beauty. (t)ruth. god.

Here is a long paper I wrote for a selected readings class reviewing McClendon’s three volume systematic and theology and what it has to offer the church. I am not quite happy with the paper as it is hard to condense and build something good when your using 1500 pages. I should have tried a more focused topic, but I think the paper allowed me to make some decent reflections.

Hence there is a temptation (no weaker word will do) for the church to deny her “counter, original, spare, strange” starting point in Abraham and Jesus and to give instead a self-account or theology that will seem true to the world on the world’s own terms.¹

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Lately I have been thinking about how important language is to the theological task, and how through the continuation of words like sin, holiness, judgement, redemption, gospel, and other terms we can begin to gain insight into how God is active in the world. One in important question is what we mean by gospel, I thought this quote from Karl Barth was worth sharing:

The gospel is constituted by the mighty acts of God in history for the liberation of the cosmos. It is not a set of rickety arguments about the divine order; it is not the expression of some sublime religious experience brought mysteriously to verbal form; it is not a romantic report about awareness of God in nature; it is not a speculative, philosophical theory about the nature of ultimate reality; it is not a set of pious or moral maxims designed to straighten out the world; it is not a legalistic lament about the meanness of human nature; it is not a sentimental journey down memory lane into ancient history. It is the unique narrative of what God has done to inaugurate God’s kingdom in Jesus of Nazareth, crucified outside of Jerusalem, risen from the dead, seated at the right hand of God, and now reigning eternally with the Father, through the activity of the Holy Spirit, in the church and the in the world. Where this is not announced, it will not be known.

My current dream trip would be to go through Yosemite, rock climb little, camp out, and enjoy the park. While I was hoping to get to that this summer, it isn’t looking likely. However, right now you can head over to the NYTimes and get some pictures/thoughts from someone who worked with Ansel Adams. Most of the shots are pretty amazing, and the commentary is good as well. Here is one I liked. Here is the article, and link to interactive bit.

Here is a short paper for NT Class on how three passages of changed my understanding of why we eat at Shalom Group.

Why We Eat: New Testament Meals and Today

The week before our first class meeting I recently began having a small group, called Shalom, of people meet at my house on Tuesdays to discuss what it means to faithfully follow Christ and be held accountable in that mission. Our first meeting had 8 people, with only 3 returning the next week. Slowly throughout the semester that group of 3 from the first meeting has most recently turned up as 12 people crammed into my small living room on Tuesday evenings. One practice we sought to establish early on was that of eating together every fourth week. In beginning this process I didn’t know what to expect, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt. A week before our first class assignment was due I asked Rob which of the three topics would be most helpful for a group and he instantly responded, “Meals.” The following is my assessment of how the three passages used in my papers, helped form my understanding of meals and how that relates to my home group.

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If the Lamb is worthy to receive power, then the only rational worldview, in a cosmos where we have no control, is Apocalyptic.

John Howard Yoder, For the Nations: Essays Public, and Evangelical

‘The Christian story in its primal form tells of a God who [unlike gods of human fabrication] is the very Ground of Adventure [anastatic], the Weaver of society’s Web [social], the Holy Source of nature in its concreteness [embodied]—the one and only God, who, when time began, began to be God for a world that in its orderly constitution finally came by his will and choice to include also—ourselves. We human beings, having our natural frame and basis, with our own [it seemed our own] penchant for community, and [it seemed] our own hankerings after adventure, found ourselves, before long, in trouble. Our very adventurousness led us astray; our drive to cohesion fostered monstrous imperial alternatives to the adventure and the sociality of the Way God had intended, while our continuity with nature became an excuse to despise ourselves and whatever was the cause of us. We sin. In his loving concern, God set among us, by every means infinite wisdom could propose, the foundations of a new human society; in his patience he sent messengers to recall the people of his Way to their way; in the first bright glimmers of opportunity he sent—himself, incognito, without splendor and fanfare, the Maker amid the things made, the fundamental Web as if a single fiber, the Ground of Adventure risking everything in this adventure. His purpose—sheer love; his means—pure faith; his promise—unquenchable hope. In that love he lived a life of love; by that faith he died a faithful death; from that death he rose to fructify hope for the people of his Way, newly gathered, newly equipped. The rest of the story is still his—yet it can be ours, yours…To outsiders the story is sure to count as a myth among myths, but to us it is no myth, but our only way of telling the whole truth.’

I haven’t blogged in long time. I think the longest time in over a year. If I had to guess it has less to do with me having nothing to say (since most of you know I always have something to say), but rather my life has lately been captivated by what it means to follow Jesus, given my conceptions of faithfulness. Not surprisingly this didn’t start in mind, but rather in my interactions with a wonderful small group of people who met at my house. Our conversations since January have given me much more to think in the actual realities of following Jesus I profess to believe, then my former reading and collection of information.
All that to say, I think I am ready to start blogging again. But as I move towards that here is a current quote that has my mind captured:

Then to follow Jesus does not mean renouncing effectiveness. It does not mean sacrificing concern for liberation within the social process in favor of delayed gratification in heaven, or abandoning efficacy in favor of purity. It means that in Jesus we have a clue to which kinds of causation, which kinds of community-building, which kinds of conflict management, go with the grain of the cosmos, of which we know, as Caesar does not, that Jesus is both the Word (the inner logic of things) and the Lord (“sitting at the right hand”). It is not that we begin with a mechanistic universe and then look for cracks and chinks where a little creative freedom might sneak in (for which we would then give God credit): it is that we confess the deterministic world to be enclosed within, smaller than, the sovereignty of the God of the Resurrection and Ascension. “He’s got the whole world in his hands” is a post-ascension testimony. The different it makes for political behavior is more than merely poetic or motivational.

Crucial for me is the presumption that the gospel is a story meant to train us to live without explanation. Explanation presumes that if I can just account for why what happened did happen, then I will be able to live with what has happened… I think Christianity is the training for learning how to live without being in control: you learn to live in the silences, and you learn what the politics of living in the silences might look like… But to learn patiently in a world where you have no answers, it seems to me, gives you political alternatives that otherwise would not exist—through hope… I assume that God will show up in all different kinds of ways. That’s how I try to conceive of what it means to live hopefully without explanation. You don’t try to explain the death of a child. That will kill you. That will kill you.

HT: rustyparts

For a while I have been trying to come with a good post about why the Obama (or fill in the blank of anyone else running for president, he just happens to extremely popular at Mars Hill) fan parade has been bugging me but in the short conversations I tried to engage anyone on the subject it went nowhere. It was like attempting to talk an evangelical about voting for Bush in 2000. So, I decided to just let it go and not blog about. But then David Fitch (whose books I will buy after reading this) really wrote out this critique I wanted to write using Slavoj Zizek’s political theory, and gently critiquing this phenomena (phenomena being here national politics) that the church gets sucked into every four years.  Here is just one line, but please go to his blog and read the whole thing. Later I might engage in his questions at the end, but in the meantime his post is excellent. 

• When it comes to Christians of my evangelical tradition, I would suggest this “ideological cynicism” could work another way. We participate in National politics, its political ideologies of a more just society, even though we deeply suspect the corporate national machine insures nothing will change. We do this because it is much harder to think of the church itself as a legitimate social political force for God’s justice in the world. It is simply a lot less work to support Barak Obama for president than it is to lead our churches into being living communities of righteousness, justice and God’s Mission in the world.

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.