Breakfast Links

Thabiti Anyabwile, author of The Decline of African American Theology, talks with Christianity Today's Collin Hansen about Jeremiah Wright, black theology, and the African American church.

Speaking of CT, they recently announced the winners of their 2008 Book Awards.

Good thoughts from John Mark Reynolds on the difficulty of married love.


Kyle Vaughn at Resurgence asks whether considers whether the digital age is in fact a new Dark Age and suggests how the church can minister to those burdened and heavy laden with information:

As Christians, we need to deeply understand how the gospel impacts and gives us a responsibility concerning knowledge as well as understand how a lost world around us is drowning in a storm of information that they don't know what to do with. We live in a unique time in terms of knowledge. Never before in the history of mankind have so many people had the ability to learn (literacy) and had the access to such a vast array of information and even other cultures. With a vast network of libraries and information systems, particularly the internet, one only needs to travel one block over or click a button to access just about everything mankind has ever known or experienced. But mankind is adrift in its thinking. This boom of knowledge it would seem has led to only more despair.

Daniel J. Solove, associate professor of law at the George Washington University Law School, examines another facet of information technology's societal impact in his book The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (Yale University Press, 2007). Its full text is available online for free. (HT: Question Technology)

The Decline of African American Theology

Boundless Webzine features an excerpt from Thabiti Anyawile's book by that title. Here's a sample:

There is a place in Christian theology — stemming from a deep reflection on the Person and work of Christ — for radical jeremiads against bigotry, injustice, and oppression of all kinds. The earliest African Americans understood this and, consequently, were able to hold both a conventional Christology and an active political praxis. The two are not mutually exclusive, and yet, the theological trajectory followed in the last seventy-five years seems to treat them as such.

To the extent that African American thinkers obfuscated the centrality of Jesus' spiritual mission to purchase a special people for Himself, then they participated in that grand lie of the serpent in the garden that promised knowledge beyond imagination but only ended in the destruction of souls.

This is no victimless crime. Materialism and black nationalism masquerading as Christology overthrow the faith of many — shrouding the cross of Jesus in the temporal affairs of this world, which in turn choke the seeds of the Gospel.

Thabiti's article is a poignant reminder of how our cultural-historical contexts can serve to both sensitize and blind us to biblical truths, thus making it imperative that we humbly listen to saints from ethnic groups and times beyond our own.

"The Cool Pastor at Obama's Church"

After 36 years as senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, Jeremiah Wright is retiring. The Chicago Tribune  profiles his successor, 37-year-old Otis Moss III.

In explaining his mission, Moss compares himself to a DJ who's playing an updated version of the Bible. Using hip-hop terms, Moss calls his message "the Gospel remix."

"How do we, with our great foundation and history, speak to a new and current generation that desperately needs to hear the word of God?" Moss asked.

"Every pastor has to be an amazing theological DJ. You've got to know what records to play, and you've got to know where the breakbeat is, and you've got to be able to create a new song that does not alienate the old, but at the same time gives a rhythm for a new generation.