Extra Credit Podcast

Summenary Ep. 1.

NOTE: If you want to read along in this series on Robert Jenson’s A Theology in Outline, you can find the PDF of next week’s reading below:

Making our way through Robert Jenson’s, A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live we begin with the question: “What is theology?”

“Theology,” says Jenson, “is thinking what to say to be saying the gospel.” The gospel can not simply be parroted from one generation to the next. It is a living message, that speaks a fresh, new, liberating word to each new hearer. T...

The Will of God Ep. 7.

NOTE: We will be starting a new study next week through a short book by Robert Jenson called A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? Each week we will take a chapter of the book for our class. I’m encouraging everyone to read along. You can find a PDF of the first chapter below.

Bonhoeffer on becoming guilty for Christ’s sake…

By turning our focus back to the origin of all responsibility, we come to understand what willingness to become guilty means. Jesus’ concern...

The Will of God Ep. 6.

This week we try to think through the reasons for the anxiety that seems constituent of modern life and seeking to do the will of God.

Here is the passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics that we finished with:

All that we have said thus far implies that we have abandoned the abstract notion, largely dominant in ethical thought, of an isolated individual who has available an absolute criterion by which to choose continually and exclusively between a clearly recognized good and a clearly recognized evil. Such an is...

The Will of God Ep. 5

“Whoever accuses or judges a brother or sister, accuses the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.”

-James 4:11

Bonhoeffer commenting on James 4 writes,

Judging stands in absolute opposition to doing…There are two types of behavior with regard to the law, judging and doing; they are mutually exclusive. Those who judge understand the law as a measure that they employ against others, and see themselves as responsible for se...

The Will of God Ep. 4.

This week we discuss how we can hear the voice of God. Bonhoeffer is convinced that the primary and the orienting way God speaks directly to us is through preaching. He writes:

Proclamation is the specific mandate given to the church. God wants a place at which, until the end of the world, God’s word is again and again spoken, pronounced, delivered, expounded, and spread. The Word that in Jesus Christ came from heaven wants to come again in the form of human speech [in the sermon]…In this word...

The Will of God Ep. 3.

This week we discuss knowing the will of God for our lives. God’s will is not a secret. God has revealed it and wants us to know it and do it. We discuss the difference between abstract, universal moral principles and the concrete commandment of God and we looked at the life of Bonhoeffer as an example.

Here are a few quotes that cut to the quick of the class:

Bonhoeffer on knowing the will of God:

[Meditating on Ps. 119:19 “Do not hide your commandments from...

The Will of God Ep. 2.

A catena on the birth of God in each person:

Meister Eckhart:

Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says, “What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.” We shall therefore speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us.

The Will of God Ep. 1

Here is an excerpt from Chris Green’s Surprised by God that not only cuts to the heart of what we discussed in class, but is the genesis for all my thoughts on the matter:

“In many ways, our move toward a mature grasp of the truth begins in the recognition that God is not in control of what happens in the world, and that all that we experience in this world is at best an incomplete realization of God’s will for us. Perhaps we want to think God is in...

The Joseph Story Ep. 7.

In lieu of a write-up of the class I’ll leave you with a couple of quotations. The first, from St. Maximus the Confessor, which framed our discussion. The second, from Chris Green’s Sanctifying Interpretation, which was the primary source for the entire class.

St. Maximus the Confessor:

“In consequence, it is necessary for him who seeks God piously not to latch on to a phrase, lest, instead of God, he unknowingly receive things about God; that is, because he is dangerously devoted to the words of Scripture instea...

The Joseph Story Ep. 6.

Jewish scholar Yair Zakovitch says that the book of Genesis is the Table of Contents for the Bible. Everything is contained Genesis in embryonic form, it is the genetic code of the Bible.

The more I study Genesis the more I’m convinced he’s right. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that most every point Paul makes in his letters can be made on the basis of texts from Genesis.

Perhaps Paul’s most important point is taken from a line in the Joseph...

