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This is a very wonderful opportunity to listen directly to one of the greatest NT Theologians of our era.
Jeffrey Gibson was in possession of 62 files of audio recordings of George Cairds New Testament Theology lectures from Oxford from 1979 to 1982. I offered to host these files so that others could also hear these lectures from this famous New Testament scholar.
You can find the files for download here:
via NT Blog: George Cairds New Testament Theology lectures online.
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Ed Cyzewski has a terrific article about how we see God and how we read the Bible. This one hits home for me as I deal with my wife’s questions about why things happen the way they do. These ideas will help.
Avoiding the hard passages of the Bible altered my understanding of God and didn’t prepare me for the complications of life.
If all we have is an easily understood, easily explained, neat and tidy Bible, then it’s not much good in a world that is confusing, mysterious, and extremely messed up.
I’m less and less convinced that the Bible exists to give us straight answers. If that was the purpose of the Bible, then it does a bad job of it.
via The Consequences of Ignoring the Hard Parts of the Bible | :: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::
Thanks to Bill Kinnon for the link.
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Neil Williams has a fascinating piece on game theory and the gospel. I had never considered The Prisoner’s Dilemma before in relationship to the church.
Finite games are defined by their boundaries, whereas infinite games are defined by their horizon. Boundaries are fixed and clear, and one cannot move beyond a boundary. But in an infinite game the horizon is open-ended—it is a direction toward we move, a place we never reach, a journey always open to newness and surprise.
Is Christianity a finite or an infinite game? What should it be? We would be naïve to assume that there is one message of Christianity. In the church’s two thousand year history, people have expressed a multitude of different ideas about Jesus and different versions of Christianity.
It is possible to conceive of Christianity as a finite or an infinite game.
Neil goes on to show the possibilities. Recommended reading if you don’t mind thinking a little bit.
via The games we play | GospelFutures
Thanks to Peter Enns for the link.
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I’ve been in a melancholy mood for several weeks now.
That’s a pretty good list. I doubt it is unusual, though. Most people carry about that same level of stress and change and mess and survive it ok.
I would sure like to get out of this funk.
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I’m a sixty-year-old man with about 58 years of nearly perfect attendance. If they still gave out those Sunday School attendance pins with the bars attached to the bottom, I’d be tripping over mine.
All for nought. (That’s my translation of “all is vanity”.)
Alan Knox analyzes scripture and talks about what we gather for. Good stuff.
So let’s continue meeting together – whether in large or small scheduled weekly meetings or in large or small spontaneous meetings. But, let’s come together for the right reason: not to count noses and record attendance, but to consider one another in order to stir up one another towards love and good works.
via But I have perfect attendance… | The Assembling of the Church.
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The trick to being a Christian is understanding the kingdom of God. That’s all there is too it.
Jesus gave us a lot of hints about the kingdom. Those hints usually start out with “The kingdom of heaven is like …”
He also seemed to be saying that the kingdom would come through his followers, his witnesses, when the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost.
I think that if I could live my life as a citizen of the kingdom, I would be doing my little part to cooperate with God in “kingdom come”.
That’s all there is to it.
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We are meant to travel in packs. Without our pack — or tribe, as many say — we are not as strong as we should be.
Dogs are social animals, like their wolf ancestors. We have three dogs at our house. When they lie sleeping, they like to be in contact with one another or with us a lot of the time. I suppose that is a protection mechanism. It is easier for one of the pack to rouse the rest when needed if we are all touching one another already.
I like being part of the pack.
But my tendency is to be a lone wolf. I don’t know why. Sometimes I stay away from the pack. Maybe it’s because the pack brings with it a responsibility to the others. When I’m weary, it’s all I can do to take care of myself.
This can bite me in my work. If I keep a problem to myself and deal with it alone, I have fewer resources available and increase my level of stress thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold. I’m learning to be a social animal at work. It’s hard for me.
My Christian pack is missing in my life. Certainly we cannot spend all our time in the comfort of the pack, but we do need it from time to time. I don’t have a pack right now. Except for a virtual pack. A virtual pack is of some value, for sure, but it cannot replace a physical pack.
