Before Makkai stood up to read, Sares thought it best to issue a disclaimer. “I told the congregation that the next piece was R-rated,” Sares recalls.
It (evangelical theology) has exegetical weaknesses that are not recognized or owned up to by the various evangelical Protestant strains of theology. That's what it boils down to...
The issue is not really with Christology, the Trinity, the virginal conception, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, or the Bible as the Word of God. The issues I'm concerned about are the distinctives of Calvinist, Arminian, dispensational, or Pentecostal theology. When they try to go some particular direction that's specific to their theological system, that's precisely the point in their argument at which they are exegetically weakest.
We have to remember that those who wrote the Bible were not late-Western Christians suffering from post-Enlightenment psychoses. These were people who lived in storied worlds, in an oral culture where storytelling was the essence of the thing. Most people in that culture were not even literate. They didn't live in a world bound by texts.
The Bible was not written in a text-oriented culture but for an oral culture. So these documents were meant to be heard. When you read them out loud in Greek, you notice alliteration and poetry and all kinds of things going on that are totally lost in translation. I think the oral dimension of the biblical world, very much connected to storytelling, is a crucial dimension and is a key to understanding the theology in those texts.
During a service last Sunday morning, Rev. Kyle Lake was standing in waist-high water as he prepared to baptize a woman. When he reached for a corded microphone, the 33-year-old was jolted by electricity, and did not survive. The woman going to be baptized was unharmed.
The incident took place just minutes after the 800 members in attendance had prayed aloud, "Surprise me, God."
When asked if he thought the events were result of asking to be surprised, Esau, who witnessed the electrocution, said, "I wish I could answer that. I honestly, truly don't know. That gets you into all kinds of really, really hard questions. 'Does God cause everything to happen?' or 'Is there tragedy and chaos and stuff in the world because it's the natural consequences of humankind and our freedom of choice?'"
The book's title, Beyond the Bible, is a recognition that doctrine develops. Even Protestants who are fond of proclaiming the Reformation battle cry "Scripture alone!" cannot pretend that every aspect of the Christian faith is explicitly taught in Scripture. The most obvious examples are the doctrine of the Trinity and the high Christology of Chalcedon. Biblical revelation points us ineluctably toward those truths, but the Bible writers never make them explicit.Filed in: books, interpretation, hermeneutics
| Do you practice Christian meditation regularly? | ||
| Yes, daily | ||
| Yes, weekly | ||
| Yes, monthly | ||
| No | ||
| No, Christian and meditation are oxymorons | ||
| This Poll by hawkenstein | ||
| Click here to view results | ||
Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better – and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.
a form of quiet (but not necessarily silent) contemplation often associated with prayer or scripture study. It is rooted in the Bible, which directs its readers to meditate. In Joshua 1:8, God commands his people to meditate on his word day and night to instill obedience. The psalmist says that "his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night" (Psalm 1:2). The Bible mentions meditate or meditation twenty times.
CategoryTagBlogThis!Filed in: tagging, blogger
I have made some very minor changes to the script so that the tags link to my del.icio.us account (and as we know by now, will still be visible in technorati!!) As before, all that you need to do to make this bookmarklet work for you is to right click it on your links bar, select properties, scroll through the script to the very end and replace my del.icio.us signon at the end of the URL http://del.icio.us/***** with your own. Now you can tag & categorise with blogthis!! Tag keywords should be seperated with commas.
"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city," Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club."
How many American priests end up in their own reality show on British television? James McCaskill did just that when he moved last year from Pittsburgh to the town of Lundwood in England's South Yorkshire district. He was brought in to revitalize a church whose congregation had dropped below ten, and his turnaround efforts were filmed for one year by a camera crew. The results will air—under the name Priest Idol—in a three-part series in November on the UK's Channel 4. Nate Anderson sat down with McCaskill on a recent visit to the U.S. to talk about ministry and media.
The worst aspect of it was that I did feel a lot of pressure from the film crew to "film this tomorrow," and I was trying to earn the trust of people in the congregation who didn't want things to happen so fast, and I had the archdeacon tell me, "You need to make this happen and that happen," and all this is being filmed, and they're all watching me, and I'm supposed to perform and produce and succeed—which really overwhelmed me at times. There was a point, after I'd been there about three months, I started having a panic, thinking, "We're not going to have anything to show; we're not going to have anything to make good TV." Which sounds terrible—a minister of the church saying that he's worried about making good TV.
"A few days before Christmas, pastor Mike Sares got a call from his associate. “Mike,” he said, “Mary Kate Makkai has agreed to read one of her poems at the Christmas Eve service. It’s really, really good, but it’s got the F-bomb in it several times, and I just thought I should check with you about that.”"
