Blog from the garage …

Generally Orange Couunty, CA is referred to as “sunny southern California.” The exception is when I head out for a visit. Clouds and rain Wednesday evening into Thursday. We did get some sun today - breakfast on the beach is a nice fringe when coming out to meet with the folks at Fuller Seminary.

I am writing in close proximity to the garage from what Spencer refers to as, “The Beachshack.” The wireless router is in the garage and I am at the dining table with my laptop.

Our meeting with Fuller went well and we are on track to offer our first ETREK course via Fuller in March 2005. Exciting times ahead.

I sat in on a course at Fuller last night. Barry Taylor taught the course. He offered some very interesting takes on the way Jesus is portrayed in art. Several prints from various time periods reflected that Jesus was viewed through the lens of a given cultural setting. Fascinating. We got to eat a bite before class with Barry and so got to talk a bit about theology and culture. Very good thinker.

Spencer took about an hour to discuss changes in culture and how it may affect the church’s engagement with culture to be salt and light - what it might look like and what we may need to consider. Overall a stimulating three and a half hours.

I must say, the older I get the more this time change thing affects my adaptability to new schedules. Thankfully I will get an extra hour Saturday evening as “Daylight Savings Time” will give way to “Central Standard Time” again.

More television wisdom …

My family knows my penchant for a good quote. They offered yet another from the new series, “Lost.”

“A leader can’t lead unless he knows where he is going.”

My question, “What about a leader who knows the direction but not the exact destination?” Careful, consider Abram who through his journeys became Abraham.

Truth in strange places …

From the new television series, “Lost.” “If we can’t live together then we will die alone.”

Faith

A quote from Sunday bible study - “None of your faith is in your faith.”

Scandal …

Stephne Shields puts together some thoughts and links regarding Mark Noll’s book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind ten years later.

Hopeful optimism and the move from Christian pessimism …

Reading through Romans 5 in preparation for Bible Study last evening, I came to a personal conclusion I sense grows from the text. We who follow God the way Jesus shows us and the Spirit empowers us should increasingly move from a position of pessimism toward hopeful optimism. Pop-eschatology birthed in the late 19th Century, popularized by highly visible preachers from their pulpits and made into novels and movies at the end of the 20th Century press us into an inherent pessimism about the world God made and the future of people and the Kingdom of God that consequently disconnects us from any hopeful engagement except for the purpose of getting more people onto the ark. We then fail to engage our world beyond the exclusively spiritual as we compartmentalize life into the materal and physical more akin to Platonism that Christianity as practiced in and by the early church.

So, when we come to find our hope does not disappoint when that hope rests on the effective work of the Spirit of God to both infuse us with the love of God and birth in us a love for God, we exult in tribulation that works perseverance and a tested and tried character. The hope we then have effected in and to us comes as we understand “those whom he justified, them he also glorified.” The future realities have been squarely brought into the present by the effetive work of the Spirit of God so that our hope will certainly not dissapoint.

Here’s a call to move every more away from Christian pessimism to the hopeful optimism that comes from our experience of hope - firm trust in the Him who justifies the ungodly.

The relationship between story and truth claim …

Divine Conspirator raised some questions about story and truth. The comments have been interesting. What I Think also offered insight. I ran across this quote from N.T. Wright in his commentary on Romans 5-8. He wrote,

Beneath the surface, however, and poking out like the tips of a huge iceberg at varous key points, there runs a different theme, not so often noticed. A word is necessary about the detection of apparently submerged themes. For centuries nobody minded when exegetes declared that Romans 1-4 was “about” justification and 5-8 “about” sanctification. These were regular topics in the systematic theology that sustained many churches and preachers; it seemed reasonable that Paul should develop his argument along such lines, and some sense could be made of the text on that basis (with little exceptions like 7:7-25; 8:18-25). The fact that Paul nowhere said that this was how he was dividing his material, and that so far as we know “justification” and “sanctification” did not function in his mind (or anyhone else’s in the first century) in the same way as they did in the church, did not seem to matter. But when people today propose alternative underlying themes, even when they are far more plausible within the mind of a Second Temple Jew, they are often howled down. “How can you be so sure?” they are asked. “Why does Paul not say it more openly if that’s what he meant?”(p.510)

Could this be a scholarly way of helping to locate the “text” in its “context” thereby giving us a means to truly “contextualize” the message?

Exodus or Exile …

The September 27, 2004 issue of the Wall Street Journal offered an article on the Internatinoal scene titled, “Iraq See Chrisitan Exodus.” Yochi J. Dreazen chose “exodus” when “exile” might not be a better picture. The “Exodus” conjures the Hebrew picture of liberation and freedom. What Dreazen describes is more like “exile.” We find a picture in the Hebrew Scriptures about exile. Being put out from your “homeland” or in the case of the Israelites, “the promised land.” Disheartened and discouraged the exiles were carried to Babylon. The “exodus” prompted celebration.

