For nearly two years I’ve been slowly collecting books in a series published by Fortress Press called Facets. The series consists of small volumes about such tpics as Jesus’ death, religion and empire and caring for the earth. I highly recommend this series to anyone with a curious mind but not much time to read. Here’s a link to the list of publications in the series:
http://www.augsburgfortress.org/store/itemseries.jsp?clsid=126978&redirected=true&page_number=1
A professor at Colorado Christian University was fired recently due to his controversial teaching and critique of the free enterprise system. If you would, take the time to read this article and tell me what you think. There are many questions that immediately come to mind for me here. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard about a professor at a Christian institution getting fired for teaching on non-doctrinal related issues. So this isn’t really a question of heresy, its more telling of how politics have become doctrine for many Christians. So, what are your thoughts?
For the past few months I’ve been listening to Bill Moyers’ podcast and I can’t say enough good things. In that time I’ve heard criticism of the media in the U.S. on how they allowed the Bush administration to roll right over them, the need to impeach the President and Vice President for their unbelievably flagrant disregard of the Constitutional boundaries set upon their offices and their disdain for their oath to defend it, the raging class war raging in this nation, congressional ethics and a much more provocative solution for the situation in Iraq than is circulating among the Washington elite.
Check out this podcast on iTunes. It’s free, so you don’t have to worry about a cost. You can also go to their blog and leave comments for them or read the transcript and watch the broadcast.
Here’s the link:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html
Grace and Peace,
Jared
“Let us turn our eyes to the Father and Creator of the universe, and when we consider how precious and peerless are His gifts of peace, let us embrace them eagerly for ourselves.”
-Clement of Rome
Last summer I was in Ecuador for work. In that time, I had the opportunity to read some ten or eleven books. One of the few that stands out to me is William Dever’s Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? It’s a pretty astounding book that I picked up in the bargain section at a Mardel here in OKC. Dever’s goal in this book is to lay out a manageable amount of the archaeological data pertaining to ancient Palestine and demonstrate his analysis of it, in a way that the average reader could handle. I think that he did an excellent job.
But my intent here is not to review a book I haven’t picked up in a year. I’d like to make a proposition about scripture itself, based on Dever’s conclusions, which are essentially that the earliest Israelites were natives of Canaan, and that they reformed the stories that were characteristic of the pagan Canaanites and made them part of the YHWH cult. At first this was a challenge for me to accept. I was raised in a borderline fundamentalist household where the truth of scripture was that it was all historically true and anyone who said otherwise was not a believer.
But what I’m reading here, in Dever, is that maybe there is a need for a much more nuanced view of scripture than what I was raised with. How do we challenge the very rigid definition of truth that has infiltrated the thinking of believers in the U.S. without totally rejecting truth?
Should we say, with John Dominic Crossan, that the authors of scripture meant what they wrote to be taken as metaphors or allegories? No, that would be to ignore the fact that the cultures from which the scriptures came were not beholden to the deceptive idea that knowledge of reality is only contained within propositional statements. There should be room for the creative liberties taken by the evangelists with their respective tellings of the gospel story without throwing them into the rubbish heap of fiction.
Not long after I read Dever’s book I came across a review by Craig Blomberg of one of Bart Ehrman’s books. Ehrman questions the truth of scripture because there are so many differences in the different texts. Ehrman seems to think that if the Bible were divinely inspired, there would have been no real human involvement in its transmission and therefore there would not have been errors. Ehrman is, I believe, the jaded result of an intensely fundamentalist upbringing. Here are the last few lines from Blomberg’s review:
“It would have been a far greater miracle to supernaturally guide every copyist and translator throughout history than to inspire one set of original authors, and in the process it probably would have violated the delicate balance between the humanity and divinity of the Bible…”
I believe that the stories in the Old and New Tesaments are true in a way that transcends fact. I believe that even in the cases when a story is not historically factual they are true in that they offer a way of somehow grasping the transcendence of YHWH. We see in the flood, not an account of primary history similar to what we call the news. Rather we see a people trying to redeem one of the stories of pagan communities to tell a tale of YHWH’s faithfulness.
Even in the case of something that happened within history (e.g. the resurrection) the truth is not contained in the facts but in the transformation that comes about from such an earth-shattering event. It’s a telling of a story to live in its wake. This is why so many of the messianic movements in the first century attempted things like re-crossing the Jordan to introduce the new conquest of the land. They weren’t digging up artifacts to determine the truth of the stories they were told any more than we challenge the truth of TV and movies. Today in the west we believe that we have separated ourselves from the “fiction” that we see, hear and read. Yet people are driven to plastic surgeons by the clearly air-brushed images in magazines. We look to movies, TV and music to shape our identity in the same ways that stories, poems and songs influenced the early Israelites. The difference is that we think modern science has become our way of knowing.
I hope this sparks some conversation.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
” A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.”