The Joseph Story Ep. 5

The Roaring Lion

At the end of the Joseph story the elderly patriarch Jacob gathers his sons around him to deliver last words to each of them. It is Judah (along with Joseph) that receives the most positive (and lengthiest) words. This helps us to pay closer attention to the important role that Judah plays in the Joseph narrative. He is one of the heroes of the story.

Jacob’s blessing of Judah in Gen. 49 gives us insight into Judah’s role:

8 Judah, you, shall your brothers shal...

The Joseph Story Ep. 4

This week we take a close look at Joseph’s scheme (dissembling) that he puts his brothers through. The scheme serves the purpose of forcing the brothers to experience the suffering they caused Joseph in an “eye-for-an-eye” type justice. But it also forces them to relive their original crime, which unearths their feelings of guilt.

In other words, Joseph scheme causes his brothers to come to an intimate knowledge of the truth of what they did to him, but then it also opens up the possibility for forgiveness, reconciliation, and even commun...

The Joseph Story Ep. 3

A preliminary remark:

One of the gifts of Scripture is that its stories allow us to process our deep-seated personal pain in a safe way. I can talk about my own pain a lot easier by talking about Joseph’s pain. The topic of trauma is a sensitive one, but perhaps the Joseph narrative can give us enough distance from our own circumstances—even for a moment—to think about the nature of trauma, God’s promises in the midst of trauma, and especially to begin to pray.

Family Trauma<...

A Sermon for Good Friday 2026

A Good Friday sermon on Psalm 22

9 Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.10 On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.

Johannes Tauler (1300-1361) on Mary at the foot of Jesus’ cross:

“For if any creature could have brought comfort to our Lord as He hung upon the Cross, none would have been so fitted for this as His most blessed Mother…[But] His Moth...

The Joseph Story Ep. 2

Because of the additional “duties” that Holy Week brings, I was unable to write up an overview of this week’s class. I’m sure that with Easter Sunday on the horizon you will all find it in your hearts to forgive me.

Here is the diagram of Joseph’s family tree that I drew in class:

And here is the quote from Bonhoeffer:

“So people called by Jesus learn that they had lived an illusion in their relationship to the world. The illusion is immediacy. It has blocked...

The Joseph Story Ep. 1

The Jewish scholar Jon Levenson has said that the Joseph story in Genesis “is arguably the most sophisticated narrative in the Jewish or the Christian Bibles.” Chris Green writes that it is “deceptively simple” and that it becomes “more mysterious with every good re-reading.” Taking these two thoughts together we see that the sophistication of the Joseph story is the reason why it becomes more mysterious the more you read it.

For many of us this will sound like an odd claim. The Joseph story, as most of us have been taught, is v...

Paul pens both his letters to Timothy to encourage him to continue his struggle against the false teachers in the congregation at Ephesus. Paul planted this church years earlier. Luke records this in Acts 19—20. As Paul was leaving Ephesus he warned the church that false teachers would creep in and even arise out of their own number. There was something about the church in Ephesus that made it especially susceptible to a certain form of false teaching.

I think at least part of that reason for this susceptibility was Ephesus’s culture of magic. It was a city...

As we close our study of 1 & 2 Timothy we come to the most notorious lines in either book:

“11 A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet” (1 Tim. 2:11-12).

Of course, the typical complementarian vs. egalitarian debates center on this passage. In class I gave both a historical and a theological argument for why I don’t think this passage prohibits all women throughout all time from teaching or holding positions of authority within the church.

...

Suffering and Power

2 Timothy is a tender letter. It is written from a jail cell by a man who knows he is not long for this world. Paul’s heart is opened wide to Timothy throughout. The letter begins: “To my dear son, Timothy,” and concludes with: “Do your best to come quickly to me.” Paul needs his dear son by his side because most everyone else has deserted him. He’s lonely and in need…

…and yet the letter is packed full of powerful statements that are meant to encourage Timothy to remain strong in the faith eve...

Last week we looked at the non-rivalrous, non-competitive posture the church is to have to the world. The church is called to be for the world not against it.

In 1 Timothy 2:1—5 Paul says that there is one mediator, Jesus Christ, who died for the entire world, and it is through this mediator that the church is called to make petitions, prayers, intercession, and thanksgiving for all people. Why? Because “God wills that all people be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.”

