June 2007 Archives

Post of the week -- no question.

Maybe this is the post of the week too: Br. Maynard.

Nope, this might be the post of the week: T. Freeman.

Brevard Childs has died. As a young professor I reviewed a book of his, sent him the review, he sent me a very kind note, and then the magazine (TSF Bulletin) published his letter. I will never forget his generosity in response to my review. When we began the Zarley Lectures, Childs was earmarked early as a lecturer so we wrote him; he declined for health reasons. The next SBL he looked me up and apologized. This was the kind of man Childs was. RIP.

John Frye's post and question about The Old Man and the Sea. I think Hemingway romanticizes suffering and uses the Christ-image for it.

Every now and then I link to some of my steady reads, and sometimes I repeat myself because the turnover of readers here is so high -- but Brad Boydston's daily post is a collection of news and fun. And of course Jim Martin is up to his usual wise stuff here. Now steady readers of Jesus Creed know that these are two of my favorites, but these two steady bloggers drip wisdom.

Barna's new report on how Christians perceive and respond to the poverty issues in the USA.

Good for John Kass and Quinn McCloskey. The leader of baseball should call Bonds' run to the record to a halt before it happens.

Cool site of the week: I don't think I noticed the look of Brian Moore's blog until now. How cool is it! And he links on that page to Theopedia, which might make for a good link for many of us. I've added it to my (already way too long and in need of pruning) blogroll.

1. Obamafaith.
2. Anyone have an Apple iPhone yet? Some of you know that I'm a Neanderthal when it comes to cell phones. Other than Kris' daily call during her commute home, I get about 2 calls a week -- but last week, when playing golf, I got two calls (Kris to say the brakes were going and Laura to say the Cubs traded Barrett). Here's a more complete iPhone article. Looks really cool. Now they say there is an iFrenzy.
4. Weaning a city from the bottle.
5. Matt Lindahl, a former student and fantastic golfer who pushed me all over the course this week -- and it was huge fun watching his drives disappear into the horizon, has a new business: caddiestogo. I hope some of youi can find a way to support him.
6. If we can make laws that permit us to keep telemarketers from calling us, can we not also make laws that keep spammers from loading up our e-mailboxes? Anyone know of anything being done? I'd like to support the cause. I get about 1200 spams a week caught by my blog spam-detector and about 1000 e-mails a week trapped by North Park's spam-detector.
7. Amen, brother Steve Johnson!
8. Hit it straight; keep it in the fairway.
9. Ah, what I like: some suggestions for my dinner preparations.
10. Conversations. What I like here is that JR is a pastor.
11. On reading widely ... nice thoughts.

Sports:

Cubs surrender six runs in the top'o'da'9th, go down one run, and then make a crazy comeback. Wrigley goes wild. I sat there and laughed as the Wrigley went delirious. But this doesn't happen in LA because all the fans leave early.

Pathetic and not even lovable: the Phillies.

"Eighty percent of the marriages in the NFL fail, and 90 percent if you're an All Pro," he said. "When you're in the public eye, there are so many elements added to it." -- Dave Duerson. It ain't worth it.

Santeria among baseball players.

We're back with Jon Wilson's fine book, Why Church Matters: Worship, Ministry, and Mission in Practice -- and this week we look at another chp on worship and it is about the significance of the Trinity for worship. Good topic.

Does the Trinity really matter to your church? to you? Is this something we confess but not something that really does make a difference? Many theologians today would say most Christians are either functional deists -- God is out there somewhere and we hope he shows up -- or functional tri-theists -- there are really three gods: Father, Son, and Spirit. Have we thought about this sufficiently? Jon Wilson points us to Roger Olson, Chris Hall, The Trinity. I've not seen the book; I shall.

Wilson's focus in this chp is to delineate the two primary traditions about the Trinity -- the Western and the Eastern. Good. And to show how each shapes worship. Better.

And the Western tradition, ever following the trails charted by Augustine, has focused on the oneness-in-the-threeness. This "rule of oneness" puts to shame our tendency to see the majesty in the Father, the friendliness in the Son, and the emotional in the Spirit. God is not divided against Godself (this expression avoids the "him" in "himself"). This division of labor approach to the Trinity is called the "economical" Trinity.

So, what about worship? He makes two points: first, Father, Son and Spirit are Trinitarian language. To convert this to Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier divides the persons of the Trinity against the Godself and turns the Trinity into a discrete and divisive division of labor within God.

The Eastern tradition, ever following the early lead of John of Damascus, has focused on the threeness-in-the-oneness. So, the focus is on the "social" Trinity (vs. the economical Trinity). God is a family or a communion of persons in the Eastern tradition -- where there is a dynamic life of mutual glorification and mutual love of one another.

So, what about worship? If God is glorifying within the Godself, then worship is participation in the Father's, Son's, and Spirit's worship or it is not good worship at all. And, if God is ushering us into that very presence of threeness-in-oneness of never ending glorifying and loving, is not simply what we offer to God but what God is offering to the Godself!

Think about it -- we are summoned into the glorious praise and intimate love of God. Now, that ought to get our weekend off on a right note!

Every now and then I get bogged up in my reading enough that I post some short notices about books that have crossed my desk that I think Jesus Creeders might like to know about but which I can't blog all the way through. Today I mention another one:

For those who genuinely know what an "organic" community is, or who have participated in a community of faith that grew up organically, what do you think of his listing below?

