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Q.What must you know to
live and die in the joy of this comfort?

A.Three things:

first, how great my sin and misery are;
second, how I am set free from all my sins and misery;
third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.

Reformational Christian Psychology

I was recently invited to give a presentation for a sociology class at a public university on the myth and ritual of Christianity. In this context I understand “myth” to be the narrative we inhabit, and “ritual” to be the means by which we appropriate the myth and live within it. I used the first two Lord’s Days of the Catechism as a template for “ritual”.

For Christians our ritual is not actually the Catechism, it is Christian worship in the Christian community. People create and sustain their belief worlds in community and Christians are of course no different. What each of us needs to do, however, is to emotionally process these beliefs in the context of our individual lives. I find this template of misery, deliverance, gratitude to be an extremely helpful emotional template through which to process the loss and decay of normal living. Just as Q/A 2 suggest, if you really want to live withing the great declaration of Q/A 1, you need to know, really push down and live, the three things of Q/A 2.

Jonah

Jonah is one of God’s great treasures to humanity. In this little book we gain a radical insight into the heart of God amid the complexities of a cruel and bloody world.

Because there are some dramatic elements to the book, we are often distracted. We imagine the book is simply about obedience. The book has something to say about obedience, but one of the amazing things about the book is that it is really about the emotional relationship between God and one of his prophets. This prophet stands in for his people and that includes us.  Continue reading →