What does coming to Jesus look like today? We may not have the answer but we do have a seriously fun and enlightening conversation.
During the American Academy of Religion a herd of theology nerds gathered in the home of Mark Scandrette – Jesus Dojo extraordinaire – for some live Homebrewed Christianity podcast fun. Daniel Kirk (New Testament Prof at Fuller Theological Seminary) and Philip Clayton (Philosophical Theologian and Dean of Claremont School of Theology) were our featured contributors but the crowd Deacons who gathered made the entire experience a blast. On top of the podcast we all enjoyed the wonderful food provided by the Scandrette family, the huge bottle of Bullet Bourbon from Rebekah, 3 amazing homebrews from Kirk, and some great questions at the end. 
We hope you enjoy the live brew. If you dig it you should make plans to join us February 12 at Claremont for John Caputo going 3-D or holla about hosting a show in your own home\bar\church.
If you are wise….and of course you are…you should get Kirk’s new book Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? and Phil’s freshest The Predicament of Belief.





Perhaps another reason ‘socialism’ is growing in popularity is thanks to our growing outlandish political Right in the country. I thought of this when a high school student told me he was a socialist and I said “What? Do you have any idea what that means or would mean for your family?” He said, “Yeah, you want college to be affordable, healthcare available to all, and to go back to Clinton era taxes. I mean that’s why everyone is upset at Obama and he’s a socialist.” What if our hyper-polarizing rhetoric in America and in particular the socialist name calling on the Right is actually making an audience for the very idea they abhor?
There is, in my judgment, one other problem with Calvin’s theology and that is a formal or methodological one. Calvin, like all the premodern Protestants, believed it is necessary to account for every single statement within the Bible and to make them cohere with one another in a “system” of doctrine. Calvin’s Institutes of 1559 is probably the finest achievement in the era of the Reformation of this form of biblical theology. Two centuries of historical-critical labor, however, have sufficed to demonstrate that there are multiple theological perspectives in the Bible that cannot be harmonized apart from doing damage to the integrity of the biblical text itself. Let’s take the example of divine determinism. Obviously, Calvin has plenty of exegetical support for his deterministic doctrines of providence and election in both testaments. Yet the Bible itself also offers counter-examples where the emphasis is precisely to assert human responsibility and hope for a redemptive outcome of even the most desperate circumstances if only sinful human beings will repent of their destructive ways. I believe that an honest reckoning with the Bible requires us to leave behind Calvin’s basic methodological assumption of a unitary biblical theology and to think systematically about the various possibilities offered to us by the Bible for thinking about providence and election. But agreement with my view means that we have to move away from the understanding of exegesis and theology bequeathed to us by the sixteenth-century Reformers and to grapple with the difficult issues of modern theology that have arisen of necessity from the historical-critical study of the Bible.







