Archive by Author

Genesis for Normal People

April 23, 2012 in Book Reviews with 4 Comments

Today Pete Enns has a new ebook out, with Jared Byas: Genesis for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Controversial, Misunderstood, and Abused Book of the Bible.

For the low, low price of two bucks, you can get oriented to Genesis as a story, a story that speaks to us, yes, but to the ancient world in which it was written first of all.

It is a story about Israel. It is, in every sense, Israel’s story. It is a story that leads up to, and in some ways may only make sense with, a place of national catastrophe.

Catastrophe, and uppity Babylonians, won’t have the last word in Israel’s story–because YHWH is greater. There is a power of subversion possible only in storytelling, there is a power of hope present particularly well in storytelling, and Genesis does this in spades.

Enns and Byas walk you through this in clear, easy to follow prose.

It might just be the best $2 you’ll spend all year.

Abstinence is Death

April 23, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 16 Comments

In an interview with Christianity Today Christine Gardner talks about the language that Evangelicals use to talk about abstinence. Gardner’s book is entitled, Making Abstinence Sexy–a telling encapsulation of how Evangelical abstinence are striving to affirm the culture’s obsession with sex–and visions of abundant, great sex in particular–while giving it a distinctive, Christian veneer:

They are using the very thing they are prohibiting to admonish young people to wait. They are saying, “If you are abstinent now, you will have amazing sex when you are married.”

Holy non sequitur, Batman!

Gardner thinks that Christianity has something to offer that has been largely missing from these abstinence campaigns:

Language of sacrifice and suffering can be transformative to those who know that sex sells everything from cars to deodorant and, now, abstinence.

I think she’s getting close. Abstaining from sex is suffering, dying to the desires of our bodies. In a world where people are regularly remaining single into their thirties and beyond, it’s death with no this-worldly promise of new life.

Perhaps reframing abstinence as participation in the cross of Christ is better preparation for marriage than the promise of great sex on the other side.

Image: photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

No only is there no correlation between abstinence now and quality of sex then, this framework perpetuates a self-centeredness that can make sex a source of conflict and tension rather than intimate oneness.

Whatever else sex is, it is also an extension of the other dynamics of who we are both as individuals and as couples. If we are insecure and distrustful in our relationship, that will play out in our sex as well. If we are looking to sex simply as the avenue of self-satisfaction, we are going to discover that the presence of another person with their own set of needs and desires is an annoyance and hindrance.

That’s the deeper problem with the “sex will be great if you wait” dynamic that some seem to be advocating in the church world. It buys into the idea that sex is about “me.”

First, whether you’re Christian or not, sex is always going to be about “us.”

But then there’s the more important fact for us as Christians that “love” is not about seeking our own. Our understanding of sex needs to be reframed as an expression of the self-giving love of Christ by which we are called to make God’s love known in the world.

In other words: if we frame abstinence as the death that it is, we are putting our sexuality within the Christian narrative of Christ crucified. This is the same story within which we are called to love our partners Christianly in our sexual relationship.

Houston Conference

April 22, 2012 in Church, Culture with 2 Comments

This weekend! If you’re in or around Houston, TX, I’d love to see you at the Christians for Biblical Equality conference !

My talk, “Walking by the Light of New Creation’s Dawn,” will be working out the importance of finding our place as participants in the New Creation when dealing with issues of gender in the church.

You can register here.

Even Now, It’s Still Easter

April 22, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

Don’t let the resurrection of Jesus slip out of consciousness too soon. It’s still Easter, even now.

Having vanquished the Enemy, who had usurped authority over all the kingdoms of the world (Luke 4:5-8), Jesus reclaims for humanity its original purpose: to rule the world on God’s behalf (Gen. 1:26-28). This is one reason why we find Paul referring to the resurrected Jesus as the second and last Adam. But as the last Adam, Jesus also holds humanity’s destiny in his hands. (Read more here)

Patience and Perseverance; Or, Why I’m OK with You Not Being Convinced Quite Yet

April 21, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 8 Comments

Today on Seth Godin’s blog, he had this to say about getting customers:

The easiest customers to get are almost never the best ones.

If you’re considering word of mouth, stability and lifetime value, it’s almost always true that the easier it is to get someone’s attention, the less it’s worth.

