Prototype : book

Posted on May 22, 2013 under books

So far, this book by Jonathan Martin is my choice for favorite book of the year. Jonathan is a Pastor and this book reads like a sermon. I needed to read this book at this time… it spoke to me in a very profound way.

I don’t want to say much more, but here is one of many brilliant excerpts:

“We have always been inclined to worship people or things we perceive as being great. So we exaggerate our own greatness, inflate our successes, downplay our weaknesses, and hide our scars. Thus human history is largely the story of people who say, “My god can beat up your god, my king can beat up your king, my army is more awesome than your army,” and then attempt to prove the point to each other. All in the name of greatness. In ancient cultures, people often tried to appeal to the extraordinary power and dominance of their gods as reasons for worship. Pharaohs, caesars, emperors, and even many of our contemporary celebrities are humans whose feats of power and achievement make people worship them as virtual gods.

So what do we make of a God who is worshipped not for His might but for His weakness, even for His wounds? Not a human wearing the medals of military conquest to convince us He is a god, but a God who wears His suffering on His sleeve to convince us He is human? Instead of “my god can beat up your god, my king can beat up your king,” Jesus’ path to kingship comes wrapped in a very odd strategy indeed: He is the King of kings largely because He lets himself get beat up. He is victorious not despite His scars, but because of them.”

Seek, but do not Find

Posted on April 28, 2013 under philosophy, spirituality

It’s interesting that nowadays it is popular to be a spiritual seeker.

It’s cool to say that you are searching for faith.

It’s not cool to say that you found it.

Maybe it’s because when you say that you found faith, it requires a commitment to an interpretation of reality. And maybe people are afraid of commitment, or maybe it sounds too exclusive. If I found it and you didn’t, I am right and you are wrong, and therefore you are excluded from the truth of what is real.

However, seekers are already committed to a worldview whether they realize it or not. To interpret faith as simply a mystery that can never be found, is still committing to a picture of reality.

This, of course is different from doubting. I think it’s natural that everybody has periods of doubt in their faith commitments. But if the roots of commitment have been well grounded, meaning that there is a sense in which truth has taken hold of you, then certainty begins to form.

This idea of ‘truth taking hold’ has always been interesting to me because it’s more about an external influence. Maybe one of the problems with spiritual seeking, is that people tend to look inwards rather then outwards. I don’t know about you, but inwards can be a very dark and confusing place. If you truthfully look inside yourself at your intentions and what matters most to you, you’ll probably find selfishness and pride.

Of course external faith doesn’t require signing up to a world religion or established system of religiosity. Much of that stuff is either culturally defined or packaged to make you feel good about yourself. Jesus hated that kind of externally influenced religion more then anything.

At some point, I came to realize that seeking faith is more about being sought; Finding faith is more about being found; discovery is more about being revealed.

And so it goes.

Speaking of Jesus : book

Posted on April 27, 2013 under books

 

I suppose there is a lot of good things I could say about Carl Medearis’ book titled ‘Speaking of Jesus’ but maybe I should just let Carl say some things instead:

“I don’t want to redefine salvation. I don’t want to redefine the gospel or even Christianity on the whole. I suppose I want to undefine them. I want to strip away the thousands of years of graffiti painted onto the gospel, turning it into a reasonable code of doctrines. The gospel is not an idea. It is not a belief. It is not a favorite verse. The gospel does not live in your church, it cannot be written down in a simple message, and it is not the sinner’s prayer. The gospel is not a what. It is not a how. The gospel is a Who. The gospel is literally the good news of Jesus. Jesus is the gospel.”

“Relax. Enjoy your friends. Enjoy their company along with the company of Jesus. Point Him out, freely, without fear or intimidation. You’re not responsible to sell Him to them. You’re simply saying what you’ve seen. You’re not the judge. You’re the witness.”

“Self is no longer the most important commodity. Living in the wisdom and compassion of the true Way, the life of the Nazarene, is in itself a death of sorts. It is a daily ritual of surrender to the here and now of self-interest. In order to live like this, we must model ourselves after the Christ, pursuing relationships, compassion, and even reckless self-endangerment as a sacrifice to this person, this Way. Jesus’ way embraces this cost as a means of living in the pleasure of the kingdom of heaven. It is what pastor and writer/translator Eugene Peterson refers to as the “pilgrimage” of obedience to Jesus.1 It is a journey, it is a trail, it is a way.”

Why I no longer call myself a Christian

Posted on April 18, 2013 under culture

I was reading an online forum on the question ‘what do you think of when you hear the term Christian’? the responses ranged from the following… hypocrite, homophobic, judgmental, gay hater, religious person, conservative, and brain washed. Then I thought ‘wow’ that doesn’t sound like Jesus.

To the Middle Eastern person, Christian means someone who wants to spread capitalism, democracy, and political idealism.

To many Americans, Christian means conservative right-wing Republican.

To the Intellectual academic, Christian means someone who opposes science, and believes the world was created six thousand years ago.

To the Muslim, Christian means a descendent of the crusades.

To some Europeans, Christian means Roman Catholic. To Africans, Christian means someone who wants to convert you to a  religion. To Asians, Christian means Western Imperialist.

