Stretched Illustrations?
(**Spoilers below**)
Some times I wonder how people arrive at certain interpretations of “art”. Strangely enough, I came across this article which sets about using Avatar as a metaphor for “emergent evangelism”. The main thrust of the article is that we “don’t bring God to the other,” rather, that “we find God in the other”–Jake Sully is the perfect example of this sort of mindset, or so it’s claimed. I don’t want to examine the entire article, only one paragraph.
Evangelism is a two-way street
This is where the Avatar movie is a great metaphor for what evangelism could and should become. Although Jake Sully entered the Na’vi world (Pandora) initially with an agenda in mind, he got to appreciate their way of life, its beauty so much so that he wanted to become part of it. Eventually his presence there really helped to save them. But it was something organic. … (Read more)
Unable to Prepare for the Journey?
It’s an Adventure, Not an Axiom.
A Story Unfolding, Not a Tale Already Told.
The Journey Counts, Not the Destination.
Right?
I came across this collection of (emergent) catchphrases during a forum discussion which happened this past weekend. There is a visual which goes along with it, which you can find here. The visual itself is, I think, self-evidently brilliant (I highly recommend you look at the visual). The attitude towards truth that these catch-phrases convey is one I can never seem to take seriously. If I have a desire, or a thirst, to know the truth, then it seems to me obvious that my ultimate end is the destination. For how can we truly be prepared for the journey when we neglect the fact of where we’re going, or hope to be going ? It’s a casual attitude, fatally flawed.… (Read more)
Hosea 4:6 — Lack of knowledge is an understatement.
When I read the Old Testament two things strike me as immediately apparent. The first is that Israel was commanded to worship and keep the commandments of Yahweh and Yahweh only (Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5, Numbers 33). The second is that by-and-large, they didn’t and as a result their nation was at first divided and then destroyed.
When Israel was on the verge of entering the Promised Land God laid down a few rules. We read in Exodus 34:12–14 (NASB):
12 Watch yourself that you make no covenant with the inhabitants of the land into which you are going, or it will become a snare in your midst.
13 But rather, you are to tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars and cut down their Asherim
14 you shall not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God
Now what happens … (Read more)
Say what?!
Tony Jones has responded to the sort of argument I used in my previous reply to him and the response has me scratching my head. The core of Tony’s response is that first of all, everything is relative (this isn’t surprising). Second of all that the Biblical narrative as such doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that the creation narrative only mentioned the creation of man and woman for each other. It also doesn’t matter that Jesus affirmed this in the New Testament; the book of Matthew and the Sermon on the Mount and in other places. Tony Jones equated the lack of mention of bisexuals, homosexuals, hermaphrodites etc., in Genesis and the sayings of Jesus with the fact that Jesus cast demons named Legion out of a man instead of calling this man’s ‘problem’ schizophrenia. That therefore, in the same way that a schizophrenic isn’t excluded from the kingdom of … (Read more)
Exclusively Inclusive
I was browsing through An Emergent Manifesto of Hope in the hope of finding something semi-substantial to write on. Luckily I encountered a contributing author by the name of (Pastor) Samir Selmanovic. In his article he writes:
When we say that only Christ saves, Christ represents something larger than the person we Christians have come to know. He is all and in all. And Christ being “the only way” is not a statement of exclusion but inclusion, an expression of what is universal. If a relationship with a specific person, namely Christ, is the whole substance of a relationship with the God of the Bible, then the vast majority if people in world history are excluded from the possibility of a relationship with the God of the Bible, along with the Hebrews of the Old Testament who were without a knowledge of Jesus Christ–the person. The question begs to be … (Read more)
The Bible, Propaganda?
Speaking of The New Christians, Tony Jones said something else that caught my attention:
“The Bible is propaganda.… Propaganda has a point and a purpose.… It doesn’t claim to be objective. It’s trying to convince someone of something. It’s trying to get people to join a cause, to join a movement. Isn’t that exactly what the Bible is?.… It is a living, breathing document that makes a claim on its readers’ lives. It’s like the pamphlets surreptitiously printed by Paul Revere and his compatriots in 1776 — propaganda in that sense. It’s God’s manifesto, Jesus’ Little Red Book“1
Depending on what one means by propaganda, yes and no. If by propaganda one means simply ‘to propagate information’ with the modification ‘as accurately as possible’ then yes, the Bible is and so are many other things, such as school text books, certain history books, medicine bottle labels, instructions, … (Read more)
Truth as a symptom
“The preoccupation with ‘truth’ among emergents has often been pushed on them by their conservative critics, primarily because truth is a central concern of theirs. And their preoccupation with truth is a symptom of their modernism. They want the Bible to be unswervingly factual (here, truth equals fact), for if it is, then its claims about eternal salvation cannot be ignored. So they publish books against emergents titled Truth and the New Kind of Christian and The Truth War, and blogs excoriate the emergents on the issue of truth.“[1]
The above comes from Tony Jones book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. What Jones says worries me, not least because this is yet another blog ‘excoriating’ him and by proximity emergent Christians on the truth question.
Al Mohler, in discussing the role truth plays within the emergent church, has warned that, “if you get the truth … (Read more)
A Proper Epistemology?
It occurs to me that a proper Epistemological foundation begins by acknowledging the premodern notion that all human knowledge is a sub-set of God’s knowledge, while at the same time permitting the postmodern notion that no one has a God’s eye view of reality, truth, society, etc., and that, in effect, we all have relative perspectives (there are many “I’s”). I would rather consider this following modernism through to its logical conclusion, rather than determining it to be a new phenomenon under the heading of postmodernism. The reason being is that I believe we can know truth to a substantial degree. That even if not exhaustively (omnisciently), we can say we hold a true, knowable belief.
In support of this I would turn to Karl Popper’s asymptotic approach, which was developed to explain knowledge acquisition in the field of science. The following diagram was also used by D.A. Carson … (Read more)
The Sins of Hierarchy?
I don’t believe there is any one ‘right’ way to do church. To become something of a postmodern (or is that, ultramodern?): societies and cultures change, language changes, contexts change. What worked in the New Testament may not necessarily work today. What works today most probably wouldn’t have worked in the New Testament. To look at our church today and proclaim disagreement and concern because we aren’t ‘New Testament’ enough is well, unrealistic…
Whose Epistemology?
Postmodernism, like modernism before it, is built around the Cartesian idea that all knowledge begins with the “I” that exists (cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am — Descartes). Postmodernism differs from modernism in the sense that the “I” is constantly changing (this leads into perspectivism). Premodernism, however, holds to the idea (correctly) that knowledge starts with God, thus, all human knowledge is ‘merely’ a subset of God’s knowledge.
To beg the question, why must Christianity adopt postmodernism to survive, if, presuppositionally, the adoption being proposed is at it’s core, wrong?… (Read more)
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