Baptist Identity and the Ecumenical Future book signing at Gardner-Webb

I'll be signing copies of my new book Baptist Identity and the Ecumenical Future: Story, Tradition, and the Recovery of Community (Baylor University Press) during the "Meet the Authors" event at Gardner-Webb University on Monday, April 11, from 3:00 until 5:00 PM at Dover Library on the Gardner-Webb campus in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the signing, courtesy of the campus shop.

Baptist Identity and the Ecumenical Future is also available from Baylor University Press and via Amazon.

Curtis Freeman to speak at Gardner-Webb University Oct. 26

Dr. Curtis Freeman, Research Professor of Theology and Baptist Studies and Director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke University Divinity School, will present a lecture titled "Undomesticated Dissent" on Monday, October 26, at 7:00 P.M. as part of the Joyce Compton Brown Lecture Series sponsored by the Life of the Scholar program at Gardner-Webb University. The lecture will be held in Faith Hall in Tucker Student Center on the Gardner-Webb University campus in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. A reception with light refreshments will follow.

Dr. Freeman is the author of Contesting Catholicity: Theology for Other Baptists (Baylor University Press, 2014) and editor of A Company of Women Preachers: Baptist Prophetesses in Seventeenth-Century England (Baylor University Press, 2011), Baptist Roots: A Reader in the Theology of a Christian People (Judson Press, 1999), and Ties That Bind: Life Together in the Baptist Vision (Smyth & Helwys, 1994). (Copies of Contesting Catholicity will be available for purchase and signing after the lecture.) Dr. Freeman is currently co-chair of the commission to the international ecumenical dialogue between the Baptist World Alliance and the World Methodist Council and has also served on the commissions to the international ecumenical dialogues the Baptist World Alliance has held with the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Church.

The point of departure for Dr. Freeman's lecture "Undomesticated Dissent" is Bunhill Fields cemetery in London, where there are stone memorials to John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake. The lecture focuses on three narratives of dissent: Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Blake’s Jerusalem. According to Freeman, "By telling the story of dissent in this way, it will become clear that the voices of dissent are always subject to the forces of domestication, by becoming 'hand-tamed' to the powers that be. At times the radical spirit slumbers away in uncomfortable dreams while the nations rage or becomes gentled to the touch and taste of polite culture, only to rise again unexpectedly in all its undomesticated fervor. Perhaps by remembering these stories of those memorialized in stone, the slumbering saints may be awakened and the voices of undomesticated dissent may arise yet again."

Dr. Freeman will also serve as guest preacher for the Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity chapel service earlier that day (Monday, October 26) at 1:00 P.M. in Dover Chapel on the Gardner-Webb University campus. His message, titled "Beastly Powers," will be based on Revelation 13:1-18. The public is invited to attend both the School of Divinity chapel service and the Joyce Compton Brown lecture (free of charge, no reservations required).

Auxiliary aids will be made available to persons with disabilities upon request 48 hours prior to the event. Please call 704.406.4264 or email servicerequests@gardner-webb.edu with your request.

Common story, community, and Christian higher education

(The following are my prepared remarks delivered as a devotion for the President's Prayer Breakfast at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina on September 2, 2015.)

The one unalterable date on our family’s summer calendar is the third week in July. That’s when Duraleigh Presbyterian Church in Raleigh hosts Camp Moo Gung Hwa each year. Named for the national flower of South Korea, Camp Moo Gung Hwa is a Korean Culture Camp for Korean adoptees and their families. It’s become one of the most important things our son Timothy, my wife Kheresa, and I do together for our family life.

When we first arrived at Camp Moo Gung Hwa three years ago, we didn’t know anyone. But that first day as our children played with kids who looked like themselves and who had parents who looked like their parents, and as we parents began talking with each other, we had the most profound experience of instant community we’ve ever known.

We lived in different parts of the country. We had different levels of education, widely varying professional lives, diverse religious commitments, and for all we knew divergent political inclinations. But we bonded immediately because for all our differences we knew that we shared a common story: struggles with infertility for many of us, the long roller coaster ride of the adoption process, the joy of our children and our pride in them, the challenges of being transracial families, the hope that we might help our children embrace their Korean heritage and grow into confident Korean-American adults.

Not all of us were Christian. But when Kheresa and I debriefed that first experience of Korean Culture Camp, we both said out loud, simultaneously, “That was like church.”

It was like church, because the church too is a diverse community bound together by a common story that relativizes all the other things that make us different. The Apostle Paul wrote about that in Galatians chapter 3, verses 28 and 27:

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus (NRSV).