I’ve found that the same holds true in presenting new ideas–shifting fields from “buying” products to getting folks to “buy in” to the ways we’ve come to understand something.

In my world, of course, this mostly has to do with ways that I think about God, the Bible, Jesus, the cross, discipleship, resurrection. But here’s the connection:

The easier it is to convince someone of something, the more it is likely to be that someone else will come along and change their mind back just as quickly.

I’ve never been much of a “close the deal” salesman–not for those newspaper subscriptions I tried to hock as a high school freshman nor as an evangelist. But I’ve discovered that, as in so many arenas, there’s a power in not attempting to fight the fight to the bitter end, bludgeoning our theological debating partners into submission.

Give it time.

Lay out your ideas, wrestle with the implications together, and then step back and give these things time to seep in.

In fact, I almost worry that disaster has struck if I’m sitting with someone, arguing for something that is, to them, a new idea, and they say, “Yes! You’ve convinced me!”

This did actually happen once.

The next time I talked to the guy it was as if the conversation had never taken place. We were back to ground zero.

Yesterday I posted some of Barth’s thoughts about God’s patience. Here’s how he views it:

Patience exists where space and time are given with a definite intention, where freedom is allowed in expectation of a response.

“In expectation of a response.” Too often, we think that if our ideas are really compelling, that we should expect an immediate response.

Another way to view it, however, is that if our ideas truly have the compelling merit we think they do, then we can relax. We can trust the power of the idea to seep in over time.

I don’t need you to walk away, right now, convinced that I am right.

Patience is not a sign of the weakness of our idea, but of its power. A cheaply gained acceptance can become a cheaply accounted rejection.

Patience and Wisdom

April 20, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 2 Comments

As we think about who God is, we often struggle to hold down ideas that appear contradictory to us. How can God be both holy and gracious? How can a just God also be merciful? How can the God whose wisdom calls us to a definite way of life exercise patience with those who refuse?

These are the three pairs of seemingly incompatible attributes that Barth unpacks in his chapter on the God who loves (Church Dogmatics §30, “The Perfections of the Divine Loving”).

While I resonated with the tensions of the first two pairs, I found the Patience and Wisdom section to be a bit more strained.

The strength of this section, as usual, came in the insistence that we don’t know from any sort of ideals or preconceptions of what a God is or might be that God is wise and patient. We only know that this is who God is because it is who God has revealed Godself to be in Jesus Christ.

What is the true God’s patience?

Patience exists where space and time are given with a definite intention, where freedom is allowed in expectation of a response.

God is patient in eager expectation that those reconciled to God in Christ will enter the relationship God has created in him.

This section of the Dogmatics contained a couple of beautiful, revisionist readings of biblical passages, including here God’s marking of Cain. The preservation and defense of the murderer is the triumph of God’s mercy and patience.

When Barth moved into the discussion of wisdom, I felt that Jesus Christ as the wisdom of God was too much confined to the small print, and not given enough of a defining place in the major theological structure. The desire to juxtapose wisdom with patience felt strained at this point.

Nonetheless, there was another beautiful revisionist reading of the OT, as Barth discussed the story of Solomon suggesting that a contested baby be split in half and given to the parents. There is a people who profess to come to God in search of wisdom, but would take death to be proven right. And there is a people who come to God in search of wisdom, and would rather suffer the personal loss in order to give life to the other.

The two women end up representing a people standing before God, whose wisdom is made known in the cross of Christ–and is, therefore, not a wisdom that can be known from below, but only by God’s own revelation.

The patient God is wise–patiently awaiting a people who will see God’s own wisdom made manifest in the cross.

From here, Barth will move into the God who is perfect in freedom. Apparently, this is either more important or much more difficult to talk about than God as love. §31 extends over the next 240ish pages of the book. Steel yourself…

Story Telling & Crisis

April 19, 2012 in Culture, Spirituality & Prayer with 4 Comments

This past quarter I had a student whose final project was about storytelling. Working at a Christian undergraduate institution, there was something of a culture in which a veneer of “nice” was masking shallowness and exclusion.

The stumbled upon solution? Storytelling night. Or, as they call it, “Yarning in the Round.” I forgive him for turning a noun into a verb.

Listening to his NPR-style documentary, the power of telling stories came through repeatedly. It’s funny–we look at the people around us and assume everyone else is “normal,” but then we exclude ourselves from that label.

