It is not right human thoughts about God that form the content of the Bible, but right divine thoughts about us. The Bible tells us not how we should talk with God, but what God says to us. Not how we find the way to God, but how God has sought and found the way to us. Not the right relation in which we must place ourselves, but the covenant which God has made with all who are Abraham’s spiritual children and which has been sealed once and for all in Jesus Christ. It is this that is within the Bible. The word of God is within the Bible.
A great game today as City beat United at home for the first time in over 30 years.
BLUE MOON!!!
Not a great video but you can see the goals here.
City has been playing less than stellar ball of late, but today I am going to over to George and Dragon to hopefully watch them take down United. While checking the time of the replay I found this goal on YouTube.
From the Ekklesia Blog by Randy Cooper:
David Kline is an Amish man. He insists that Amish people are not understood. Amish people are maligned for being against all forms of modern technology. That is not true, he says. Rather, the Amish use only those technologies that, in their best judgment, do not harm their community life. For example, lanterns are not allowed on their farm field equipment. With lanterns they would be tempted to work into the night hours. And working in the fields past sunset would weaken their family life and would overwork their horses. Several years ago the question came up about whether David Kline’s community would use telephones. Everyone in the church—the community—met and discussed it a number of times. It took all summer for them to decide whether they would have phones. They finally decided against it. And they had two reasons. First, they knew that if they began to use telephones, they would carry out conversations less and less in a face to face manner. Second, if they had telephones, they feared that their children would begin talking more and more exclusively to one another. The decision about telephones was made in light of what was good for the community and for the human word. Some people believe we live under a “technological imperative.’ If we can invent it or use it, we do so with little foresight as to the repercussions down the road. Look at what television has done to family and community life. And people now speak of the “virtual community” of the Internet. Imagine being a part of a church where major decisions of your life are brought to the congregation for discernment. Imagine being a part of a community where everyone agrees to say “yes” to those things that strengthen the community and “no” to those that weaken it. And don’t dismiss the Amish too quickly. By and large, theirs is the only agricultural community in the entire country that has maintained relative health in the past 30 years. They have something to teach us.
I have been tagged for the 1-2-3 Meme by Eliacin at Kingdom Praxis. The game is to grab the book nearest to you and turn to page 123. Find the 5th sentence and share the next 3 sentences with everyone. Then you tag five people.
My book is Introducing the New Testament by Achtemeier, Green, and Thompson. Pg 123 5th Sentence:
- To some, Mark the Evangelist has appeared as little more than a chronicler, having put the story of Jesus’ career in written form for the sake of prosperity. This view has been helped along by the anicent tradition stating that Mark served as Peter’s interpreter, writing down accurately, though not in order, Jesus’ sayings and deeds as relayed by Peter. Later we will asses the importance of this tradition for the identification of the author of the Gospel.
Exciting stuff.
If Scripture is ever again to be a living source for theology, those who practice theology must become less preoccupied with the world that produced Scripture and learn how to live in a world Scripture produces. This will be a matter of imagination and perhaps of leaping.”
—Luke Timothy Johnson
I ran across this quote in a book on preaching the other day, but I think it symbolizes the new found hope I have in the Scriptures. Upon entering Seminary I don’t know if I was super convinced in the hope that the Text itself had to offer. I understood the role the Scripture played for the church, but I think I saw it very outside of myself. I allowed the power to speak into my experience but I am not sure I allowed my experience to be shaped by the Scriptures. One book I recently read suggested that the Text itself is ‘a world construing event.’ I would like to think that is going to be task going forth from here, allowing the Bible itself to make my world, rather than the other way around.
Here is what the Shalom community has decided to take up for Lenten Practice as a community this year.
5 Practices for a Justice-ful Lent
1. Immerse yourself in Isaiah 58. A Read it before going to bed and when you get up. Memorize the chapter or a portion of it. Live with it. Live within it.
2. Personally meet someone’s basic needs for food, shelter, or clothing. The first step for many of us might be to get to know someone with those needs.
3. Connect with someone in your own family, church, or life that you feel far from or need to reconcile with. Perhaps there’s someone in your family you just need to spend more time with. Do that.
4. if you don’t already have one introduce a Sabbath day into your weekly schedule. Reserve a day a week to only do things that bring you joy. It’s not selfish. It’s a good, Godly practice with several millennia of precedence.
5. As the weather warms up we’ll plan time to together to get outside, to enjoy Seattle, and be together.
I have been meaning to get back on the blogging horse for awhile, but nothing has really took as a topic for me write about. Last year I read an interview with Satan that the Wittenburg Door that is reminiscent of the Screwtape Letters. Since starting graduate school I have become a critical (thinking) reader of about everything I see. Since for most of my life I have been trained that watching movies, and TV is task at which I should turn off my brain, it has been different to watch those things with my mind engaged.
Here is the main part of the article. I would interested in what you think.
DOOR: What type of movie seems to work the best for you? Horror? Pornography? Action?
DEVIL: Romance.
DOOR: Romance?
