Hebrews was written by nobody

This just in, the book of Hebrews was written by nobody. I love it. Click to read the article "Study suggests book of Hebrews wasn't written by anybody."

Global Warming & the Anti-Christ

"I am strongly against Christians embracing the environmental movement. It’s easy to relate to a desire to save the earth. Unfortunately, the designers of this movement have a political agenda that few true Christians would find compatible with the Bible.

The true goal of the environmental movement is to draw the world into a central body that would set the rules. This plan is part of the devil’s master scheme to recreate the type of control he had during the time of the Babylonian Empire. The only way to get back to Babylon is to push for world unity.

The environmental movement is a perfect disguise because it asks nations to surrender their sovereignty for a cause seemingly beneficial to all nations. Recently, a group of well-known evangelical leaders fell for this ploy by deciding to back an initiative to fight global warming."

By Todd Strandberg - Raptureready.com

I have heard a lot of good and bad arguments for why we should or shouldn't take care of creation, but this is a new one for me. Wow.

Courtesy of Raptureready.com (Thanks Art for the link).

Jesus & the Elephant

I am here in TX and truly cringing at the amount of broad generalizations I have run into. I recently had "the conversation" as my wife and I like to call it (both of us being from the South) with my mom about how it really is possible to be a democrat AND a Christian. Needless to say, I wasn't too convincing. But the claims I have heard all week are somewhat depressing, a lot of polarization going on. "Those liberals" all they want to do is take God out of the government. We were founded on Judeo-Christian ethics and our country is going down the tubes because of "those liberals." Global warming? Oh Jared, that's just a political agenda. We can't destroy this earth. What was interesting was some of the broader generalizations that were even about Baptists, "you know, they only teach the basics, but at some point you have to grow out of being a baptist." Anyway, I was amazed at it all and I am know rethinking my coming out of the closet with my democratic and 'liberal' stances, from fear of being forever excommunicated from the family. But, as Kimball says in his new book (which I am ironically reading in TX):

"Today, Christians are known as scary, angry, judgmental, right-wing finger-pointers with political agendas."

His (and my) conclusion about outsiders and their views on Christianity: "I can't blame them - I wouldn't like Christianity either"

Derrida on Death

The Phaedo explicitly names philosophy: it is the attentive anticipation
of death, the care brought to bear upon dying, the meditation on the best way to
receive, give, or give oneself death, the experience of a vigil over the
possibility of death, and over the possibility of death as
impossibility.
-Derrida in The Gift of Death

The idea of "being-towards-death" and "facing your own death" are central to existentialism. However, it seems odd to me that the for Heidegger and other existentialists, these terms mean the exact opposite of Kierkegaard's notion of "facing your own death," with Kierkegaard being the supposed Father of Existentialism. For Kierkegaard "facing your own death" is relational and exoteric (the subject before God). For Heidegger, etc "facing your own death" is esoteric (the subject before the subject). It seems then that for the unbelieving existentialist, "facing your own death" is merely resolving to the fact, a sort of neo-Stoicism. But with Kierkegaard it is a living faith, a relation by constant choice.

Maybe a practical implication:
For the common American, life is the material. But death is non-material and therefore cannot even be in the purview of the material mindset. It precludes the notion of death, it is inauthentic in the Heideggerian sense of always losing oneself in the crowd so as to not have to face one's own death. It needs a material ending and that ending is (perhaps?) retirement.But for the spiritual, death can be faced since it is not only not precluded but included in the very nature of the spiritual. The material is taking and can decide when to stop taking, when it's had enough (retirement). But the spiritual is giving and so cannot decide when to stop giving, only death decides. But it is a death that can be accepted, it is truly the believer's retirement.



The importance of death to the believer cannot be stressed enough.

As we learn to acknolwedge and admit the reality of death,
rather than deny it, we can prepare for our own death by familiarizing
ourselves with it while it remains (probably) at some distance...We should not
downplay or suppress the reality of death in our worship. Every occasion
of worship, after all, harks to the death of Christ on a cross. Every
baptism is a death, a drowning, and we should not gloss this.

-Rodney Clapp, Tortured Wonders

So then, this life brings death and this death brings life (just as Jesus taught). This is the paradox of the Christian life. It brings life now, but only insofar as its hope is in the future, not in this life. To grasp your own death as a Christian is to truly "hide your life in Christ" (Colossians 3; II Corinthians 4:18; Hebrews 11:1).

