theological phrase of the day

I’m working through a class by J.I. Packer on Theology currently. Today we took a glance at how Jesus offers a complete picture of what it means to be truly human. My favorite part was when Packer, pulling from Barth, described Jesus as,

“God for man, man for God, and man for man…”

Jesus is God for man. He demonstrates, elucidates, exegetes, and brings to life all of who God is for humankind. Humankind knows what God is like when we look at Jesus.

Jesus is man for God. Jesus is the representative of humankind to God. On the cross he was our representative who became our substitute. He stood in our place. He continues to mediate on our behalf today. He is man for God.

Jesus is man for man. Jesus is the model, the paradigm, the archetype of what is means to be human. He is the model of godliness. We learn how we ought to live by observing Jesus.

God for man, man for God, and man for man.

books for the summer

I recently got back from the Regent bookstore.  This is what I’ll be reading this summer.  Have you read any of them before?   What do you think?

Berkhof

Migliore

Erickson

Grenz

Bloesch

Guder

Moyise

Thrall, McNicol, McElrath

Goleman, Boyatzis, McKee

Minitrea

turning the world upside down?

which two people wrote the following quotes?

first-
“The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind. When then there is such a difference… the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master. For he who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle, is a slave by nature… It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right.”

and second-
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

getting ready for finals

I’m trying to get ready for a couple finals in the next few days.  One of the classes is Christian Thought and Culture.  It’s a interesting class, it attempts to get a sense for the narrative of history from the beginnings of Christianity until today by looking at historical events, the development of theology, and the interaction of Christianity with culture at large.  We’ve had lectures on everything from Medieval music, the development of the printing press, the development of Trinitarian theology, the current ecological crisis, and 19th century Evangelical social activists.  It pulls together quite a few threads.  The first semester begins around 100 C.E. and go until the Reformation.  This semester covered the Reformation until today.  For the exam we get 8 essay questions ahead of time, 5 will be on the final of which we will choose one to answer.  Here is the essay I am currently preparing for, I think it will give a sense for the breadth of the class.

Is the story of Christianity and culture since the 16th century one of secularization, fragmentation, and decline, or is it one of increasing personal freedom and progress?  Explain.

a prayer in spiritual dryness

another highlight from Pilgrim’s Regress by C.S. Lewis

My heart is empty.  All the fountains that should run

With longing, are in me

Dried up.  In all my countryside there is not one

That drips to find the sea.

I have no care for anything thy love can grant

Except the moment’s vain

And hardly noticed filling of the moment’s want

And to be free from pain.

Oh, thou that art unwearying, that dost neither sleep

Nor slumber, who didst take

All care for Lazarus in the careless tomb, oh keep

Watch for me till I wake.

If thou think for me what I cannot think, if thou

Desire for me what I

Cannot desire, my soul’s interior Form, though now

Deep-buried, will not die,

-No more than the insensible dropp’d seed which grows

Through winter ripe for birth

Because, while it forgets, the heaven remembering throws

Sweet influence still on earth,

-Because the heaven, moved moth-like by thy beauty, goes

Still turning round the earth.

story and worship

Here’s a quick summary of a paper I am working on for a class on preaching and worship.

Humans are narrative beings, we use stories to understand the events in our lives, the meaning within them, and to guide us in our living.  To say that stories give meaning to our lives does not mean some stories be more true or more false, it does not relativize all stories, but it does acknowledge what psychologists, educators, and theologians tell us, what our own hearts point out to us, and what a survey of cultures of the past reveals to us, namely that stories are central to how humans make meaning of their lives past, present, and future.  As we reflect upon ourselves and form self identity, we connect our past memories, our present experiences, and our future imaginings by a plot line.  Our plots give us a sense of who we are and where we ought to go.

Christians worship a God who has acted and revealed Himself in history.  Christians did not find a philosophical treatise elucidating the properties of God but rather met a God who acted and acts in history, a history with a past, a present, and a future.

The first Christians understood that they were part of a story, the great story of God saving people and creation in history.  The story of salvation history is communicated primarily through narrative form in the scriptures, and even the non-narrative sections are inherently embedded within a larger narrative.  Both the structure and content of the earliest Christian worship declared and reenacted God’s great story of salvation history.

