broken eikon

So I was reading the Presbyterian book of confessions today. I came across the confession of 1967, and I have to say… I was blown away. In 1967, the Presbos adopted this confession of faith as a response to “racial discrimination, nationalistic arrogance, and family and class conflict”.  It was very responsive to biblical scholarship and  asks the church to read scripture with literary and historical context in mind. There are many really really cool parts, but this really stuck out to me is line 9.45, containing the following words…, “this search (for reconciliation and peace) requires that the nations pursue fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict, even at risk to national security, to reduce areas of strife and to broaden international understanding… Although nations may serve God’s purposes in history, the church which identifies the sovereignty of any one nation or any one way of life with the cause of God denies the lordship of Christ and betrays his calling”.

“Even at risk to national security”?

Can anyone find me another statement of faith that states that nations should pursue reconciliation even at their own risk? That sounds too much like Christ for me…

And that last part about identifying any one nation or way of life with God’s will means denying the Lordship of Christ. Dang.

love it…

This came as such a shock to me. I have never read the books, I assumed that clay work was on the rise. Much to my dismay, it appears that Harry potter (the person who wrote the autobiographical books) is a witch herself. George bush was right to not let her win the award.

Some of my books have surfaced, yay! here is the updated list of missing books:

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodr Dostoyevsky

Jesus and Empire by Richard Horsely

The Seven Cities of the Apocalypse and Roman Culture by Roland H. Worth Jr.

The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg

The Challenge of Jesus by N.T. Wright

Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf

God’s Politics by Jim Wallis

Our Father Abraham by Marvin Wilson

The Gospel according to Moses by Athol Dickson

Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire by Brian J. Walsh

Not sure who would want to read it, if anyone, let alone get it published, but for the first time, I thought I would like to write about something that I could actually fill a books-worth of information with. I don’t know if I actually will start writing it ever, because the research would be really intense and time-consuming, but if Joseph has his way, then I will eventually write it just to write it.

 Winner of most vague, nebulous, rambling blog of the year: this blog post

I just finished reading John Caputo’s “Philosophy and Theology”. Great read. Nine short chapters.

outline in a nutshell:

Theology and Philosophy used to be nearly one and the same, and ruled the intelligencia.

Modernity broke them up, and relegated philosophy to a back room at uniersities. Theology was now irrellevant to science.

Postmodernity has now shown “pure science” for what it is, limitations and strengths, and brings back philosophy and theology into the public discussion with equal force to the other “sciences”, each with thier own languages.

Caputo shows how the popular deconstructionists of philosophy are estranged brothers of our theologians, and they have been in dialogue intentionally and unintentionally throughout history… and that is great.

Do yourself a favor and pick this book up if you are at all interested in  theology or philosophy. Great read, and short.

I was in the Brite reading room in the TCU library the other day and I found something that was fascinating to me. They had the entire Talmud translation there. The Talmud is a collection of various Rabbinic commentaries on the Mishnah (which is a bunch of Rabbinic commentaries of the Hebrew Bible).

At any rate, I was browsing through volume 1 (I think), and I came across some commentaries on various passages of scripture dealing with pooping. For example, the story of David cutting Saul’s robe while he pooped in cave. This led to a discussion about modesty while pooping.

One Rabbi commented that as long as no one sees you, you are modest enough. Another councils that you should politely excuse yourself in such a fashion that no one knows where you are going. My favorite though, was the advice that anyone may poop freely behind a fence, but if you are in an open field, you need to go far enough away that no one can hear you fart. And yes, it said “fart” in the Talmud. Love me some Rabbis.

I am taking a Greek language class as one of my classes at my first semester at Brite. One of the coolest things about it is the study of the Septuagint.

The Septuagint was the official Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, often . It was  translated, as the legend goes, starting in the third century b.c.e. by 70 (72) scholars (thus LXX, or 70 in Greek) all working for 72 days in 72 seperate chambers, and they all came up with the sme translation. At any rate, it became the Bible that Jesus and the rest of first century Judaism would have most commonly read.

This is important because when the New Testement references text from the Hebrew Bible, they reference, not the Hebrew, but the Septuagint. This means that when we read the NT, sometimes we miss the nuances that connect the scripture more to the LXX than to the Hebrew Bible in the Hebrew language.

I would like to share with you all what I am learning as I learn it, and I am by no means an expert, so I am sure those of you who have better Greek than I do will correct me if necessary…

I just finished this book, which was a really neat read. Granted, it may not be a riveting book for most folk who like mostly fiction. However, it gives a great sense of the transition from the Roman Empire to the medieval world, as well as how the Irish were influenced and how they influenced the world during the “Dark Ages”.

The particular thing that struck me as appropriate for me to share with you is the part of the book about St. Patrick. As you may or may not know, Patrick was the first to evangelize the Irish. He was a Roman Briton, kidnapped by the Irish as a slave. He escaped and after seminary, went back to the Irish who had enslaved him, bringing the gospel with him. The curious thing about Patrick is what he did not bring. He did not bring the Roman civilization with him. Patrick was the first missionary in history to bring Christianity to a people without bringing his culture with it. The result is a distinct version of Christianity that was not Roman, Eastern, or otherwise. It was Irish.

Like Patrick, we all have a choice in how we interact with the people God puts us in contact with. Eikon’s community has folks from lots of places with certain likes and dislikes, talents and foibles. Instead of trying to make everyone the same, we instead foster what God has already been doing in them and see how the gospel transforms those gifts into blessings for them and others.

May God do the same for you. May no one ever tell you that you have to become like them for the gospel to take root. And may you reach many people with God’s love exactly where they are at.

I just got done reading “The Shack”. I don’t want to spoil the book for those who haven’t read it, so my comments are purposely vague. What it is to my mind is a giant step forward in some respects for many Christians stuck in a one-dimensional understanding of God. I think its most powerful message is about forgiveness and restoration. All of us can think of people we feel are not worth forgiveness. Christians have become very good at some sort of verbal “forgiveness” by which we say out loud that we forgive someone, but in reality we continue to talk negatively about that person, and carrying around ill feelings in our hearts. True forgiveness paves the way for reconciliation. True forgiveness means that you desire the best good for that person. At its best, the Shack is a well crafted lesson here.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t have my issues. I think I boil them down to 2 major issues. First, I don’t think it goes far enough, or at very least, its internal logic is inconsistent. Many times in the book, many widely held theological beliefs are torn down, I think for the good, critiqued as “old way thinking”. However, the author still holds onto certain theological beliefs, somewhat arbitrarily. He throws out some things which have Biblical precedent, but keeps others that come from church councils or the like. I guess to boil it down, while I like most of what he picks and chooses, he is still just doing that, picking and choosing which theology he likes and which he doesn’t, without any clear internal logic for doing so.

The other issue is the little bit of bait and switch. In the intro to the book, the main character is introduced as being a real, true to life friend of the author. The detail given really allows you to want to read more about this person. As I read the book, I thought, “wow, this is powerful stuff”, but when I found out later that the person was not real, it seemed contrived and it was a let down. It doesn’t change the meaning of the book or what you can get from it, but it lessened the impact for me.

Still, I cried a lot and it was very cathartic and good for me to do so. Give it a read, I think you will be rather glad for it.

I finished reading “How to Think Theologically” yesterday. I can’t say I would recomend it to anybody in particular, except incoming graduate theology students (which it is intended for). I however, felt like I had read this book in various forms maybe 3 or 4 times before. The content was good, and the mental exercises really cause you to think, but on the whole, I felt the book was not particularly helpful. But it might have been if I had never taken a theological class before.