To some extent I have walked away from the pack. The pack has also kind of walked away from me. Probably because they think I think I don’t need the pack.
I need some people to touch. And to drink coffee with.
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So to sum up, I’m proclaiming an indefinite moratorium on my own culturetalk. If I mean morality, I’m going to say “morality.” If I mean art, I’m going to say “art.” And if this experiment interests you, you’re more than welcome to join me.
I’m with you, Charles. I’ll do my best.
via Why I’m Not Going to Talk About “Culture” Anymore (or Bill O’Reilly and the Guinness Shamrock).
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The more I read the Bible the less convinced I am that it was created to be an answer book.
via FROM THE VAULT: Questions, Questions, & More Questions | The American Jesus.
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Everywhere I turn, the quality of writing has gone down. Not because people can’t write a decent sentence, but because the writing contains so few ideas of worth. It possesses no depth. It exists to occupy space on a page. Whether that page is digital or print doesn’t matter. I read the words, and they vanish from my head as swiftly as they entered, a nonstop stream of gruel.
Everyone is a writer, and yet so few truly are.
Free is to blame.
via “Free” and the Destruction of Worth | Cerulean Sanctum.
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HOW NOT TO READ THE BIBLE | Remnant Resource
I’ll give you the list, but you need to read Doug Ponder’s article to get the good stuff.
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I’ve been suitably upbraided today for my attitude. Thank, Brian.
But it’s us. We be the church. Me and you. Not people “out there” than can be objectively criticized, dissected and reassembled again on a disinfected lab table.
We are the church.
And despite all our easily recognized flaws, out of all the possible choices he had at his disposal, God chose to make us his temple.
via The Church Is A Whore, But She’s Our Mother.
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God the Father is depicted in Romans 8 as having a game plan, a salvation plan for getting believers to the finish line intact, come hell or Noachic high waters. No outside power, degree of suffering, temptation or circumstance can rip the believer out of the firm grasp of the Father. God is working things together for good in every stage of the relationship that he has with believers, once that relationship is established. This is a great reassurance indeed. In other words, this text is about what God is prepared to do to help believers persevere and reach the finish line.
Ben Witherington, III, The Indelible Image: The Theological and Ethical Thought World of the New Testament, Volume 2: The Collective Witness (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 323.
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These simple practices of meditating on scripture and praying in silence have been labeled “outside the bounds of evangelicalism” by a certain blogger because they are categorized as “mysticism.” I assume this blogger has made a simple but discrediting mistake of not reading enough church history. He doesn’t have to look far to see how these practices of prayer and meditation—“mysticism… Ooooooh”—have been nailed into the identity of the church over and over again.
They’ve been part of following Jesus far longer than the Reformation.
via The Heretical Meditating Father | :: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::.
Thanks to Bill Kinnon for pointing to this one.
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Can we lay aside forever the fiction that Abba/αββα in the NT (Mk 14:36; Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6) means something akin to our English “Daddy”?
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I’ve been trying to not write about the church so much. Especially, I am avoiding discussion of problems in the church. Basically, I just don’t want to be cranky, and I’m better off talking about the Bible than about the church.
But I’m going to make an exception, because a truth dawned on me this weekend. I don’t remember how or why, but it hit me, for sure.
When people ask me why we left our church almost two years ago, I really haven’t had a clear answer. Sometimes it is hard to put those things into words, but this is more than that. I really didn’t have a clear reason in my own head.
Sometimes people leave churches because they aren’t being fed, they say. I have never felt that way. I’ve always tended to my own care and feeding anyway. That isn’t necessarily what church is for.
I was certainly involved. Several years on the board. Several years leading a small group on Sunday morning, or what we quaintly called Sunday School. Several years being the main sound engineer, running the board for most of the worship times.
But I realized this morning that we left because we weren’t really welcome there anymore.
The youth movement had taken over and we weren’t young. We were approaching sixty. Our church pretty much wanted the older folks to keep their mouths shut and pay their tithe. Our child was grown and gone. We were not the future of the church and not the present of the church.