These two realities, first God’s revelation of Himself in history, action in history, and communication through Biblical narrative, and second humans reliance upon narrative to understand and guide their lives, form a convincing argument to more deeply incorporate narrative content and structure into Evangelical Christian worship.  If worship services are to deeply influence how people view and live their lives it is imperative that narrative is incorporated in the structure and content of weekly worship.

why study the past?

I’m in a class called Christian Thought and Culture right now.  Its a year long class where we essentially follow the history of Christian ideas over time and the interaction between Christianity and the wider culture.  We take seriously both the history of the Church and the history of (primarily Western) culture.  Why?

Because we live in an ahistorical age.  How we came to be where we are tends not to be highly valued, either in society at large or in most Evangelical churches.

Think about your own life.  Think about how your memories shape your understanding of who you are, where you are going, the story of your life.  Without your memories, you’d have no identity.  You wouldn’t know where your life ought to head next.

A culture that doesn’t know its past, a church that doesn’t know its history, is like a person without a memory.

The Pilgrim’s Regress

I’m currently enjoying The Pilgrim’s Regress by C.S. Lewis along with Finding the Landlord: A guidebook to C.S. Lewis’ Pilgrim’s Regress. For Christian Thought and Culture we needed to do some extra reading of our choice, Pilgrim’s Regress was one of my choices.

A few favorite lines:

‘I set out to find an Island and I have found a Landlord instead.’

.

‘But you must play fair.  If its help is not a metaphor, neither are its commands.  If it can answer when you call, then it can speak without you asking.  If you can go to it, it can come to you.’

.

‘He whom I bow to only know to whom I bow

When I attempt the ineffable name, murmuring Thou;

And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart

Meanings, I know, that cannot be the thing thou art.

All prayers always, taken at their word, blaspheme,

Invoking with frail imageries a folk-lore dream;

And all men are idolaters, crying unheard

To senseless idols, if thou take them at their word,

And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address

One that is not (so saith that old rebuke) unless

Thou, of mere grace, appropriate, and to thee divert

Men’s arrows, all at hazard aimed, beyond desert.

Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense, but in thy great,

Unbroken speech our haltering metaphor translate.’

christians or humans?

Are we primarily to conceive of ourselves as Christians or as humans?

Are “religious activities,” evangelism, Bible studies, prayer gatherings, elders meetings,  what we were made for?  Are baking, sailing, gardening, eating, laughing, hiking, and kissing secondary?  Or is the other way around?

Did God create us first to be Christians or to be human beings?

Is hiking a distraction from Biblical exegesis or is exegesis needed in a broken world but hiking the thing I was truly made for?

In churches we often talk about the Great Commandment and Great Commission (Love god, Love neighbor, and go and make disciples) but we don’t often put a third “Great” in there, the Great Creational/Cultural Mandate.

Way back when humans were first awaking to their creation, God gave them a vocation.  In Genesis 1:28 God, in the words of Nancy Pearcey, gives what we might call the first job description: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” The first phrase, “be fruitful and multiply” means to develop the social world: build families, churches, schools, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, “subdue the earth,” means to harness the natural world: plant crops, build bridges, design computers, compose music. This passage is sometimes called the Cultural Mandate because it tells us that our original purpose was to create cultures, build civilizations-nothing less.

Christian mission is only not about making more Christians, who can go to church, and themselves make more Christians, who can go to church, and themselves make more Christians…

Mission is not a giant pyramid scheme involving people.  It is a restoration project.  It has an end beyond size.  It has a goal beyond numbers.  We do not invite others to be new salespeople, we invite them to be healed human beings.  And to live as a healed human being, at least in God’s eyes, will involve playing music, painting pictures, writing books, cooking meals, swimming, running, climbing, farming, working, raising families, playing games, dancing, laughing, and well…

I guess the rest is up to you.

the marriage covenant

For Christian Thought and Culture II, I recently surveyed Love, Covenant, and Meaning: Why are Liberals and Conservatives Conspiring to Prevent “Homosexual” Men from Marrying? by Jonathan Mills.