DEVIL: No question. You see, (takes sip of water) Man, what I could get for a glass of this where I come from! Movies about evil do not necessarily help my cause. Besides, they are much too transparent. No one in their right mind wants to confront pure evil. I personally supervise the making of every romance, or chick flick, as they are sometimes called.
DOOR: Um, we don’t see the connection.
DEVIL: Hopefully you won’t! What I try to accomplish in a romance movie such as Sleepless in Seattle or You’ve Got Mail or The Mirror Has Two Faces, and the list goes on and on, is a presentation of love, at least the human expression of it, which is both irresistible and unattainable at the same time. The old carrot and the ass idea. Since belief is already suspended, my job is just that much easier. I even have lovers traveling through time to make up for their past shoddy behavior. There’s no limit to a guilty man’s ingenuity, or my imagination. It’s a winning combination.
DOOR: Are there any recent scenes you are particularly proud of?
DEVIL: I’ve ruined many relationships with the last scene of The Mirror Has Two Faces where the guy is running desperately through the streets of the city, calling out, trying to save their love, in the rain, I might add. Tears of heaven! Every woman who sees it thinks, “I wish a man loved me that way and I’m pretty sure it’s not this jerk sitting next to me!” And, just for good measure, I always make religious characters look a little silly or nutty. You see?
DOOR: —
DEVIL: What could be better than an irresistible situation – which seems unquestionably good – yet is impossible to ever successfully attain? Dissatisfaction is the key. If I can keep every woman out there feeling like she’s not being loved the way she should be and every man thinking he could never love a woman the way he ought to, then you have the makings of some classic human despair. My viewers embrace disillusionment, and its elusive remedy, like a long lost lover. It’s beautiful. It just creates a big, gooey marsh of cantankerous confusion. You know you fall in love but you have to crawl out. Then I get to sit back and watch all the pitiful imbeciles trudge through it. You should see the average couple leaving a movie like this – both feeling a sense of complete inadequacy. It’s quite amusing, actually.
DOOR: So you create the ideal situation which will never happen?
DEVIL: Bingo! Movie-goers are a ripe group anyway. You just have to pick them. We all know that life is, for the most part, distasteful, right?
DOOR: Um, right?
DEVIL: The very fact that they are exiting their lives for a couple of hours is a sure sign that they want something else. I give it to them all wrapped up in wine, candlelight, flesh, ribbons and bows. But the trick is to make them think that the emptiness they feel inside can be filled by another human, which, of course, it can’t.
DOOR: But no one I know associates love with the devil.
DEVIL: Exactly! Of course I have nothing to do with true love but I have successfully made a connection between beauty and goodness. People, especially Americans, associate beauty with goodness. And there is really no connection. Take sex for instance. Everyone thinks – by the way, do you know the etymology of the word “horny?” – what people want is intimacy, a sense of being personally connected. The more impersonal society becomes, the more tempting establishing a quick sexual connection appears. It’s a short cut. But there’s only one problem.
DOOR: Which is?
DEVIL: The intimacy is false and neither party can go back over the bridge once it has been crossed. Don’t get me wrong. The connection is real in the truest sense but I love to see the emotional confusion resulting from a too-soon consummated relationship. Feelings are so beautiful and fleeting! Shouldn’t it be obvious by now? People think, “Hey! It’s natural! Must be good then, huh?” But I’m never obvious. That’s a four letter word where I come from. Obviousness is just exactly that. What is the one thing about God which makes no sense whatsoever?
DOOR: That John Ashcroft hasn’t been hit by lightning?
DEVIL: LOVE! And what does love have to do with sex? NOTHING! But what does everyone teach their kids? “Daddy? What were you and mommy doing in the bedroom?” “Well, son, when you love someone… .” It has nothing to do with love. But I digress. What is it about God that makes no sense?
DOOR: Go on. I guess you’re going to tell me.
DEVIL: The fact that He loves ridiculous creatures such as yourself. It’s been a death-long goal of mine to sidetrack humans in their pitiful quest for love. Look at history. I’ve done my best to make love nothing but an irresistible disappointment. Who do you think introduced the idea of romantic love into marriage? Rhett Butler? Did you know that I developed the zero birthday principle?
DOOR: The what?
DEVIL: The zero birthday principle. On a woman’s birthday, the man must do a myriad of selfless things just to get back to zero. He must get her flowers, a card, perhaps a cake, with candles, a gift which she does not need and would not buy for herself, and take her out to dinner just to get back to zero. He gets no points. None! If you see a man getting off work with balloons, a cake, flowers, and a gift with a look of despair on his face you can bet it’s his girlfriend’s or his wife’s birthday. I love it! Then, you mix in a little pride and BOOM! A birthday celebration to remember! Then he despairs of ever making her feel as special as she needs to feel.
DOOR: That’s not a very flattering view of women. Are you saying they are evil?
DEVIL: Well, evil is a term I like to reserve for myself.
DOOR: Why are you so interested in relationships?
DEVIL: Come on. Think. The vehicle for the greatest joy is also the vehicle for the greatest suffering. The scalpel that heals you can also kill you. It just depends on who holds it. I love fairy tales.
DOOR: You do?
DEVIL: Yes. And happy endings … provided they are only imaginary.