In my church circles we often quote that text in support of the full equality of women and men in church, family, and society. I think that’s a good and proper application of the text. But in context Paul’s main point is that our baptism creates a new reality, a new basis for community in which all the ways the world categorizes people are no longer our primary identities. In baptism the story of the Triune God, made known to us by the story of Christ, becomes our story. The ancient baptismal confessions of faith were brief recitations of that story. All of us who have been baptized into Christ share that story in common, however different our individual stories may be. It’s what makes us church. “All of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

A Christian university like Gardner-Webb isn’t a church, strictly speaking. Gardner-Webb is not a baptizing community, but it is a community of the baptized. And in the Baptist understanding of the essence of church as happening wherever two or three are gathered in the name of Christ, we can recognize that something church-like happens when the baptized gather in a Christian university to engage in learning “for God and humanity.”

All of us who engage in learning for God and humanity—faculty, staff, and students—are different. In our differences, we’re going to disagree. And that’s a good thing—unless we earnestly contest our disagreements, our movement toward God’s truth is hindered. We can embrace our differences and debate our disagreements without demeaning each other when we remember that we share a common story—the story we claim and that claims us in our baptism, the story that makes us all one in Christ Jesus. May God help us remember that in this new academic year, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Prayer

Loving God, who desires to draw the world to share in your love: may your Spirit empower our work of fostering learning and leadership for God and humanity, so that division is overcome and true community established, on our campus, in your church, and in your world; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

U2 Songs of Innocence radio interview

Last week I sat down in the studios of WGWG, the campus radio station of Gardner-Webb University, to discuss U2's new album Songs of Innocence (on which I had previously offered my theological first impressions in an Associated Baptist Press / Religious Herald guest commentary). The embedded SoundCloud player above should play the interview (which also includes three full-length songs from the album thanks to Gardner-Webb's streaming license) within this blog post; here is the direct SoundCloud link:

https://soundcloud.com/wgwgdotorg/u2s-new-album-dr-steven-harmon.

(I should point out by way of correction that contrary to a comment in the interview introductory remarks, the members of the band were not all "Catholic schoolboys" once upon a time.)

Devotional reflection for December 9, Second Week of Advent

Each year Gardner-Webb University publishes an Advent Devotional Book as an aid to personal devotion during this season in the Christian year, with brief devotional reflections for each day of the season written by faculty, staff, students, and alumni. The text of my contribution for today, December 9, appears below; the entirety of the 2013 Advent Devotional Book is also available online in PDF.

December 9 (Nahum 1:15; James 3:18)

On his very first Christmas, we began reading with our son Can You Say Peace? by Karen Katz. Besides demonstrating the wonderfully varied ways children around the world say “peace” in their own languages, the book declares that “all around the world today, children will wish for peace, hope for peace, and ask for peace.” The children—and adults—of the world share a hope for peace because all people are created in the image of the God whose hope for the world is peace.  We also share a hope for peace because the world currently lacks the peace for which God created the world and toward which God is moving the world.

It’s appropriate that the first week of Advent’s focus on hope is followed by the second week’s focus on peace, for “peace” sums up in a word the biblical vision of the world for which God and people hope. Today’s text from Nahum is a call to envision this future peace: “Look! On the mountains the feet of one who brings good tidings, who proclaims peace!” (1:15). The whole book of Nahum is a contrast of two stories with different end-pictures: the story of violence that underwrites the present evil order of things, epitomized by Nineveh, city of the violent Assyrian empire, which ends in “devastation, destruction, and desolation” (2:10), and the radically other story of God’s goal of peace for all creation, epitomized by Jerusalem, city of those who seek the peace of God’s reign. Today’s text from James makes the same contrast, for the antidote to the diabolical wisdom of the world that leads to conflict is the heavenly wisdom that leads to “a harvest of righteousness…sown in peace by those who make peace” (3:18).

As we join God in wishing, hoping, and asking for peace this Advent, let us also join God in working for the peace for which we hope. Such pictures of the end, suggested the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, are “enough to make me change my whole life” (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett [University of California Press, 1967], p. 57). Nahum tells us how to change our lives in light of this end: “Celebrate your festivals”—in other words, worship and in so doing be transformed by and become participants in the story of the peace of God’s reign, and “fulfill your vows”—in other words, live out the practice of peacemaking mentioned by James that we take on in our covenantal vows to live as the people of God, joining God in what God is doing to move the world toward its end of peace.

We won’t have to look very hard to find where God is working for peace. Wherever there is war, violence, division, and interpersonal conflict—in short, wherever there is broken relationship—God is already at work to realize the divine hope of peaceful community. Let us be open to opportunities to join in during this Advent season.

(Download the complete 2013 Gardner-Webb University Advent Devotional Book)