I am none of these definitions, so if the culture defines the term this way, why am I using it?

The reality is that when you tell somebody you are a Christian, you have to swim against the morass of stereotypes. You could either spend your time defending the word ‘Christian’ – deconstructing the portrait you are being identified with, or you could think of another way to identify yourself.

As for me, I am no longer a Christian.
I am a follower of Jesus. That makes sense to me.

In the book Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller writes about a radio interview he had with a non-christian talk show host who urged him to defend Christianity:

“He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. “Then why don’t you want to defend Christianity?” he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend. By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry. I won’t do it. Stop ten people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers. How can I defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people? I told the radio show host that I would rather talk about Jesus, and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me. The host looked back at me with tears in his eyes. When we were done, he asked if we could go get lunch together. He told me how much he didn’t like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe Jesus was the Son of God.“

The Historical Jesus: N.T. Wright audio

Posted on April 11, 2013 under jesus

There are times in my life where I listened to, read, or experienced something that created a paradigm shift in my thinking. One of those times came when a friend of mine lent me an audio lecture he recorded on the historical Jesus by N.T. Wright. From that moment on, I understood a Jesus that was grounded in a historical narrative.

I can’t explain it, but I just knew that what I was listening to was an accurate portrayal of Jesus – one that I never heard of before. The following online audio lectures are not the identical versions, but they are very similar.

CS Lewis Institute : Finding and Following the true Jesus
by N.T. Wright (click a link below for audio downloads) or listen online here

What’s the Problem with Jesus

Jesus and the Kingdom of God

Jesus, Israel, and the Cross

Jesus and the Kingdom, Today & Tomorrow

Knowing God in Story

Posted on March 12, 2013 under biblical, philosophy, theology

There are two ways to know God.

There is the Narrative God, revealed through the pages of scripture and embodied in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the story of God interacting within human history.

Then there is the Abstract God, known by rational and logical thought. We describe this God in terms of attributes. A God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. A God who is outside of time, and is immutable or unchanging. A God who is triune in nature.

The first sort of ‘knowing‘ is relational, God makes himself known in the lives of people in and through a story. The latter is ‘knowing about‘ God, as in theory and systematized propositions.

Now I don’t specialize in Biblical Exegesis by any stretch, nor am I a Biblical scholar, but I wonder if many of the theological conundrums we engage in, is the result of improperly mixing these two forms of knowledge. For example, the Biblical story about God includes the following: God changes his mind; God regrets something he did; God questions his actions; God get’s angry; God acts surprised; God is jealous; and God interacts with people differently throughout history.

What do you make of these? the common traditional response is that it is logically impossible for the abstract God to contradict his nature, so God acting in these ways must be simply man’s perspective of God. However, why not read it as it was intended?

Here’s an interesting thought:
What if the Narrative God is the incarnation of God within human history?
For God to reach down to humanity, it always involves a holding back of his glory. Consider the incarnation of God in Jesus or in the written word – The act of incarnation is to enter into the limitations of the world.

This is not an un-biblical concept of God, nor is it a dualist view of God, for the abstract God is still the same God in all his glory – however he is not comprehend-able by human understanding. Therefore the only way to truly know God is through revelation within the story.

This creates a rather interesting portrait of God. If it’s true that God allows himself to be limited within the narrative framework, then prayer is dynamically real and the open view of God as it relates to the narrative actually starts to make sense. The origin of evil is not tied to a divine blueprint making God responsible, but rather evil enters into the narrative.

God is in control, by entering into our narrative.

 

Moral Obligation

Posted on March 1, 2013 under philosophy

It seems to me that each of us have intuitions that are guided by a sense of moral obligation. In fact, it’s the very thing that makes morality tick. Even the relativist who denies moral absolutes feels obligated to tell you so because it’s the right and good thing to do. Those who cry out for injustice; for fairness; for the greater good, all do so because they feel morally obliged.

But where does this sense of moral obligation come from?

If I drop a box of alphabet cereal in the ground, and it somehow spells the sentence “take out the trash,” would I feel obliged to do so? Not really, because the combination of letters was a result of chance. If there is no God, then moral obligation is an illusion, there is no basis for obligation because our impulses are simply a result of chance. See where I’m going with this?

The point I am making is that we are not just aware of morality, but we feel responsible to behave as such. When somebody does something wrong, we are angry at them, why? because we are appealing to a standard of behavior that we expect them to know about.

Moral obligation and moral responsibility only makes sense if you infer a moral authorship; a mind behind the blueprint of morality.

The Biblical Mythos

Posted on February 21, 2013 under biblical

I found this quote from Kevin J. Vanhoozer to be really helpful in further thoughts on a Narrative Theology:

“The truth of Christianity is not like the universal truths of reason. The cradle of Christian faith is a story rather than a system. Though the Bible includes many literary genres, what holds it together is a narrative unity: the story of what God is doing in the world through Israel, through Jesus Christ, through the church. Christian thought inhabits the biblical mythos— not cleverly devised modern or postmodern myths, but myth become redemptive history. This is the mythos that serves as our framework for interpreting God, the world, and the self.