But the answer given to the question by the series of visions and their hymns is not the standard answer. “The lamb that was slain is worthy to recieve power!” John is here saying, not as an inscrutable paradox but as a meaningful affirmation, that the cross not the sword, suffering and not brute power determines the meaning of history. The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience (13:10). The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification for the use of violence and other kinds of power in every human conflict; the triumph of right although it is assured, is assured because of the power of the resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, nor because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys. The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.
John Howard Yoder
Politics of Jesus
HOMILETICS: Which reminds me of what you say in Performing the Faith in a chapter called “Explaining Nonviolence,” and the penultimate sentence of the chapter says that “contrary to the title of this essay, nonviolence cannot be explained.”
HAUERWAS: Right! Explanations are attempts to domesticate the wildness of God’s Spirit in a cause-and-effect model. You can’t explain God. If you think an explanation is possible, then you think that there’s some principle that is more determinative than God to explain God. One way to put it: People say, “Well how do I know that Jesus was raised from the dead?” I say, “If you need a theory of truth to explain that Jesus was raised from the dead, worship that theory, don’t worship Jesus!” It’s an attempt to avoid theological reductionistic accounts. And there are a lot of those out there. So both of these books are my attempt to exhibit how I think Christian preaching should look today.
I don’t regard myself as a great preacher in any way. I love to preach. Indeed, I always feel theologically freer when I preach than any time when I am doing my theological work exactly because I am under the obedience of the text.
HOMILETICS: You describe yourself as a reluctant pacifist. Is this because it took a lot to overcome your Texan machismo?
HAUERWAS: That’s part of it. Also, to be committed to Christian nonviolence changes everything. It makes life at once more challenging and more interesting, but also you’re not sure you want to have to think through all of that [laughs], and it also means you always have to remember the life of nonviolence is impossible if you are not willing to depend on other people to make your life a reality. It creates a vulnerability that no one likes to have. But it’s exactly what salvation is: vulnerability.
So I am a reluctant pacifist, as anyone should be. It doesn’t come naturally to anyone. We always find ourselves in violences we hardly know how to name. That’s why I don’t like the language of pacifism because it’s so passive. Nonviolence commits you to a very aggressive stance toward the world. I don’t like nonviolence because it makes it sound like whatever is peace is not violence. Part of the argument is that you never know how to recognize violence unless you’re already embedded in practices of peace.
Since not receiving the job in Phoenix, Kelli and I have done a lot of thinking about what we desired there that wasn’t here. One of those things was a community that was formed around the Bible and vision for peacefulness in the world. While both COTA, and Seattle Mennonite are great communities, what we hoped in a move was having a more intentional kind of life around those concepts. It didn’t take us long to figure out that we were more than capable of providing a space for that kind of lifestyle up here. So I have spent some time thinking about it and came up with this:
- Shalom Community: Intentional Living - Starting Tuesday, January 8th, a new community group will begin meeting, focused on being a Bible Study/story group/intentional living place in which people will begin to look at what it means to share a common life with one another over a rhythm prayer, study, listening to one another, and becoming a group of people committed to the shalom (peace) of the world.
While I am not quite sure what form this group will take as we move forward, I wanted to post an open invitation to anyone who might be interested in attending on my blog. However, it is important to clarify that the hope is to actually form a community around the story of the Bible and its story of Shalom through the conversion (repentance )of our lives. This (I think) is only possible in a community that can tell each other the truth, and hear it from each other as well. Which of course means this will not be easy, or your typical Bible study. However, if you’re still interested send me an email or post a comment and I will give you the time and the place for our first meeting this week.
Here is the class rundown for the last semester:
Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence, Dr. Jo-ann Badly: Tied with Biblical Theology for my best class at Mars Hill so far. The amount of information Dr. Badly brings to class is extremely helpful and she does a great job at integrating teaching with intelligent classroom discussions. Before this semester if asked to describe my relationship with the Apostle Paul I would have skirted the question, but after this class not only do I feel like I understand the Apostle better, but also find him deeply connected to the biblical reality of the text. This class also helped me flesh out a deeper theology of the church, culture, and hermeneutics.
Theories of Cultural Engagement, Dwight Friesen: This class is essential a long overview of our current culture and postmodern thought. Dwight was his usual self, which is has it benefits, but I thought the class lacked in some areas. I would have like to seen a more challenging text chosen. Even switching from Downing’s book to Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? might have helped a lot. I really enjoyed the final assignment though and his class normally involve a high level of engagement.
Church History, Dr. Craig Barnes: For an adjunct professor after the summer from hell this class was amazing. Dr. Barnes is an amazing professor, and brought integration of text, soul, and culture to a class on history that was amazing. If only all our intensive classes could be so refreshing. While my retention from the class is most likely low due to the high output of energy the end of the summer required it is still one of my favorites.
Prayer I, Dr. Patricia Brown: Tricia is a passionate teacher and brings a lot to the class. However, this class was to set up to fail for reasons I don’t want to type about so…
Greek, Rob Gilcrest: A pretty good class. Rob is still a great teacher, but languages are not my thing.
contact
Networks