Now, admittedly, no one ever put it that way. It was a de facto thing. Probably a confluence of lack of resources and unintended consequences.
Many churches have such youth movements, even if they give lip service to the importance of the elder folks. But they have decided that they must grab the younger folks to have a future. And, interestingly enough, they are failing at that, too. Pushing the older people to the sidelines and failing to maintain the younger people doesn’t seem like a recipe for success.
And it isn’t. So what happens instead is a constant shuffling of young families who want to be in church around the circuit of local churches that happen to appeal to them most this week.
For a year or more we attended a church that really didn’t care who was there, young or old. They just had good music and good preaching and lots of energy. There were no relationships, just dinner and a movie. This church was very much a part of the young family shuffle circuit, though.
Now we attend this church that is mostly made up of older folks. Maybe we even seem kind of young to them. In fact, maybe that’s when this truth dawned on me, as I parked the car and noticed that I was surrounded by Buicks.
Now, this church is dying and will not survive my generation in its current form, but it’s ok for now. At least they seem to want people like us there. This is where I’ll go until I retire and move away, I suppose.
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The church is called to be the church expectant, the church prepared for “what will yet come.” Like the saints under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11, it is more appropriate for the church to cry out, “How long, O Lord?” than to simply wish to join those saints in their present location. By this I mean that the book of Revelation does not encourage us to have a purely otherworldly view of eternal life, does not encourage us to focus on heaven rather than history as the final goal or terminus of Christian life, does not encourage us to abandon the eschatology of the earliest Christians such as Paul. The saints in heaven are impatient for the end of history and final vindication; they are not basking in everlasting peace, believing that they have reached the end.
Ben Witherington, III, The Indelible Image: The Theological and Ethical Thought World of the New Testament, Volume 2: The Collective Witness (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 306.
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According to Jesus’ words, two thirds of the people are not good soil and will not bear fruit (Okay, I know the passage is not prescribing a percentage, but it is clear that more will be bad soil than good). Keeping them in the church really may not be the best solution if you desire a fruitful church.
via Cole-Slaw: Advice on Church Growth & Assimilation: Open the Back Door!.
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Challies recently posted on The Boundaries of Evangelicalism. I’m not a fan of Challies, nor of the young, reformed, and restless movement in general, so I admit I am predisposed to dismiss such a post without reading it. But Zack Hunt called my attention to it in his rebuttal: Evangelicalism And The Problem Of Orthodoxy.
One reason I would dismiss Challies’ post summarily is the title. Challies is not qualified to define the boundaries of evangelicalism. He lives in a small ghetto in a small corner of the city of evangelical Christianity. He cannot see past his corner store.
I read enough to know that Challies dismisses mystical Christianity as being outside the borders of evangelicalism. Really, outside the borders of orthodoxy. To Challies, mystical Christians are beyond the pale of election, I guess. And he says it’s a shame that mystics have penetrated the true church.
I’m no mystic. But I’m smart enough to discern that Challies is misguided, inbred, and full of himself. Nothing new in any of that.
My concerns with the Challies post are viscerally motivated and surface deep. I haven’t even bothered to read the article. Why would I?
But Zack, who took the time and effort to actually RTA, has some real bones to pick. You should check his post out. His posts are not to be dismissed without further consideration.
What has happened as a result of this constant infighting, is that evangelicalism in particular has increasingly become defined by its ignorance and arrogance, but it’s lack of knowledge about its own history and the audacity with which it portrays itself as the keepers of the one, true faith.
This must change.
Amen, brother Zack. Amen.
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The late Robert Webber said, of the church:
These are the people whose outlook and lifestyle are being reshaped by their participation in the alternative community of faith.
The alternative community of faith. Is that what the church should be? Is that what it is?
Is my participation in that alternative community reshaping me? Is my outlook shaped by the church? My lifestyle?
Or, rather, is the today’s church just another manifestation of the culture? When I participate in the church, am I just another member of another social club?
The culture or the alternative?
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