While in exile they must remember the King. Long for the return of the King. Live in the Kingdom regardless of geography. Know that those of us in the way of Jesus are praying for them everyday.

Uniquely Mormon? …

I received another article clipped from the Wall Street Journal; again found in the column, “Houses of Worship.” “The New Promised Land” appeared in the October 8, 2004 issue of the Journal. Naomi Schaefer Riley chronicles the growing acceptance of Mormonism expecially in the New England states. I find two statements made in the article interesting.

First, “By church policy, Mormons who do missionary work by going door to door never proselytize in the area where they have put down roots. Thus they are seen in two ways: as the strangers who come to the doorstep carrying the Book of Mormon and as co-workers, neighbors and friends.” My thoughts center around the idea of why disconnect who you are and your eagerness to share from where you “put down roots”? Does this offer some kind of dis-integration of life and faith? Certainly, this is Riley’s evaluation, “thus they are seen …”, rather than the necessary philosophy behind such, that is of course unless Ms. Riley is herself a Mormon in which case I am willing to stand by my reflection but concede to knowing too little about these kinds of particularities of the Mormon religion.

What really caught my attention was when this line of reasoning encounters the following statement, “They seem to like the strong sense of community and the obligations that come with it.” How is it that I can disconnect from the community in which I put roots down the faith I cherish? Does it not seem a bit anti-communal? If by community we describe shared “something” - geography, interests, relationships, etc., it would seem that my authentic participation in a given community must inherently include the flavor of my faith.

These thoughts are not intended to denigrate Mormons or Mormonism. Rather, anyone who holds a “cherished faith” ought to consider whether or not they have dislodged the thread of faith from the fabric of life. If a life of faith is to be paramount to udnerstanding true reality (Dallas Willard might suggest such.) then one would not be so worried about how they were received on the front porch with their book of faith but would instead see to it that their lives reflected the very faith they hold. Inquiries then would flow naturally from conversations rather than from a disconnected missionary position.

I do believe my faith in Jesus worth expressing as it is weaved into the fabric of my life by the Spirit of God.

Consequences, culture and disconnect …

John clipped a few articles from the Wall Street journal for me to read. One of those articles, “Christian Teens? Not Very” penned by Dale Buss appeared in the July 9, 2004 column, “Houses of Worship.”

Buss runs through a number of statistics that convey a confusing picture when it comes to teens and faith. The Barana Research Group, dubbed the “gold standard in data about the U.S. Protestant church by Buss, exposes a disparity between what is said to be beleived by teens and other positions they hold to be apparently mutually exclusive.For example,

“Some commentators produce even more startling statistics on the doctrinal drift of America’s youth. Ninety-one percent of born-again teenagers surveyed a few years ago proclaimed that there is no such thing as absolute truth, says the Rev. Josh MdDowell, a Dallas-based evangelist and author. More alarmingly, that number had risen quickly and steadily from just 52% of committed Christian kids in 1992 who denied the existence of absolute truth. A slight majority of professing Christian kids, Mr. McDowell says, aslo now say that the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ never occurred.”

An inset quote from articles suggests, “Many hold mushy beliefs antithetical to the creed.” Does something happen the minute a young person reaches adolescence that prompts them to jettison “the faith once for all delivered to the saints”? By all means, we pour truth claims down our children as though they are vitamins to help keep them healthy and stave off heresy. We have for many years sat them in a room and preached to them the ills of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. We have painted a bleak picture of the world so as to give them absolutely no hope of things getting better. If they were to believe the Kingdom could make a difference then our “Rapture” boat would not be near as full and our books would not sell near as many copies.

Ivy Beckwith may be on to something when she suggests the pendulum extremes of ignoring the ways in which children learn, and so giving them nothing but propostional truth claims necessary though they may be, and the other extreme of playing so severely to their learning styles that we have melted down the gospel and created of it a “golden calf” of fun and entertainment, and so creating an experience a bit disconnected from reality, has only served to craete the very environment we decry.

Have we lived our beliefs in a mushy ways so as to demonstrate antithesis to the creed? Do we fail to seize authentic means to help provide the proper spiritual formation for our children. Dallas Willard suggests that everyone undergoes spiritual formation. The question remains then, what is spiritually forming our young people? If we determine it is our culture then one of two things must happen. We either must “transform” culture or we must take a more active role in the spiritual formation of our young people who will then in turn live to be Neibuhr’s “Christ transforming culture.”

The disconnect may well be in our own understanding of spiritual formation. Buss concludes, “The kids in my Sunday School class really do undestand that. It’s their peers I’m worried about.” I then wonder, what is being done for the class that could be done for their peers?

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