But this focus on the universality of God’s desire for all peop...

What relationship is the church to have with the world? Many versions of Christianity assume that the church and world are locked in a metaphysical fight to the death. One will win, the other will lose.

But the church is not in a competition or duel with the world. Jesus says he will build his church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. The only competitive relationship the church has is with the powers of hell. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” God is for the world. God loves...

Pillars That Make Shared Life Possible

We are moving outward in concentric circles from the center of the church (the eucharist), to ordained ministry, to sociality within the church mediated by Christ, and now to the structures of authority within the church.

Talking about power and authority is messy business. People get hurt in church—sometimes inadvertently, other times deliberately. But I’m convinced that the most dangerous thing to do is avoid talking about it. We are in desperate need of different ways of thinking and talking about authority within the church to help us r...

Perhaps the most famous line in either First or Second Timothy comes in 1 Timothy 2:5, “There is one God, and so there is one mediator between God and man, namely the man Jesus Christ.”

We can easily see the importance of this line, but when we consider it within the context of Paul’s letter to Timothy it can be hard to see how it fits in with the rest of the argument. Yes, Christ is our mediator with God. He has reconciled us to God. He has made peace between us and God. Important? Yes. But is it cen...

In 1 Timothy 4 Paul reminds Timothy that he was commissions into ministry “by Spirit-filled utterance [prophecy] and with the laying on of hands by the council of elders.” Again in 2 Timothy 1 Paul encourages Timothy to “fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands.”

This is the beginning of the sacramental ritual of ordination. This ritual is “sacramental” because it not only authorized Timothy for his particular ministerial responsibilities but it also granted the very gift of the Spirit needed to fulfill those responsibilities.

A “sacrament” is a sign that acco...

Paul writes to his young protégé Timothy to “command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer.” Paul does not ever clearly explain what these false teachers were teaching (Timothy doesn’t need him to). Throughout the two letters we primarily get little hints and insights into the situation by the way Paul talks about the effect these teachings have in the church-community.

However, there are two passages in which we get a bit more of the picture regarding the content of the false teaching. In 2 Timothy 2 we learn that they are teaching that the resurrec...

“Sound teaching strengthens, while sick teaching weakens…sick teaching leads to sick holiness.”

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Sick Teaching, Sick Holiness

Gordon Fee argues that the primary purpose of Paul’s Pastoral Epistles is not to establish church order or provide a “church manual” for church governance. Rather, Paul’s purpose in writing to Timothy is to thwart the false teachers that have gained sway in the house churches of Ephesus.

Paul can hardly go a chapter without writing about sound teaching/doctrine. The Greek word for “sound” that Paul uses is hygiano. Timoth...

“By the way, a prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent; one waits, hopes, does this or that—ultimately negligible things—the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.”

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This week we read and discussed some of Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison during the season of Advent. Bonhoeffer touches on themes of suffering, grief, loss, and restoration, and sharing in the sufferings of God.

Here are the sections we discussed:

Letter to Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer, Dec. 17, 1943

My dear Paren...

I.

Fleming Rutledge says that “Advent begins in the dark.” She writes,

We live in a world where the season of Advent is simply relegated to the “frenzy of holiday” time in which the commercial Christmas music insists that “it’s the most wonderful time of the year” and Starbucks invites everyone to “feel the merry.” The disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain that characterize life in this present world is held in dynamic tension with the promise of future glory that is yet to come. In that Advent tension, the church lives its life.

Advent is the se...

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

(Psalm 42:5)

Psalm 42 is a psalm of hope in the face of despair, but there isn’t a hint of optimism in it. The literary critic Terry Eagleton once said that the optimist is just as bereft of hope as the nihilist—neither has any need of it.

In common usage, though, the language of “hope” is on a continuum with optimism, only weaker. Imagine you have plans fo...