- Thomas Merton
I started up the engine
having stripped myself of rage
opened up the chords of longing
simply to stare at a blank page./
Crisping through the melodies
to find a song for you
infest my mind of all the thoughts
of playing it in tune./
But I need you to pen the words
if the song is to be played
’cause in the end it won’t make sense
emptied of your aid.
Kyle has been leading Rivendell into a tour de force of the spiritual disciplines, and much of what we have discussed has been enlightening for us as a community. Touching on these subjects not only puts oneself under the microscope, it also shows the structure of a group of people and how they live out their lives. So far, we have covered disciplines like scripture memorization, prayer, Sabbath, lectio divina, the Jesus prayer, and fasting (Kyle, if I missed something let me know!). Yesterday, as we were entering our time of commmunion, Lindy spoke about the difficulty of practicing these things. He was honest about his own struggles, about how it is much easier to consume ourselves with discussions about spirituality without really having to do the grunt work of it all. And I think that is key, because many of us so often think that spirituality is something that is easy. The problem occurs because so much of the terminology we surround the already loaded word ’spirituality’ is usually synonymous with ease. Think about it. Rest, peace, tranquility, communion, these are just a few of the words that get used frequently when we talk about spiritual issues. These things are conflated together often, and it is easy to see why.
But to face the silence, to open up the scriptures, to rest for a day, to withdraw yourself from others or to abstain from eating is a direct challenge to our everyday routines. We rarely encounter the mystery of God on a daily basis, we are so busy with ourselves and with managing our accounts, making sure the barista gets our coffee order right, hedging our bets on whether or not we can gain affection from others. We work terribly hard to distance ourselves from any abruption to our schedules, emotions, or our passions. We are both the taskmaster and the slave wrapped into one package, and if we feel that our product is not making us rich enough, we enslave ourselves even more to get what we want.
Today I started rereading one of my favorite books of all time, Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. Throughout the book, Nouwen reflects upon his life in conjuntion with Jesus’ parable about the lost son who returned home to his father. Nouwen sees himself as the prodigal, the elder son whose resentment has made him depart from home in an emotional way, and finally as the father who welcomes home those who were once lost. I think that is a healthy analogy for Christian communities, for we have all been both sons at certain times in our lives. We have lived as if our father does not exist, we have also resented our father when he did not give to us as we thought he should, and yet we have been called to come home, to eventually take on the characteristics of the father and shepherd other lost sons and daughters. Nouwen says that this journey starts in prayer, and I want to extend that to the spirital disciplines in general, to the formation of Christians who are trying to follow in the father’s footsteps. Lindy is right, this only starts with us actually doing these things, praying the prayers, silencing ourselves to hear God better, fasting and reading the text to shape us into people who long for the love of God to be shown in this world. My prayer is that we allow the Spirit of God to invade our territories, to move in us and form us in ways we could not imagine.
posted by pilgrimramblings, unofficial news reporter
Tulsa – A much heralded and artist friendly coffeehouse in the Cherry Street district of Tulsa, Oklahoma was invaded by a verbose and fulminating group of older men. The noise level reached so high that one witness said that she could no longer hear herself think.
The Coffeehouse on Cherry Street, normally a safehaven for aspiring artists and writers and an oasis for the caffiene-addicted, was abruptly transformed from a quiet and peaceful gathering of coffee drinkers into what one observer said ”resembled a Friday night bingo tournament”. Daniel Sharples, a resident of Tulsa and frequent visitor to the shop, stated that he had never experienced such a troubling event in his entire life prior to today’s incident. “I am a writer, and usually I can deal with distractions in my given environment, but what happened in there was a cacaphony of sounds that I never want to hear again. The noise was penetrating, it ruined all my attempts to write today.”
All attempts to subdue the men failed, various customers glanced angrily at the congregation, others cleared their throats multiple times to convey that they were annoyed. At one point, the owner of the store walked over to the group and appeared to admonish them for their disruptive behavior, only to be observed moments later contributing to the noise. Sharples also said that other patrons were visibly frustrated and began to leave. The perpetrators appeared to be aloof of their actions, laughing and conversing about meaningless subjects, all the while well-intentioned artists tried to master their craft. “It eventually became too much, I just lost it and gathered all my belongings and left. I had planned on being there for a couple of hours but it ended up being just fifteen minutes!” continued Sharples. When asked if he would return to the coffeehouse, Sharples said that he would have to think cautiously about it before going back.
It is believed that the aforementioned group of men have departed from the coffeehouse, but no one interviewed knew if the men would return.
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more news:
I said I’d be your lover.
You laughed at what I said.
I lost my job forever.
I was counted with the dead.
I swept the marble chambers,
But you sent me down below.
You kept me from believing
Until you let me know:
That I am not the one who loves –
It’s love that seizes me.
When hatred with his package comes,
You forbid delivery.
And when the hunger for your touch
Rises from the hunger,
You whisper, “You have loved enough,
Now let me be the Lover.”