Joseph R. Myers, author of the well-known The Search to Belong, has a new book. It is in the emersion line of books with BakerBooks. His new book is called Organic Community: Creating a Place Where People Naturally Connect.

If you are seeking to avoid the Master Plan programming model and, instead, want to create an organic environment, this is a good book for lots of ideas. Here's a summary of the Master Plan programming model and the Organic Order model:

Patterns: prescriptive vs. descriptive.
Participation: representative vs. individual.
Coordination: cooperation vs. collaboration.
Growth: bankruptcy vs. sustainability
Measurement: bottom line vs. story.
Power: positional vs. revolving.
Partners: accountability vs. edit-ability.
Language: noun-centric vs. verb-centric.
Resources: scarcity vs. abundancy.

Missional Jesus attracts crowds, summons folks to follow him in order to participate in the kingdom mission, invites all sorts of folks to trust him, and both names and engages the powers of evil. And, as has been indicated a number of times, he heals people. But our passage today reveals special features about the missional Jesus.

1. What stands out here is that Missional Jesus heals on the basis of second-hand faith. I don't know how to explain this -- and some speculate that the paralyzed man had faith himself, and that makes sense too -- except to say that our passage says that Jesus saw "their" faith, and that means he saw the faith of those who let the man down through the roof.
2. Missional Jesus' style and substance offend the religious authorities. When I was in college the book on this topic was by John Stott and it was called Christ the Controversialist. I read it and relished it.
3. Missional Jesus perceives human tensions with God.
4. Missional Jesus challenges those around him to watch what he does -- he heals a man -- and to infer from what he does to who he is.
5. Missional Jesus forgives sins and, evidently, connects sins to physical maladies.

1 A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. 2 So many gathered that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. 3 Some men came, bringing to him a paralytic, carried by four of them. 4 Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. 5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

8 Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, “Why are you thinking these things? 9 Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take your mat and walk’? 10 But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins . . . .” He said to the paralytic, 11 “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” 12 He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!”

When Augustine said his heart was not at rest until it came to rest in God, was he simply saying that we are selfish and coming to God makes us happy? That we use God for our own ends? Is the reward system of the Bible -- "do this and you will live" -- a mercenary system of doing things so we will get a prize at the end? Julie Clawson, over at Emerging Women, weighed in recently on how educational systems frame learning with rewards and she calls that into question. This question -- how moral is a reward system for morals? -- is a question worth thinking about.

Brief note: I've got a new "doo-hickey" on the side called "Blom Me" It is an Instant Message kind of thing. I'm not all that sure how it works, but if you sign up and we are on the computer at the same time, I think we can chat directly. I want to give this a chance.

Are you troubled by evangelism for the sake of a reward (heaven) or the elimination of a punishment (hell)? Are you bothered by motivating others by what they will get if they do what you say? Is this nothing more than warrants? How do we deal with the regular presence of reward/punishment language in the Bible? What is our motivation? And, to be honest, how often can we realize what we think should be our motivation? Does the altruistic system -- do what is right because it is right -- depersonalize our behavior and turn into learning to live in the only real objective reality?

Now we get practical: How do we motivate others? Does a reward system of immediate results or less-than-final results create superficiality?

I stumbled upon Gilbert Meilaender's new book with a gorgeous evocative cover: The Way That Leads There. His first chapter converses with Augustine the issue of desire and he virtually leads us through this discussion to a nice place -- at least he does for me. I loved his first chapter. There are six chapters in this elegantly written and ruminating study of the Christian life. I'm savoring it.

"On the face of it, then, our desire for God seems selfish" (9). But, we are not to seek God for the sake of our own happiness for that makes ourselves the final end. And self-denial can be seen as the alternative, but self-denial is never an end in itself in the Bible and it too makes us the final end of our motivation. The biblical moral basis is neither mercenary nor disinterested altruism.

For some finding God is about possessing God; for others it is about praising God; for others it is about the presence of God. Augustine, Meilaender argues, "does not seek God in order that he may thereby live a happy life; he seeks God in order to delight in his presence" (11). Perhaps this puts it all in pleasing perspective: "The point is not to have joy but to rest in God's presence, which will of course bring joy to one who loves God" (12). "We can call this a loss of self (in the praise of God) or an expansion of self (as one flourishes in God)" (12).

Is this an ethic of relational love?

He critiques Luther for thinking he was thinking correctly in saying he wanted God's glory so much that he'd go to hell if that meant glorifying God. Meilaender: "To renounce even desire for the vision of God," which is what Luther in effect was doing, "is to renounce our creatureliness -- which is the primal sin" (22). Later: "It would be prideful self-sufficiency for one who is God's creature to repress the heart's desire for God" (36).

I come to this reflection: Christianity is not in the end mercenary and it is not an ethic of disinterestedness. Instead, it is a relationship with God, it is delight in God that motivates. The reward is not the point; the reward is God and relation with God. Our motivation, if we are to hold our a reward, is to know God and to gaze at God in God's presence. Motivations of our behaviors with fellow Eikons, then, can be framed in the same way: It it is about delight in their presence, about relationship, about love.

Any thoughts?