This quote has been floating around my mind all morning.
“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.” -Carl Jung
If I understand him right, he seems to be saying something like, “either you face up and deal with your junk, your past, your fears, your demons, or they come back to haunt you.”
My friend Calvin attends Assumption Church in Kathmandu, Nepal. The church was recently bombed during a Sunday morning service. Several were killed and even more injured. Thankfully Calvin wasn’t there that Sunday, the bomb went off right where he normally sits.
Pray for Calvin and the Word Made Flesh staff in Nepal. Pray for those injured in the blast. Pray for the loved ones of those who were killed. Pray for the Christians in Nepal. Pray for the enemies of the believers there.
This is based on my class with Rikk Watts this morning.
Imagine a classroom full of Americans and one Australian. The professor makes a passing reference to “Four score and seven years ago…” and moves on. For the Americans these six simple words carry a world of meaning. Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address. A nation divided over race. A bloody war with the nation’s unity in the balance. The reference itself is to the founding fathers and a dream of a new kind of nation, one ruled by freedom. A nation based on a Declaration of Independence. In other words, for the Americans in the room these are iconic words loaded with meaning having to do with how an entire nation understand and defines itself.
The Australian is trying to figure out what happened 87 years ago.
When we read the scriptures we need to understand that we are dealing with a people communally defined by the stories found therein. The Exodus, Passover, The Davidic Dynasty, the Exile, these aren’t just things that happened in the past to them, these define who they are as a people. And these events too have iconic texts associated with them.
When the New Testament authors refer to these texts we need to be aware that there is probably a lot more going on there than we realize. We need to know, really know, our Hebrew Scriptures. We need to learn to read with the hearts and guts of 1st century Jews if we are going to get a clearer idea of what is going on in these texts.
Otherwise we will be busy trying to figure out what happened 87 years ago.
How would a first century Jew read/understand the events and teachings of Jesus’ life? Do we really take this question seriously enough?
For example, Rikk Watts discussed in class this morning the series of events in from Luke 8:22 – 39 this morning where first Jesus is out in a boat with his disciples and a huge storm comes up. Jesus calms the sea with a mere word. He commands the sea what to do. The disciples are more scared of him than they were of the storm. Next they land on the other side of the lake, gentile territory. A demon possessed man runs up to him. The man has demons in him that go by the name Legion (legion of course also being a term for a contingent of the Roman army, the enemies of the Jewish people at the time). Jesus commands the demons out of the guy and into some pigs. Pigs are the animal of the Gentiles, par excellence. The pigs then rush headlong into the Sea of Galilee and die.
So as modern thinkers we often ask modern questions. What was the storm like? How big were the waves? Are miracles possible? Is it ethical to treat pigs that way? Did the man have demons or merely a psychological disorder?
What might a 1st century Jew have seen/understood?
A character who commands the sea by a word of his mouth, faces the enemies of the Jewish people, and the enemies are destroyed by drowning in the sea.
Remind you of anything?
The questions we ask of the text will always determine the answers we receive.
Lift up your heads, O you gates;
be lifted up, you ancient doors,
that the King of glory may come in.
Q: Why tell the gates and doors to open and lift their heads?
A: Something BIG is coming through.
Learning Biblical Greek or Hebrew on one’s own is possible. There are a number of good resources out there.
If you want a traditional learning experience, you know, learn all the grammar rules, memorize the forms, etc, I would direct you to Teknia’s website.
I would encourage you, however, to consider a different learning model, that of Randal Buth. His course material is based on trying to get you to learn the Biblical languages as actual living languages. So for example, instead of starting the course by learning grammar and memorizing vocabulary, the first ten lessons are spent looking at pictures and listening to them being described. They are like children’s books being read to you. The idea of course is to get a sense for the language first, so grammar and vocabulary become more intuitive, just like it is when one truly learns a language. Check out his materials here.
Either way I encourage you to go for it. Its worth it.
Today in my Systematic Theology class with Packer we covered sancitification. He laid out six key themes that are vital aspects of spiritual advance, spiritual maturity.
Perhaps the two which I found most interesting were resurrection experiences and human relationships. I don’t often think of regular experiences which feel like death as key to spiritual maturity as much as I think of prayer as key to spiritual maturity. But I do think he is onto something with that.
The other is healthy human relationships. I agree that the quality of our relationships with others reflect the quality of our relationship with God, but I don’t ever think I’ve considered it that explicitly before.
I enjoy my classes at Regent and find them helpful in both my personal life and in the communities I am part of. I realize that not everyone has the time, money, desire for graduate level Christian courses. I think though, I’ve bumped into a number of folks who have the desire for rigorous Biblical education but quitting their work and taking seminary courses simply is not an option.
If this is you, I would encourage you to check out Regent’s Audio website.
They have an enormous selection of audio files, mp3 format, of everything from chapel talks, to weekend conferences, to full blown semester long seminary courses. The speakers and scholars are world class.
