By Richard L. Floyd on 1/5/2010 1:21 PM

A hymn for epiphany Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 12/22/2009 3:30 PM

“The Miracle of Christmas” Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 11/30/2009 1:40 PM

I wrote this Advent hymn for my local church in the Advent following the 9/11 attacks. Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 10/21/2009 10:44 AM

In the several months since I started my personal blog, “Retired Pastor Ruminates,” which can be found at: http://richardlfloyd.blogspot.com/ I have had quite a number of visits from people doing a Google search for “Retired Pastor.” Many of them are looking for things to say at a retirement for their pastor, a farewell sermon or a prayer. Instead they have found things like long treatises on eschatology, rants about the Red Sox, and borscht recipes.

Never being one to want to disappoint I decided to write a prayer for a retired pastor. I may be retired, but I can still write a prayer. So here it is. I started out writing a rather generic one with (name) and (his/her), but it came out eerily disembodied. So I fell back on an ancient practice, and called my retiring pastor Theophilus, the addressee of Luke's Gospel and the Book of Acts, a name that translates from the Greek roughly as “friend of God,” or “beloved of God.” Since I never knew Theophilus I just wrote the kind of things that Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 10/12/2009 10:11 PM

For me the big one was the bad bike accident, but it could have been any number of other events. Because I think most of us have had at some point the disconcerting realization that our life is not under our control. As a pastor for thirty years I spent a lot of time with people after they had this realization. Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 8/3/2009 12:11 PM

As I have written before, my favorite theology blog is Jason Goroncy's Per Crucem ad Lucem. On his blog today, On the relation between the pulpit and the academy, he has a terrific quote from Charles Partee:

‘[I]f God speaks, and if God speaks in the church, then on some subjects sermons are not popularized products of more basic scholarly reflection. Rather scholarly reflection is an academized product of the more basic proclamation of the gospel … Thus, for the Christian community, sermons are a first-order, not a second-order, activity … As worship is more fundamental in the church than theology, so kerygmatic proclamation is more basic and often more pertinent than scholarly reflection’. – Charles Partee, The Theology of John Calvin(Louisville/London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 46.

I couldn't agree with this more. Read More »

By gfackre on 7/10/2009 7:27 PM

Everlasting Death?


All biblical images of life everlasting imply, indeed even portray, its opposite. What would that contrary be?

The Yes of “life together” would face a No of “life apart,” everlasting estrangement from the relationships God intended for the world: no blessed participation in the Life Together of the triune Being; no joyful celebration of the same; no rapturous bonding in the unities God intended for us—familial, ecclesial, political; no reconciliation with or of the natural cosmos. So understood, everlasting death is more horrible than popular portrayals of fiery pain; our worst anthropomorphic imaginings seem far short of the hell of…life apart.

The fearsomeness of everlasting death, however conceived, has prompted some to argue for more hospitable endings. The most generous is that of universalism in which all will be brought to eternal life, given God’s universal desire for all to be saved (1 Tim 2:4) and ev ... Read More »

By gfackre on 7/5/2009 7:26 AM

James Luther Adams taught a generation of his students that what we hold to be true eschatologically will be what we work for ethically. In this case it means that a passionate ecological ethic rises out of a conviction that God will bring a nature renewed.

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Miroslav Volf summarizes the comprehensive Christian belief in life everlasting we have been describing in this way" "the final reconciliation of 'all things,' grounded in the work of Christ the reconciler and accomplished by the Spirit of communion, is the process by which the whole creation along with human beings will be freed from transience and sin to reach the state of eternal peace and joy in the communion with the triune God." [Miroslav Volf, "Enter Into Joy! Sin, Death and the World to Come," in THE END OF THE WORLD AND THE ENDS OF GOD: SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY ON ESCHATOLOGY, ed. John pOlki ... Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 6/25/2009 11:44 AM

Might a robust cross-centered Gospel be the best stewardship tool? Read More »

By gfackre on 6/22/2009 8:50 AM

The life that lasts forever includes the redemption of a fallen nature. We have to do in the end with "a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev. 21:1) as well as a New Jerusalem and new saints. The latter live in a new kingdom settled on a new earth under a new heaven. In such a redeemed creation the struggle for survival will be over, for "the wolf will live with the lamb and the leopard will lie down with the kid" (Isa 11:6). The animosity between human nature and cosmic nature is finished for "the nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adders den" (11:18).

While the Western tradition had a place for the natural dimension of everlasting life, certainly so in its teaching on the resurrection of the body, it was the Easter Church that gave it special accent: "The whole of nature is destined for glory....The divine Spirit which in its fulness is poured out from Christ on all who believe in him, whose ... Read More »