 

In this book Mills argues that Christians of all stripes and non-Christians have all begun to characterize marriage as primarily an expression of heterosexuality.  He traces the beginnings of this back to Rousseau and his romantic ideal of the sexes and hence, heterosexuality, which when stripped of bourgeois maladjustment would result in idyllic heterosexual relationships.  The notion of marriage as an expression of a romantic notion of heterosexuality had begun.

 

The current view of marriage as an expression of heterosexuality, he says, leads to the view that only men who desire sex with women ought to be married.  When dealing with men whose primarily sexual desire is focused on attractive men responses from the whole spectrum and the church operate from this same viewpoint.  Some encourage gay relationships, others encourage ‘orientation change’ but the understanding of a marriage is based on the same notion, namely, the desire for physical intercourse with the opposite sex.  Mills asks, why do we think the desire to have sex with attractive women a man is not married to is a prerequisite for marriage?

 

Instead, Mills argues, marriage should be understood as a covenant relationship between and man and a woman for the purposes of belonging, friendship, and raising a family.  Marriage is not a full expression of heterosexuality, at least for men.  A full expression of most men’s heterosexual desires would lead to promiscuity, prostitution, and pornography.  Marriage, he says, actually involves the submission of sexuality (whether the desire to have sex with lots of attractive men or lots of attractive women) for the sake of covenant.  He sees no reason why men cannot submit their sexual desires to the purposes of a covenant for belonging, friendship, and raising a family regardless of whether those desires are for other men or for other women.  To think otherwise is to place inordinate importance on the sexual desire within a marriage. 

 

It’s a fascinating take on marriage and sexuality.  I do think the redefinition of marriage along lines of covenant instead of sexuality is an important line of thought to be explored.  I also think it’s a helpful approach in light of the reality that binary categories of sexual identity, heterosexual and homosexual, are probably unrealistic.  The reality is that one, our desires for sexual intercourse ought not to define us, and two, everyone’s sexual desires are broken in some way and how we form and seek to express these desires is much more complex than any of us understand.  Finally, we are surely influenced by our surrounding culture by even more subtle ways than we understand, and its valuable to continually search out our presuppositions and evaluate these in the light of Biblical categories.

the ancient hebrew mindset

It’s difficult to overemphasize how vastly different the world of events in the Hebrew Scriptures is from the modern Western world.  The cultures and lifestyles Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob indwelt are much closer to nomadic Bedouins living in tents in the Middle East, conservative, patriarchal, tied to the earth, than anything in North America.

Two snapshots of this popped up in Hewbrew class today.  First, the word for “front” is the same as the word for “east”.  See, the Ancient Near East geography did not revolve around compasses and maps of the globe like we have today.  Rather, it revolved around the sun.  The east, from where the sun rose, was in front.  The Great Sea (the Meditteranean), was a place of evil, danger, and it was behind (ancient desert dwellers and hill country dwellers as the Hebrews were had little contact with the sea and greatly feared it).  North was to the left and south was to the right.

Another example is time.  The word for “in front of you,” in the physical sense, is related to the word for that which happened in the past.  The word for “behind” is related to what is coming in the future.  Essentially the ancient Hebrews walked into the future backwards, facing their past.  The past is what they could see clearly, the future was behind them, unseen, uncertain.  Unlike us, they did not forget their pasts and focus on the potential of the future, what they would do, where they would live, what they could become.  Instead, they lived their lives looking at the long line of ancestors in front of them, and their goal was to live in faithfulness to those who were in front of them, living on the family land, working the family trade, carrying on family traditions, maintaining family ties.  It was an extremely conservative culture.

For an example, think of how modern readers view the long genealogies in the Herbrew Scriptures.  For us, they are boring, useless, let’s get to the stuff which will help us live into our futures.  For the ancient Hebrews, the genealogies were key.  Their ancestors provided their identity, who they were, what they were responsible for, where and how they should live.

If we are to understand the stories of Scripture, we must read them within the contexts they occurred and were written in, a world vastly different from our own.

family

In what ways does the current evangelical Christian culture in North America encourage isolated family self-centeredness?

In song lyrics, and isolated family can become…

“‘Molly and me, and the baby makes three,’ in the words of an old sentimental pop song.  The point, in Rodney Clapp’s words, is simply this:  ‘For the Christian, church is the First Family.  The biological family, though still valuable and esteemed, is Second Family.  Husbands, wives, sons, and daughters are brothers and sisters in the church first and most importantly–secondly they are spouses, parents, or siblings to one another.’”