Ehrman on Inerrancy

I just finished Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. It was a pretty basic book but his main point raised some very good questions for me. His main beef about inerrancy is that it is a vacuous word. Almost all evangelicals affirm in their creeds innerancy but only in the autograph. But the problem, Ehrman rightly contends, is that we don't have the autograph. For me, the only thing I thought was "now we have something to work towards." The fact that we don't have the autographs at least gave us something to do, but I never actually thought through what it meant for innerancy. And I haven't thought through all the implications but one thing I know, inerrancy as its classically been defined has become for me a vacuous term. I can completely agree that the Bible is inerrant in its autograph but that doesn't get me anywhere. In what sense then can we talk about the Bible as inerrant?

The Evolution of Language

A while back I posted a blog entitled "Beowulf & Moses" where I compared the language evolution of Biblical Hebrew to English. However, a friend of mine wrote me an email about how this probably isn't a proper comparison. She is a well-educated teacher and Jewish, so I thought I should listen. Here is what she said:

Anyway, about Biblical Hebrew and Old English, there is a vast difference in purpose and culture here. We believe that the Beowulf poem was written in the vernacular or vulgar tongue of the Anglo-Saxons. There you already have the melding of two people groups, cultures and languages. We also think the original poem may have been recited in Old Norse, a very similar language to modern Icelandic. Even though Britain and Iceland are two island nations, Britain's culture and its language suffered many invasions by other European peoples, the Danes the Norse, the Norman French. Its original languages have not fared well because of this.

Several of the old languages of the Celts, most notably Cornish and Manx are no longer spoken as a first language by anyone, though that may be changing thanks to Cornish radio and TV. They are following the Welsh strategy to reintroduce the language. The only reason I know this is because I am a member of the International Reading Association and attended one of their World Congresses in July of 2002 in Edinburgh. There I met teachers from these areas who told me how they were trying to revive speaking, reading and writing in the ancient languages.

English, as Leah likes to say, is a Creole, a mixture of many languages and cultures. Because of politics and trade, the language seems to be constantly changing for the last 1,000 years. England has never had an isolated culture. According to Robin McNeill, Iceland has a very different history. It traded almost exclusively with Norse peoples for several hundred years. It also has never been invaded like England. Its language has changed very little in all that time. This point was made in a recent indie film named "Beowulf and Grendel." The writers and producers of the film were mainly Icelandic, and in an interview I read, said they could read the old English pretty easily, unlike us.

So, the point is well taken. How much a language changes really does depend on its exposure to other cultures and languages, whether through invasion or trade. In any case, I found this information very interesting.

The Language We Use - Part 2

1. A lack of concern for our spirituality outside of the buildings we go to

This actually goes back to a post I put up a few months ago where I discussed our compartmentalization in our spiritual lives and I find that our language of "going to church" emphasizes that even more. In a sense we oftentimes believe that the place we go to worship has a more "spiritual" aspect to it, that it is more "holy" than other places.

I worked at a very small church in Virginia while I was finishing up college as the worship pastor/college pastor and it was a very sweet time. But Sarah and I were the youngest people by 10 years and that was only one other couple. Everyone else was at least 2-3 decades older than us. In any case, I was often reprimanded for hurdling the altar railing to get to the stage or for wearing my hat in the sanctuary (it was okay downstairs, but not "the sanctuary"). I was not allowed to wear shorts or t-shirts, etc. Of course I complied respectfully but I just didn't understand at all where they were coming from.

This is what I want to warn against. When we begin to exalt a space, we forget that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit, not any building. Working with the youth group I often hear the term "you can't do that in church!" But by saying such things, we are saying that there are things that are okay outside the church but not okay inside, as though the building somehow is where God dwells, instead of seeing that it's within us that God dwells. We can't get away from "the sacred space", it is always with us because it is us. If our conscience says not to wear a hat inside a church because it's somehow "sacred" we should never wear a hat because we ourselves are a sort of "sacred space". Is this not what Paul means when he says (albeit in response to sexual immorality but applies here), "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. Therefore honor God with your body (1 Cor 6:19-20)?Of course there are many issues that offshoot from this but my main point is that instead of bringing our idea of "church" down to the level of our daily lives, we should exalt our daily lives to the level of "church", since that is who we are.

The Language We Use - Part 1

This is from a post I did on my church's blog, I thought it might be thought provoking:

We have all heard it said, "The church isn't the building but the people". As much as we "know" that, we still have the "building" concept still embedded in our thinking. Just look at the words we use on a weekly basis.

I am going to church tomorrow.

What did you learn at church today?

Do you go to church?

What seemingly amounts to harmless semantics I think actually affects how we view our spirituality in general. By using such phrases (which shows how we really still think about things, even if on the surface we deny it) we are making it harder and harder on ourselves to not compartmentalize things. My thought is that such language breeds two things (although there is probably more):

1. A lack of concern for our spirituality outside of the buildings we go to

2. A passivity in our engaging in spirituality and our worship, especially when we gather on the weekends at our gatherings.