The superscription of Psalm 34 contains an oddity. It reads: “A Psalm of David, when he changed his behavior before Abimelech; who drove him away, and he departed.” The account of David “feigning madness” is found in 1 Samuel 21, but in 1 Samuel it is not before Abimelech that David “changed his behavior,” it was before King Achish. So, why has the name been changed in the superscription of Psalm 34? Why Abimelech instead of Achish?

For many of us in American evangelical spaces this at least hints at questions of “inerrancy.” Is this a historical error in scripture?

In class we took...

What hard travail God does in death! He strives in sleep, in our despair, And all flesh shudders underneath The nightmare of His sepulcher. The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone; All night the cold wind heaves and pries; Creation strains sinew and bone Against the dark door where He lies. The stem bent, pent in seed, grows straight And stands. Pain breaks in song. Surprising The merely dead, graves fill with light Like opened eyes. He rests in rising. (Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: Sabbath Poems)

The Gospel of John begins by linking itself to the...

Psalm 27 7 “Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud; be gracious to me and answer me! 8 “Come,” my heart says, “seek his face!” Your face, LORD, do I seek. 9 Do not hide your face from me.

Last week I was listening to an interview with theologian Geoff Holsclaw who works in the intersection of theology and neuro-science—specifically with attachment theory. In the interview he discussed how children become attached in healthy and unhealthy ways to their parents and what this might suggest about our relationship with God.

He made a few interesting comments about children and their pa...

In his book A Religion Against Itself Robert Jenson makes the case that the Christianity is an anti-religious religion and that the Bible is an anti-religious religious text. At first this seems to fit nicely with our cliched (and mostly wrong) ways of speaking negatively about religion (think vapid statements like: “It’s not religion, it’s relationship). But that isn’t what Jenson is up to. He isn’t out to rid Christianity of liturgy and ritual.

So, what does he mean by religion?

Jenson defines religion something like this: Religion is a way to guarant...

Messianic Psalms

The psalms are filled with promise—particularly the promise that God will put an end to evil and injustice. The so-called “messianic psalms” are the beating heart of this promise. God promises that, through his messiah, he will overcome the evil of the world (specifically the evil of “the nations” and “the kings of the earth”).

The promised messiah is portrayed in the psalms as the true king of Israel. But almost every messianic psalm moves directly to the global (or even cosmic) nature of the messiah’s kingship.

Listen to Psalm 2:6-10

One of the primary themes of the psalms is God’s care for the poor. He is their judge and defender. But the bond between God and the poor is extends beyond mere compassion, and into identity. God will not—indeed, he cannot—forget the poor any more than he can forget himself. God is poor and he is inviting us to share in his poverty that we might be rich as he is rich.

Herbert McCabe makes just this argument in a wonderful little essay titled “God and Poverty.”

I want to suggest that there is s...

God Is Our Home

Psalm 46 begins with one of the more memorable lines in scripture: “God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble.”

The psalms never tire of emphasizing this theme. Psalm 90 says that God has been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Psalm 91 says that we live in the shelter of the most high and that we abide in his shadow.

In other words, God is our home. This is basic to Christian spirituality: God is our true dwelling place. “In him we live and move and have o...

Psalm 51: Superscription

Prayer for Cleansing and Pardon

To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.

Most of us will know the background for this psalm. King David is home in his palace as his army is off fighting one of his wars. From his palace he spots a woman named Bathsheba bathing on her rooftop and he is overcome with desire and lust. He calls for her to be brought to him, and he “goes in to her.” Bible isn’t very...

Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. (Psalm 32:1)

The Covering (Up?) of Sin

In a memorable phrase (not least because Paul quotes it in Romans 4) Psalm 32:1 says, “Blessed is the one…whose sin is covered.”

The language of “covering” is striking here. What does it mean to have your sins covered? This is a suggestive metaphor. And as with any suggestive material, we have to take care in how we hear it. It isn’t immediately clear.

In the winter of AD 412 St. Augustine of Hippo preached a s...

We did not meet for our typical midweek Bible study this week, so I figured I would repost an old teaching that I know I need to return to often.

This teaching was from our study of 1 Corinthians 3 in the Spring of 2024.

Psalm 23 (KJV) 1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. 4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. 5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. 6 Surely goodness and mercy...