The Eudaimonia Blog

Today signifies one month of having been on sabbatical. I texted the Session this morning thanking them for this time off as I didn’t fully realize how tired I had become after having served the last fifteen years of my ministry without a sabbatical (with a move to a new country in the midst of those years as well). John Chan texted back, “you never know how tired your arms are until you put the load down.” One of the things that sounded intriguing to me when looking at this sabbatical was doing an in-depth book study, something I hadn’t had the capacity to do for years. So I recruited a group of folks to do a two-hour Zoom Book study every Saturday morning through a 600+ page book called Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture. Along with six other fellow travelers and brave souls, having completed the first month, the study has been deeply enriching for me.

The book looks deeply at the biblical story and how it intersects with contemporary ideologies such as critical race theory that have become so prominent in how we think about issues of justice and reconciliation in our day. Here is an except from pp. 128-129 on the chapter on “Sin and Society,” one I found to be quite helpful:

“G.K. Chesterton acknowledged the internal fault line in the response he is thought to have written to the question ‘What’s wrong with the world?’ in The Times newspaper: ‘Dear Sir, I am. Yours, G.K. Chesterton.’ Francis Spufford concurs; ‘Of all things, Christianity isn’t supposed to be about gathering up the good people (shiny! happy! squeaky clean!) and excluding the bad people (frightening! alien! repulsive!) for the very simple reason that there aren’t any good people.’ Writing from prison, locked up by a Nazi regime responsible for the concentration camps and a world war, Dietrich Bonhoeffer can write the remarkable words, ‘Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves.’ If there is any Christian on whose lips those words do not sound glib or cheap, surely it is Bonhoeffer’s. ‘There is no one who does good, not even one’ warns the psalmist (Ps 14:3), a fact amply attested by a parade of illustrious biblical figures. One by one, the great heroes of the Bible have their flaws pointed out quite explicitly. Abraham is a coward and betrays his wife, Moses is presumptive in striking the rock, David is an adulterer and manipulator, Peter is impulsive, Paul kills Christians for a living and calls himself ‘the greatest of sinners.’ There is only one sole exception to this: Jesus Christ. So what is going on in Christianity? What other system (religious or ideological) is so fastidious about systematically pointing out the real, concrete, serious flaws of its leaders? In a culture where sorry is the hardest word to say, not only among politicians but also in the workplace and frequently at home as well, the Bible offers us a rogue gallery of flawed heroes who lie, steal, commit adultery, covet, hate, kill, and find 1,001 ways not to love God with all their hearts, souls, minds, and strength. This is so pronounced in the Bible and so relatively rare outside of it, that we may call it a distinctive biblical figure.”

* having lived in Canada for a decade, we say “sorry” a lot here (whether we truly are or not), but Watkin seems to mean “sorry” in a different sense, of the honest owning up to wrong-doing, confessing to having done so.