With Christmas around the corner, the following are a few articles that hopefully can bring reflection and wonder during this season. Read Sara Mannen’s piece on the hopes and challenges that Christmas brings, Morgan Bell’s reflections on what it means to live covenantally, and Jane Barter’s thoughts on parental rights and trans youth. I hope you enjoy these offerings!
— Yanan Melo
God Here & Now is the online magazine of the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary
Jane Barter, Whose Innocence? Whose Future?: If we were to think about the child through a radical eschatology, everything changes. The future that we seek is not secured by our fecundity but through a promise that has already been given. Such a futurity is not built on the backs of children's conformity to parental dreams and gendered expectations but is already given in the in-breaking of grace through the child who has secured posterity for us, Emmanuel, God with us. Post Christum natum, the fifth commandment—to honor father and mother (Exodus 20:12)—and the mandate to "be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:28) cease to be unconditional commands (CD III/4, 2). Salvation is no longer secured in "the propagation of race" (CD III/4, 2) but in its interruption.
Morgan Bell, Capital or Covenant?: It is this world that the Church is raised up to serve. It is the covenantal God at the world’s center to whom the Church is raised to witness in the Spirit’s power. All that precedes, determines, and structures reality is God’s decision to be God for us in Jesus Christ and for us to be God’s people. Beneficence and gracious exchange, rather than avarice and debt, mark true creaturely relationality as we witness to the God of every good and perfect gift. To be faithful to its mandate, the Church of Jesus Christ must engage and be responsible to the world out of and for which God raises it as a community of witnesses. But to be a community of witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ’s fidelity and responsibility are contingent on speaking truth: that covenant alone is the graced esse of the world Christ Jesus has come to save. It is in such truth-telling that the Church rejects a business ontology as illegitimate and, in Jesus Christ, sets itself to the Father’s business (Lk 2:49).
Sara Mannen, An Ordinary God?: As I look at my Christmas to-do list, I want to reevaluate my motivations for everything on that list. I want to align my desire to create special, extraordinary moments for my family with what corresponds to and reflects the extraordinary love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. I do not want to rush through and dismiss the ordinary because of my idol of the “extraordinary.” I want to savor small, ordinary moments to love my family and friends. I do not want to miss out on recognizing “ordinary” moments where the extraordinary and surprising God is present.
There are a bunch of new books to look forward to in 2024. You have a chance to win the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award. Rebecca Jane Morgan asks if we can build a trans-affirming evangelicalism. NPR interviews poet Christian Wiman on his wrestling with cancer and journey with faith. Read about how loneliness affects people from various age groups. Bloomsbury Academic’s “Political Theologies” book series has been relaunched. Send your book proposals here. An unconventional advent poem by Rae Armantrout.
God Here and Now is an online magazine and newsletter from the Center for Barth Studies. If you would like to support our work, you can donate to the center here. All donations are tax-deductible. Questions? Ideas? Email us: barth.center@ptsem.edu