We realize that our own stories are not stories of confidence and glory but rather of fumbling and shame and wounds all mixed up with moments of hope and beauty. But somehow we encounter other people and assume that their lives are the public moments of being put-together and beautiful that we happen to encounter–creating a content for the label “normal” that applies to no actual person that we have ever known with any depth.

Reframing normal. That’s what storytelling is about. It provides the rich, comforting revelation that my crap is, in fact, normal, and that there are fellow travelers through the mire. And, hope for moments of rest and peace and beauty.

My student’s project dovetails beautifully with a recent initiative of ReImagine in San Francisco.

About a month ago the stories were about spirituality and sexuality (you can read one by Anna Broadway and one by Dani Scoville [this one was subjected to heavy revision by the editor] on the SoJo blog). This week they were on Surviving Identity Crisis.

Of course, in order for you to feel the full power of the stories you’d have to… well… hear the story. But, despite that, here were a few take-aways that were rich for me:

  • We work with metaphors that create the wrong idea of what most of our lives will look like: we talk about climbing a ladder or being on a path. But most of us are, instead, enmeshed in stories. Not kids stories with a straight, single plot line. But real stories. Where people are diverted. Where quests fail. Where there is no going home and starting over. This is no “there and back again” children’s tale.
  • We tend to think about issues of identity, vocation, and career somewhat interchangeably. We need to get over this. There is an “I” who lives this life who can move from job to job, who can be, and respond, and love irrespective of other parts that are in place. (At least, in theory…)
  • It is a common, and often lifelong experience to wrestle with finding a way for our deepest longings and passions to coincide with the work we do on a daily basis (whether paid or not).

There were two particular pieces of wisdom from the night that I think will stay with me a long time.

  1. When making a decision, or discovering oneself to be in a time of transition, often it is more helpful to think in terms of a 5ish year block of time rather than “the rest of my life.” The reality is that very few of the courses we choose set us in one immovable place For.Ev.Ver.
  2. Richard Rohr told one of our storytellers that we spend the first 40 years of our lives building a tower, and then we come to the point where we have to decide if we’re going to be willing to trust God enough to jump off of it to live into what comes next. Yikes. But, importantly, this “tower” isn’t a tower simply built on success. It is the work of the successes and failures alike.

The stories held a great deal of “normalzing” power: they were stories of anxiety, of suffering, of rejection, of pain, of celebration, of hope, of hopes dashed, of insecure answers to the question “what do you do?,” of getting places but never arriving.

In that, there was creation of a new “normal”: it’s your normal. It’s my normal. There’s no “put together them” who stand over against “angst-ridden, disappointed me.”

Our lives are real stories–and good ones. Stories that are much too rich and complex to find resolution in one single dynamic such as job or marital status or recognition. Stories that, all too often, make it look like the only way to resurrection glory is the way of the cross.

“Link Bait” and the Voice

April 18, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 11 Comments

“Link Bait“:

A headline or title that attracts a high volume of online links. Applies particularly to bloggers hoping to land on the homepage of Digg or Reddit, or anyone hoping that their post will go viral on Twitter. (definition from urbandictionary.com)

Typically, link bait is an inflammatory title that doesn’t capture the substance of the article accurately. So, for example, someone might provocatively entitle a blog post about a new Bible translation “Christ missing from new Bible translation!” I mean, isn’t that much more likely to get you to click than, “New Bible Aims At ‘Own It But Haven’t Read It’ Demo“?

You may hereby consider yourself warned that recent media coverage of The Voice New Testament is peppered with link bait and other provocative assertions that will incite passion, and that lack substance.

Various media outlets have been reporting on The Voice Bible recently, especially its handling of certain New Testament words.

This problem, of course, is that it is quite easy to create a stir by misleading people about the contents of a Bible translation.

CNN’s blog entry includes statements such as:

Capes’ team decided not to include the words “angel and “apostle” in his translation.

Ok, that’s not so bad. But how about this?

They also left out the word “Christ” from the translation. No Christ in the Bible? Click on the video to hear why.

And, thus we come back to “link bait.”

In order to be responsible journalism, this sentence should have put “Christ” in quotation marks in the second sentence.

Further, the translation doesn’t take Christ out of the Bible, as the question leads you to conclude. The translators decided that “Christ” shouldn’t be the only non-translated word in the whole text, and chose “anointed one” or “liberating king” so that people would know what the word actually means.