Think about this, instead of listening to music or talk radio while you work out/drive to work/do the dishes, you could listen to:
Romans in a week with N.T. Wright,
Knowing God through the Psalms with Bruce Waltke,
Kingdom, Spirit, and the People of God with Gordon Fee,
Jesus and Prayer with Eugene Peterson,
Jesus in Literature,
Christianity and the Political Economy of Capitalism,
U2: did they come to play Jesus,
Stress, Sabbath and Serenity,
or any number of hundreds of other classes and lectures.
I just jumped on their and grabbed the titles of some of the classes that looked interesting to me. I’m sure there are others that would be right up your alley. Check it out. If you find something you like, let me know, I’d love to hear about it.
I’m dead smack in the middle of Systematic Theology B right now. Today I listened to 4 hours of lecture off of itunes, and then read Louis Berkhof for another 3 hours. I have to keep reminding myself to be grateful, that there are many people who would love to be full time graduate students and never get the chance.
Do feelings make one weak?
Do you picture a strong leader as someone who feels deeply or someone who is stoic?
Does your church or community value the intellect or the emotional more highly?
Do you?
What does that say about what is means to be truly human?
“The capacity to be affected emotionally is not only characteristic of weak people but also very strong ones. Churchill, Socrates, and the apostle Paul were all strong people of deep feeling… The ‘emotional person’ is weak not because he has emotions, but because he has such poor ones, or such a limited repertoire of them. He lacks personal integration and depth not because he feels strongly, but because his feelings are erratic and chaotic, or because he feels strongly about the wrong things, or because he lacks something that ought to be present in addtion to his strong feelings.” –Robert Roberts
Question: How much of good leadership do you think is about acquiring a certain set of knowledge and skills and how much do you think it is about becoming a healthy human being (or at least a person aware of one’s own limp and how not to hurt others because of it)?
Is leadership a skill or being comfortable in one’s own skin?
“Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.” –Henri Nouwen
I’m taking a leadership course this week, Dynamics of Church Leadership. Among other things, today we discussed identity and performance, and how these relate positively and negatively.
One of the ideas we talked about is how traditionally people have derived their identities from their communities, from relationships.
Our current culture insists on finding identity within oneself, apart from community. One looks inside oneself to find identity, or one travels abroad to find oneself.
Our professor argued that the first model is nearer the Biblical Story. Our identities are inseparable from our place in the people of God and in relationship to the Triune God.
He offered this African proverb as an example of this relational viewpoint.
“I am because you are, if you are not, I cannot be.”
What do you think?
Interestingly enough, the theory of the atonement which dominated the church from its conception until the 12th century (Anselm and Abelard) was the Ransom to Satan theory (alternatively known as Victory over Satan theory, the Classic view, Christus Victor, or the Dramatic view). It was held by patristic theologians such as Athanasius, Irenaeus, Origin, and Gregory of Nyssa. It was the primary way by which Augustine understood the atonement. Elements of this view are also present in the writings of Luther and Karl Barth.
Yeah, I was suprised too.
The cross, the atonement, while standing at the heart of Christianity has been understand in many different ways over the years by Christians. Unlike the Trinity and the Incarnation where there is considerable agreement throughout Church history, and even today across denominational lines, on what are the boundaries of orthodox belief, views on the atonement have been considerably more diverse.
The Church has been around for about 1,900 years. What theory of the atonement has been the central understanding of the majority of orthodox theologians for about a thousand of those 1,900 years?
In other words, out of those 1,900 years, there has been a millennium where nearly all orthodox theologians agreed on what the main view of the atonement ought to be.
Which thousand years?
Which view?
Well done Dad, you were right about it being deemed a heresy by the Church throughout history. Its called Apollinarianism.
Apollinarius actually was a friend of Athanasius, the great defender of orthodoxy against Arianism, and Apollinarius was concerned to maintain the unity of the Jesus Christ as well as his sinlessness. He took this concern too far however, formulating a simplistic Christology, saying essentially that Jesus Christ had a human body and his soul was the divine Son of God. Jesus was half God, half man.
The major problem with this, is that at the end of the day Jesus would not then be truly human. A human mind and soul are essential to what it means to be human. If scientists could implant a human mind into a dog body, one would not have a true dog. It would be a human in a dog’s body. Likewise, God with skin on is not truly a human, merely a special theophany. Following the New Testament authors, the early Church insisted that Jesus was fully human, including the mind, heart, and soul.
Of course this is a paradox. How could Jesus be fully God, fully human, and only one person? Some like Apollinarius tried to resolve this paradox by truncating Jesus’ humanity. Others like Nestorius divided his person-hood, positing that within Jesus there were actually two persons acting in such harmony as to be indistinguishable.
The Church was really only able to say what the incarnation wasn’t. It really was only able to put boundaries around the paradox. It guarded against the different ways one could go wrong. What it wasn’t able to do was to explain the paradox. It was usually those who insisted on explaining it who went off the tracks because explaining it inevitably meant letting go of a key element concerning Jesus affirmed by the New Testament and the early Church.
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