C. S. Lewis insists that the imagination is a truth-bearing faculty whose bearers of truth are not propositions but myths. Myths enable us both to “taste” and to “see”: to experience “as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.” What gets conveyed, therefore, is not simply the proposition but something of the reality itself: not simply information about God, but God’s triune identity itself as this is displayed in and through his creative and redemptive work. Further, the words of scripture do not simply inform us about God but act as the medium of divine discourse. It is these words— the stories, the promises, the warnings, etc.— that ought to orient Christians vis-à-vis reality.

Theology should have the courage of its convictions. In particular, Christians should think— as well as live, and move, and have their being— within the biblical mythos. The creation-fall-redemption-consummation schema is a comprehensive (and canonical) interpretative framework that should govern Christian thinking about everything, including— nay, especially!— truth, goodness, and rationality.”

Pilgrim’s Digress: Christian Thinking on and about the Post/ Modern Way, by Kevin J. Vanhoozer
from the book - Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six views

Retelling the Story

Posted on February 9, 2013 under biblical, culture

One argument you may often hear to discredit the Bible is that all ancient civilizations shared similar stories of creation, identity, and faith. Historical scholars would argue that the Hebrews borrowed many of these myths from neighboring people groups such as the Mesopotamian, Canaanite, and Egyptian. In response to this, Christian apologists tend to argue that it was the Hebrews who had the unique stories.

However, what if these stories did pre-date the Ancient Israelites? What if God used the literary form of subversion?

subversion : The literary act of replacing one identity with another by investing new meaning into commonly understood words, images, metaphors or motifs.

Jesus himself was a master of subversion.

His parables were all about retelling the story of Israel in unexpected ways. The presumption of Jewish righteous standing is turned on its head by a God who rejects arrogance in favor of the outcast.

“Jesus’ life was retold as a Davidic story – the Son of David to sit on his throne – to subvert the Jewish expectation of a revolutionary political military ruler of violence with a Messiah of suffering and a kingdom of spirit without physical weapons”
— Brian Godawa

If you want to get a more in-depth look at this perspective of Biblical subversion, I highly recommend that you read Brian Godowa’s book titled “Myth Became Fact”

Therefore, if we follow this model of subversion, the Christian is to engage the cultural narratives of the day and subvert them with the Gospel:
The scientific story that we live in a closed system of natural causes;
The achievement story of how fame and fortune are the ultimate goals in life;
The economic story of climbing the corporate ladder at all costs;
The glorified story of how physical appearance defines the perfect human being

“Author Curtis Chang, in his book ‘Engaging Unbelief,’ explains this rhetorical strategy as three-fold:
1. Entering the challenger’s story,
2. Retelling the story,
3. Capturing that retold tale with the gospel metanarrative.

He explains that the claim that we observe evidence objectively and apply reason neutrally to prove our worldview is an artifact of Enlightenment mythology. The truth is that each epoch of thought in history, whether Medieval, Enlightenment, or Postmodern, is a contest in storytelling. “The one who can tell the best story, in a very real sense, wins the epoch.”
- Brian Godawa, Myth became Fact

God in Theater

Posted on January 28, 2013 under biblical, worldview


More Thoughts on a Narrative Theology…

The Bible is a book of stories.

It is drama told in the form of images, symbols, hyperbole, and metaphor. Although it is historical, we may tend to read it like an encyclopedia of historical facts. If we do read scripture like a textbook of truth propositions, do we miss the profound way in which God is communicating to us?

“Theology is not an intellectual exercise of mentally constructing an accurate picture of reality in our ideas- and of ‘being right.’ It is a theatrical performance, where Christians participate in God’s story of redemption. In this sense, our understanding of God is not so much theology (the study of God’s Word), but theo-drama (the performace of God’s Word).” — Brian Godawa

I think for some people, the predominately narrative approach is a concern that understanding truth somehow becomes less clear, that True theology is best understood with propositions. But it seems to me that truth in the form of drama can penetrate much deeper then a statement ever can. Personally, I have found that a good movie (story) can move me in profound ways when understanding the world -  Truths about beauty, love, sacrifice, courage, and forgiveness.

“Hyperbole does not reduce the scripture to fairy tales or unhistorical documents, Rather, it is an understanding of how God interweaves image with word to paint a picture of truth that retains an element of mystery beyond human rational reductionism.” — Brian Godawa

Brian Godawa in his book ‘Word Pictures’ describes how several books in the Bible are deliberately structured according to theatrical conventions:

  • Job and Jonah are depicted in dialogs reminiscent in ancient plays
  • The book of Mark resembles a Greek tragedy following Aristotelian structure
  • Ezekiel can be considered a thespian prophet, written like a war epic

In addition, the Gospel of John follows the wisdom literature of the day –a very specific format using a conventional prologue; and seven acts centered around miracles.

“A Biblical story is not simply a delivery system of an idea, Rather, the story creates a world and invites the listener to live in the world, and take part in it. In reading and studying the Bible, ancient tales are not examined merely in order to extract a theological principle or ethical model” — Kenneth Baily

The overall idea is not that emotional-based drama somehow negates truth, rather it illuminates truth by captivating both the heart and soul.