The CNN article also does its CNN thing by linking a totally unrelated commentary piece, written a couple months ago, entitled, “My Take: Stop Sugar Coating the Bible.” If you read CNN on a mobile device, these interspersed links are difficult to pick out from the text. There is an implicit commentary created by putting the irrelevant sentence, “My Take: Stop Sugar Coating the Bible” in the middle of a piece about a Bible translation that does not, in fact, sugar coat the Bible as the linked piece complains of.

USA Today seems to have gotten ball rolling with its rendition of the story. The story begins:

The name Jesus Christ doesn’t appear in The Voice, a new translation of the Bible.

It takes a couple sentences to get around to telling folks that they translated Christ differently. In the fourth paragraph, they let you know that the translators didn’t include “the name Jesus Christ” because they want readers to recognize that there is no “name” “Jesus Christ” but rather a title, Anointed One, telling you about the one named Jesus.

If you’re dying to learn more, CNN has a video entitled, “Christ Missing from New Bible.” Consider yourself baited:

Dungeons and Castles

April 17, 2012 in Culture, Spirituality & Prayer with 3 Comments

As folks who have been around here (or me) know, I get my spiritual direction from the Mountain Goats. And I need it. Today, as I get ready to tell my own story at a gathering about “Navigating the Crisis of Identity,” John Darnielle posted this on the band’s website (language warning on his post):

I love literally everything about my life and I have this probably-dumb-but-what-the-hell mystical sense that if even one small detail of my life had been changed, then everything would be different now, and who’s to say that the things most dear to me wouldn’t have to be traded away in the bargain?

***

If there’s any point to this story, and I’m not sure there is but, it’s that the songs I sing, which are often about finding ways to call a dark dungeon a glittering castle & really mean it, have some of their genesis in me being a fearful young kid with just enough presence of mind to turn to music as an escape.

That’s what I continually learn from the Mountain Goats.

I can tell you that resurrection glory only comes by way of the cross, but he knows how to mean it better than I do. I confess the sovereignty of the God at work in the world, but with a chastened confession that wants so many things to have gone differently.

In the middle of all that brooding and questioning, there’s often the sense that I know who I am, what I should be, what I should do. But here, too, life is a jumbled contradictory mess. Who is this “I” whose story of identity crisis will be told tonight? I’m not sure I’ve seen yet.

And the Mountain Goats remind me of that as well:

Suffering and Redemption

April 17, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

The stories of the suffering Maccabees (see here and here) provide some interesting conceptual frameworks for making sense of how Jesus’ death might transform the standing of humanity before God.

But there’s another piece that is not so clear in these passages–an important dynamic in early Judaism that suffuses the NT.

Eschatology.

E. P. Sanders described the expectations of early Jewish people as “restoration eschatology.” After the return from exile didn’t quite come together as anticipated; after the Persians and Medes and Greeks and Romans continued to rule the Land for centuries; after the Temple was pitiful and then all gussied up by a half-Jew (at best)–after the unfolding of Israel’s story made it clear that no earthly course of events could turn the tide of history in Israel’s favor, the expectations were translated to a cosmic scale.

God would have to intervene dramatically. The End of business as usual would have to come by God’s hand.

But these two dynamics weren’t separate. The people who were suffering persecution and needed rescue from the kings of the earth looked to the God of Israel to do what is right; and, they looked for an eschatological visitation to be brought about through the suffering of the faithful.

The suffering righteous are not merely the persecuted. Theirs are the labor pains that usher in the age to come.

The faithful not only look back to the suffering of the Maccabees as ushering in a worldly deliverance, they begin to frame the future in similar terms. When the righteous suffer in the time of the great tribulation, God will bring about the final, eschatological deliverance of God’s people, making all things new and setting the cosmos to rights.

And so, when Jesus hangs on the cross, we read of the cosmic portents: the sun being darkened at midday. The earthquake. The rocks splitting. The dead rising. Jesus’ death is both literally and figuratively an earth-shattering event.

The ages have turned.

The new creation has dawned.

God’s faithful one has suffered, experiencing in himself the labor pangs that give birth to the age to come.

All of which, of course, makes this the best moment in Mel Gibson’s, The Passion of the Christ:

Page 3 of 106«12345»102030...Last »