From Gender & Grace by Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

this summer

This summer I’m going to be taking a number of classes.  It may sound like a lot, but one I’m auditing, a couple are just for one or two credits, and a couple are audio courses.

This will be fodder for what I write on during the summer months:

Dynamics of Church Leadership

The use of the Old Testament by the New Testament authors

Creating Missional Churches

Systematic Theology 2 & 3

marriage and sexuality

Have you ever stopped and considered how historically unusual the modern culture of sexuality and marriage is?

Sarah Williams, a history prof at Regent gave an excellent lecture on contemporary marriage and sexuality this week.  A few points that stood out:

Our private moral decisions have profound public implications.

In the last hundred years sex has been separated from procreation in a way completely novel in all of human history.  This widespread and complete unhooking of sex from procreation has allowed (not necessarily caused, but allowed) the separation of sex from marriage.  When sex and procreation were linked, there was tremedous community pressure for commitment to be a prerequisit for sex.  The moral authority of the church further bolstered this demand for marriage (commitment) before sex.  The Reformers insisted on a public commitment to be made involving both the church and the state.

Sex and procreation divorced.

Non-marital birth rates in the U.S. have gone from 5% in 1966 to 33% today.

Sex and marriage divorced.

Cohabitation before marriage has increased eight fold in the U.S. since 1970.

In the meantime marriage has become commodified.  Marriage no longer stands as a covenant to be entered but rather contract to be entered.  Covenants are meant to withstand uncertainty, contracts are meant to avoid uncertainty.  We have moved from spouse language to partner language (a partner is an economic term).  Our romantic basis for marriage results in those falling out of “love”  those in marriage to be “authentic” (the chief value of post-moderns) and true to themselves about the fact they no longer are in love, and hence dissolve the marriage.  Authenticity trumps covenant.

High divorce rates characterize all modern Western societies.  The U.S. divorce rate stands at 55%.

When sex and marriage are divorced and marriage becomes commodified, sex within heterosexual marriage simply becomes one option to be chosen or discarded, between the dizzying array of sexual choices which exist in the modern sexual culture.  Notice too, how sex now becomes a thing which is somewhere out there and can be analyzed and dissected and no longer fundamentally about a covenant relationship.

Sex is divorced from marriage, sex has no inherent morality about it, it is simply an thing, an activity, where numerous options of expression exist.

Which leads to sex divorced from stable relationships altogether.

Sex  is detached from intimacy, it is a private recreation, ethically harmless, with no real bearing on our lives.

We have now moved a long way from the Reformation view of sex within a marriage as public covenant with spiritual, social, and political implications.

If one does not need stable relationships for sex, why does one need partners at all?

So sex becomes divorced from partners.  Pornography, solo sex, becomes the natural outcome of this completely individualized view.

Finally, sex and physicality are divorced.  No longer does the sex we have need to correspond with the sex we are.  Heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, monosexual, transsexual, become an array of options to be chosen between as one sees fit.  We have drugs to change our bodies and drugs to excite our bodies.  Sex is a thing, out there, to be grabbed and used as one privately chooses, and sex to create children with the covenant of marriage is one quaint option among many, and a quickly disappearing option at that.

How much of the current Christian understanding of sexuality and marriage comes from the current cultural privatized, individualized, romanticized, objectified vision of sexuality and how much of it is driven by a Biblical understanding of covenant and design for humanity?

thinking

not every Christian is called to seminary, but every Christian is called to think. having thoughts is not the same as thinking. thinking is hard work. its tiresome. it can be quite boring. it requires asking all sorts of questions and looking very hard at tightly held beliefs. it means not holding onto ideas because they are comfortable, we like them, or everyone around us thinks that way. thinking can be an act of worship. loving enemies, forgiving hurts, being honest, caring for friends and family, earning an honest living, giving sacrificially, spending regular time with God, all these don’t come easy, they require us to but concerted time and energy in.

why would worshiping God with our minds be any different?

from C.S. Lewis:

He wants a child’s heart but a grown-up’s head. . . . The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. . . . It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a second-rate brain. He has room for people with little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. . . . God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. (Mere Christianity pp. 77-78).