"Copts will long remember Friday, October 21, as a night of terror, flame, and violence in Alexandria. Late that evening, thousands of rioting Muslims targeted three poorly protected Protestant congregations and an Orthodox church in the Muharram Bey section of Alexandria. Muslims were venting their anger over a video of a Christian play, produced at an Orthodox church. Muslims allege the video defamed Islam.
Days after the violence, I visited Christian congregations all over Alexandria and found everyday believers in a state of anxiety and shock over the attacks. Muslim-Christian violence, they told me, was something that happened in poor areas of Cairo or rural Upper Egypt, not Alexandria."
"My expectations have been raised to this ridiculous level by technology running amok through my heretofore-bucolic existence. I used to be a laid-back guy. Now I'm impatient. I chafe. I get irritable when my gratification isn't instantaneous. And it isn't just me. The whole world is bitchier these days.
I'm old enough to remember when waiting a few days for a letter to arrive was standard operating procedure, even in the bare-knuckles business world. I recall a time without answering machines, when you just had to keep calling back on your rotary phone until someone picked up. (Which had the unintended benefit of allowing you to reconsider whether the original call was even worth making in the first place.) The world moved at a more leisurely pace and, humanistically speaking, we were all the better for it.
Just because technology makes it possible for us to work 10 times faster than we used to doesn't mean we should do it. The body may be able to withstand the strain -- for a while -- but the spirit isn't meant to flail away uselessly on the commercial gerbil wheel."
"Haggard is so enthusiastic about free-market economics that he applies it to church. New Life offers hundreds of small-group activities, everything from 'Growing in God as a Wife and Mother' to 'Holy Hip-Hop Jam Session.' How do the pastors decide what to include? They don't. If someone comes up with an idea, and that person passes a basic screening, the church will help promote the group. New Life organizes the marketplace but leaves the details to the people, who write their own programs."
"Prominently displayed are books by culture warriors like Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly, but also books by public-policy experts, historians, and analysts of secular culture like Dinesh D'Souza, Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, Newt Gingrich, Thomas Friedman, and David Gergen. Yet we are in a church bookstore, where nearly all the titles are inspirational. Haggard is telling his congregation, Think big. Think about the whole world. The Bible does not tell you everything you need to know."
'When I became president of the NAE [National Association of Evangelicals],' Haggard tells the Inquirer's Nussbaum, 'the talk was about doing away with the term evangelical. Evangelicalism was morphing and changing so much that people were wondering if the term applied. The first decision I made as president was to start using the term prolifically and defining it simply. I define an evangelical as a person who believes Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that the Bible is the Word of God, and that you must be born again.'
"Christian churches, say the Emergents, need to look like Christian churches—down to the crosses, candles, and even (if necessary), the stained glass; and they need to teach like Christian churches—including a hearty dose of good 'vintage' doctrine.
So our Emergent friends would likely agree with both parties in this dispute: the church needs both to find new ways of translating the gospel to directly address the questions of the day (per Niebuhr), and to refuse to buckle to secular culture by knocking the sharp edges off of Jesus' radical kingdom message and pretending that 'we Christians are really just like the rest of you folks!' (per Hauerwas)."
"For almost ten years, I have participated in a book group comprising people who attended the University of Chicago. Mostly we read current novels, with a preference for those authors (Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, J. M. Coetzee) who have a connection with the school. The group includes a Marxist-leaning professor of philosophy, a childhood-development specialist, a pharmaceutical researcher, a neurologist, and an attorney.
I marvel in our meetings at how the same book can evoke radically different responses."
"We'll never know what Kyle Lake would have said about the reason why, when he reached for a microphone as he was performing a baptism in front of 800 people, he was fatally electrocuted. But his explanation of a verse that may be infuriating to hear right now to some of those he left behind—Romans 8:28—may at least hint at his answer. It is reprinted, with the publisher's permission, an excerpt from Understanding God's Will: How to Hack the Equation Without Formulas (Relevant, 2004)."
In what one Indonesian human rights activist describes as the latest attack in an ongoing terror campaign against Christians of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, three teenage girls en route to school through a cocoa plantation were beheaded Saturday morning, apparently by Muslims.
Theresia Murangke, 14, and Ida Lambuaga and Alfina Yarni Sambue, both 15, were attacked one mile from Sayo village near the town of Poso, reports Indonesian Christian journalist Ibrahim Buaya, who formerly lived in this volatile region of Indonesia. A fourth girl, Noviana Malewa, 14, escaped from her attackers with machete wounds to her face. Buaya reported that she is in Poso General Hospital under heavy guard. The Associated Press reported that Noviana told police the six attackers wore black shirts.
