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The Jazz Theologian

Creativity is born out of tension.  Jazz came about when a group of people had to live as "unfree in a free land."  That’s tension!  But tension sets the stage for creativity and creativity leads to Tertia Quid–The Third Way.

I sometimes feel like the apostle Paul in Ephesians 5 when he spend considerable time talking about marriage only to say that he is not talking about marriage. I talk a lot about race and life on the hyphen because jazz is race rich and a result of race.  If there were not the creation…

Moses understood what it meant to live life on the hyphen.  We aren’t sure when it happened but some where along the way he found out that he wasn’t who he thought he was.  Being the child of a Hebrew slave but adopted as an infant by Pharoah’s daughter, there was great reason for internal…

The Gospel reconciles us to God and each other.  All too often we build churches on half of the gospel—the me and God half.  Recently, Bill Hybels has undergone this second conversion and is speaking rather candidly. 

If we are going to fully incorporate the Gospel in our life then we need an additional conversion.  Not one for salvation, but one that shows that salvation has arrived in our lives.  This “second conversion” occurs when we awaken to the implications of the kingdom of God upon our culture and shared cultural differences.

Ray Bakke calls it the "second conversion."  Malcolm X called it a "Psychic Conversion."  It is what happens when we realized that we are not just individuals but also part of a group.  It occurs when we realize that our culture can live in concert with the cultures around us.  It is born of rage…

James Cone, the father of Black Theology, also indicts the Christianity of this land.  In 1999, he took 21st century descendents of slaves to task, in his book "Risks of Faith." (p111) "Our church is an impostor, because we no longer believe the gospel we proclaim.  There is a credibility gap between what we say…

Born in 1818 as a slave in Maryland, Frederick Douglas struggled deeply with the true definition of a Christian.  He wrote the following in, "A Narrative Life of a Slave." "Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognized the widest possible difference–so wide, that to receive the one as good,…

I once had a conversation with Carl Ellis in which he led me through the Salvific Paradigms of Jesus.  We usually want to know if someone is “born-again.”  But how many times did Jesus ask someone to become “born again?”  Only one time when he was talking to an older man, Nicodemus, who’s deepest need/desire…

How one answers this questions depends a lot on whether or not you approach it from a Classical or Jazz based perspective. I’d love to hear what you think–What is a Christian?
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