This episode of Lumberjack Theology has a conversation between Christian Lief and his Dad on faith, evolution, and rock music.
Jason LiefApril 22, 2019
Reading the parables of Jesus with Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine (Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi) has been unsettling. During lent I've preached some of Jesus' parables, and listening to Levine unpack them causes me to cringe. I'm…
Jason LiefApril 18, 2019
Satan presents Jesus with three temptations: bread, kingdoms, and miracles. Each of them corresponds to very real temptations facing the Christian community today: economics, politics, and religion. For Jacques Ellul, they all represent a manifestation of coercive power that divides and names. These expressions of…
Jason LiefApril 12, 2019
One of the reasons young people are checking out of institutionalized forms of Christianity is the perception that faith and science are in conflict. Some in the Christian community wonder if a person can hold to the theory of evolution and still be a bible…
Jason LiefApril 8, 2019
Prior to 1965, there were no limits on immigration from Western countries. There were plenty of quotas placed on other groups, primarily for racist reasons, but not for neighbors to the South or North. In 1965 that changed. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act…
Jason LiefApril 2, 2019
"No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.” Luke 16:13 In my part of the world there are self…
Jason LiefMarch 27, 2019
Those who think the gospel is being co-opted by a leftist ideology like to throw around the term "social gospel". Bringing the gospel into conversation with social problems like racism or poverty, in their mind, misrepresents the gospel. Jesus came to die for our personal…
Jason LiefMarch 15, 2019
I live in the reddest county in the state of Iowa. When they show one of those blue and red maps on TV, there isn't a red that's red enough to represent where I live. To be fair, this is only Trump country by default.…
Jason LiefMarch 13, 2019
A Reformed approach to the bible has never focused on a hyper-literal reading of the text. For John Calvin, the truth of scripture comes through God's accommodation to our human condition. This is the beauty of a Reformed hermeneutic that takes the human aspects of…
Jason LiefMarch 9, 2019
Those who suggest that we just need to get back to believing the bible make the assumption that before Darwin, and before liberal theology, everyone read the bible the same way. As the past few posts have tried to show, taking the bible literally didn't…
Jason LiefMarch 5, 2019