Whether a Christian enjoys high church, low church, or something in between, aesthetics in the Church are not about any one individual person and their particular tastes. Aesthetics are, fundamentally, not a matter of legalism, but of edification—that the Gospel of Christ might be preached and taught to all peoples, unhindered by its medium.
Let us live by walking with Jesus, so that our Neo-Pagan neighbors, the witch, and frankly a lot of us Christians, can put down our crystals, our superstitions, our vision boards, and our bound sage in order to live out a liturgy of life, with rituals, practices, and behaviors that reflect who we are as followers of Christ.
As Jesus hung on the cross there would be no last second escape. No Greek goddess would swoop in to rescue him. He suffered alone. And yet even in that suffering he declared his victory on the spiritual battlefield to be your victory.

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God’s headline for his church prioritizes the person of Jesus and his purpose to demonstrate God’s power by dying and rising again for our salvation.
This is an excerpt from the Chapter 12 of Hitchhiking with the Prophets: A Ride Through the Salvation Story of the Old Testament written by Chad Bird (1517 Publishing, 2024). Now available!
This is an excerpt from “Confession and Absolution” by John T. Pless in Common Places in Theology: A Curated Collection of Essays from Lutheran Quarterly, edited by Mark Mattes, (1517 Publishing 2023).
This is a companion article to “Johann Spangenberg on Dying Well”
Success is emphatically not your primary identity.
Moltmann is gone now, but his theology will continue to provoke and provide.
God does not give us an undebatable answer to suffering. Instead, God suffers, too.
We know we are made for something great. We humans were created in God’s image and restored through Christ in his perfect image.
Instead of a death sentence, those brothers hear the words of deliverance.
The cross not only stands as the measure of our hatred of God but also as the measure of God’s love for us.
Some part of us always wants our ability under the law to be just as important (or more) than grace.
Eucatastrophe is the coming untrue of all sin, evil, and death. And where that starts is the empty tomb of the risen Jesus.