Prof. John Stackhouse’s Weblog

Hear the word of the Lord from Isaiah:

“Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.”

There is no Yuletide sentimentality in Advent. Peace will not come by wishing for it. Peace will not come by imagining it. Peace will not come by God waving a magic wand over it.

No, peace will come by God wielding a scepter—and a sword. Peace will come only in the drastic rearranging of the deranged, and if that sounds violent, it is. Today’s passage follows a prophetic promise of doom in chapter 59, that God’s justice will arrive like a hurricane.

So today’s promise of light, the almost-unbelievable promise that we ourselves can shine as we reflect the brilliance of the shaft streaming down on us from God’s kindly face, is breathtaking. Indeed, it is breath-giving as life and light come to the dying and dark.

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More and more of us are spending more and more time commuting. “Super-commuters”–those who take 90 minutes or more each way–are now in the millions in North America. What are we doing during those hours upon hours in our cars, buses, trains, and the like?

Some of us are getting dumber: listening to (bad, which is to say, typical) talk radio or pop music; fuming at other drivers while trying to shave a few minutes off the commute; or simply letting our minds idly flit from one vaguely anxious or annoying or trivial thought to another.

Let’s get smarter.

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I don’t know that I have met Dr. LeRon Shults, but he is a highly respected American theologian who recently took a job in Norway. He has recently posted some “work in progress” regarding the influential anthropologist René Girard and the implications of his views for Christian theology, especially of the atonement.

Many of you are about to stop reading now, and that’s fine! But for those who are interested, your servant took exception to one or two things in Professor Shults’s post and we engaged in what became a rather extended to-and-fro that the theologically-minded might find interesting here.