Beowulf & Moses

Although many might believe that somehow God gave us a "holy language" and a "Bible dropped from heaven", for the rest of us we have to wrestle how it is that we came to have the Scriptures we have today. Now, if we believe in at least essential Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (the Post-Mosaica adequtely barring the notion that Moses wrote all of the Pentateuch) and a Post-exilic writing of at least some of the Hebrew canon, there is around 1000 years between Genesis and Malachi. Now, the question is this. How is it that we have a fairly unified Hebrew throughout the Hebrew Scriptures even though the writing supposedly spans a thousand years?

In case you don't think that languages change significantly over the years, I have posted an image of a Beowulf manuscript in English from around the year 1100 (around 1000 years). Let me know if you can read it.

So then, do we accept what many would suggest, that most of the Old Testament was written in the Post-exilic period or do we allow for substantial linguistic updating (along with some evident redaction)? Or is there another option?

Calvin on Encouraging Words

John Calvin on Roman Catholics who deny justification by faith alone:

I forbear to say what sort of zealots for good works they are who thus carp at us. Let them rail with impunity even as they wantonly infect the whole world with their own foul lives! (Institutes, III, 16, 1).

I literally laughed out loud when I read this paragraph. What was it about these guys that just did not allow them to play nice?

This one is for you Dave Williams, here is your anti-papist rhetoric back in full swing.

Secular Space (continued thoughts)

I have done more thinking on what the emerging principle, transforming secular space, includes. As I thought, I remembered the oft-quoted saying by Abraham Kuyper, "there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: mine!" This truth is at the heart of what it means to transform secular space. It is the recognition that God does not just rule at church and among church folk but that he is active in all of creation and has invited us to join. We are so self-absorbed in our own "getting saved" that we miss the whole point of redemption. The good news is not that we "get a ticket to heaven" for when we die but that we are given invaluable insight into what it means to truly live and that life involves bringing heaven to earth, transforming the secular space.

This concept of "bringing heaven to earth" is key to understanding the believer's role in the realized eschatology of the Kingdom of God. It is not just a future, hope-oriented reality but has broken into this age in the death and resurrection of Christ. We, as those united to Christ, are called to bring this new age, this renewed creation, to our worlds.

But this isn't the type of thing that people like to hear because it consumes everything you are. Like CS Lewis said in his book, The Weight of Glory "We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." This goes for Christians too (if not especially).

Secular Space

In the excellent Gibbs/Bolger book Emerging Churches, they identify 3 core practices of emerging churches. These are (1) identifying with the life of Jesus, (2) transforming secular space, (3) living as community. Now, I understand well the implications of 1 and 3, but what about transforming secular space? What is it and is it something we should care about? I haven't read that far in the book yet and have decided not to until I can think through those two questions. I want to know for myself if it's something I believe in or should be believing in. When the modern movement began, it became important to separate the realms of the sacred and the profane. Religion became privatized and also became oil to the water of science (they never mixed). However, recently Christians have bought into this compartmentalization and applied it to their own lives. Sunday morning "going to Church" becomes all-important to our Christianity while going bowling on Friday night or having dinner with the family becomes much less a religious ordeal. We have bought into the separation of the realms of the sacred and the profane. That somehow Sunday morning comes with it an extra boost of spirituality and that a pastor or someone who works in a local church is a "good Christian" or worse "a better Christian". They are somehow more spiritual because they work in the area of the sacred.But such cannot be the case. Maybe this transforming of secular space isn't such a bad idea.