Fear for life and loved ones has given strength to our fallen natures, ensnaring precious brothers and sisters in the lie that torture may be defined/redefined/justified by a Christian.
All in Culture
Is Wendell Berry Making Me A Pacifist?!?
What I'd like to do in this post is simply share some of the most powerful quotations from this essay with you all. I found, as I read this essay, that many of the deepest presuppositions the Modern West surround the concept of war. Consider the following as an extra dose of "food for thought:"
Am I Reading Wendell Berry or N.D. Wilson???
Each day is filled with "miracles." N.D. Wilson likes to point out that bats really do fly blind, plants really do turn sunlight into food, and caterpillars really do turn into butterflies; these aren't just stories we tell children. If we would heed Christ's admonition to consider the lilies and birds we would be filled with the miraculous wonder that God always intended us to see in His creation.
The Highway & The Sidewalk
Too often when someone disagrees with what someone is writing they tend to boil things down to silly arguments about the writers moral standing. Developing a an enlarged understanding of how differing mediums and purposes will affect one's form of communication could do much to quell the tumultuous world of social media and blogging. Especially among Christians.
An Apologia for Outcry
A personal apologia that is not inherently meant for outside readers. It is for me. It is what I have determined the Scriptures to require. A cry that the church should recognize, support, and encourage. The declaration that something is "lawful" does not make it righteous. And only a fool would declare that the recent string of deaths at the hands of police officers has been righteous.
The Bloody Marriage of Military & Sport
Sports, the movies, the mall, the news cycle, etc. all serve in a liturgical manner; they all shape us and form us in certain ways simply by our exposure to them. When Smith speaks of “liturgies” he’s talking about cultural rituals that tend to shape us in ways that we aren’t necessarily aware of. In other words, liturgies don’t ask for permission to shape the way we think and feel about certain things, they just do it.
Biblical Symbolism, Marriage, & the New Covenant
What is necessary is not the creation of symbols. The symbols (like marriage) are already there. What is necessary is that we have our eyes opened to the Biblical symbolism that pervades our world and that we view the world through that lens rather than the symbol-averse of late-modernity.
Liturgy Series: Part 6 – Confession & Pardon
The disordered desires of a people result not only in individual sins but ultimately take shape in the world we inhabit. Too often we limit the scope of our sin to our personal relationship with God or (a little better) to the ways our sins affect our closest relationships. Now, while sin certain does have a (powerful) affect on those things, Smith points out the cultural and cosmic effects of sin as well.
Main Street > Pennsylvania Avenue
We are woefully blind to the fact that even if one party (democrat or republican) won every seat in the senate and the house AND won the presidency NOTHING WOULD CHANGE.
Liturgy Series: Part 4 – Music
Like all parts of the liturgy, music is both unavoidable and massively impactful. Whether we like it or not the words and rhythms we sing as a congregation are shaping us into a teleological people (a people facing a certain kingdom). Considering the weight of this proposition we should be increasingly concerned with which kingdom our songs are pointing us.
N.T. Wright & the Centrality of "Story"
Wisdom incarnate (Jesus), spoke in parables and hid the things of the kingdom of God from the wise and revealed them to innocent babes (Luke 10). Again, as the apostles went out into the kingdom of Rome armed with the story of the Gospel their ultimate aim was a subversive one. Everywhere they went they started a riot because of the story they were telling: "Jesus is Lord, not Ceasar." & "You are now citizens of Heaven, not Rome." To us these often serve as empty words on the pages of an ancient text. In the first century these words were telling the story of a conflicting narrative to the story so many inhabited. Moreover, these words were telling the story of the emergence of a new world (the world of the New Adam) and the decaying of an old one (the world of the Old Adam).
Doing What Everyone Else Does, Plus Jesus: A Critique of the "Christian Worldview"
I finished reading James K.A. Smith's book Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation a couple weeks ago. I would have to say that it is the best book I've read this year (so far). The book does a wonderful job at challenging the popular conversations surrounding "Christian Worldview" talk without being over critical while at the same time offering an attractive alternative. Smith argues throughout the book that centering the Christian faith around something like a "worldview" has many pitfalls. Again, it should be noted that Smith is not advocating that we abandon the concept of developing a "Christian Worldview" but suggests that such a center cannot hold.
Historical Problems & the Problem with History
It's important to understand that the scriptures (specifically the New Testament in this sense) were written in space & time to a certain people in space and time. None of this means that what was written then is no longer applicable to the modern reader, rather, Wright contests that in order to obtain a modern application from the text would depend on obtaining the ancient application. Our approach should not be to divorce the scriptures from the place and time they were written in order to acquire their "higher meaning." Instead we should look to understand exactly what scripture was addressing so that we may see how it does (and does not) apply to us today.
Only the Trinity Will Work
"Deep Comedy," according to Leithart, is something that can only be achieved in and through the Christian worldview. What is "deep comedy?" it is the world that the Bible says that we inhabit. The Bible, through the communication of the Trinitarian God, teaches that creation (the world we inhabit) need not be a perpetually decaying world.
The pursuit of peace apart from Jesus (the Prince of Peace) or His gospel (the gospel of peace) is doomed to failure because it (the pursuit of peace apart from Christ), just like the Galatian Judiazers, is based on works of the law which cannot bring true peace.
When you think about the fact that bats are blind and use sonar to navigate the night skies looking for bugs; or the fact that caterpillars hang from tomato plants in your back yard for a few weeks in order to turn in to butterflies; or the fact that the ring I gave my wife when I asked her to marry me was at one point a lump of black coal; these all seem like stories you could tell a kid before they go to sleep at night. Wilson gets at the fact that they are all stories; God's stories for us.
While truth in the form of theology & philosophy is very helpful it is stories that ultimately grab us! In fact it is stories that grab us first as children before we even have the capacity to understand theological treatises. Christians should not shy away from stories but instead embrace them and learn to tell them better!
Much of our post-modern world is very inconsistency in the way its views hold together. People aren't taught to think how economic policy and gay mirage hold together and are connected. That's why you can have "conservative" pundits claim that all they care about is the economy and want to leave the "moral" issues out of politics.
Unfortunately, most of the time people hear or see the word "apocalypse" today they immediately associate it with some sort of catastrophic, end of the world, event that's portrayed in movies like I Am Legend or the forthcoming Left Behind movie. This is unfortunate considering the menial amount of work required to clarify such confusion.