Unable to Prepare for the Journey?

TRUTH 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).... 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.... 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.... 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... 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... 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... 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... Read More

The Sins of Hierarchy?

I just read a new arti­cle on theooze.com (you can tell it’s my favourite web­site, right?) by pas­tor Keith Giles with respect to the ‘New Tes­ta­ment church’ and how mod­ern (or con­tem­po­rary?) Chris­tian­ity has become, or runs the risk of becom­ing, ‘Churchi­an­ity’. One of Giles main con­tentions states that: The arti­fi­cial, man-made hier­ar­chy we see in the Chris­t­ian church today is not what the Church prac­ticed... Read More

Response to Postmodern Biblical Authority

Kurt Willems wrote an arti­cle on theooze.com regard­ing post­mod­ern bib­li­cal author­ity, this is some­thing of a response. In his arti­cle, Willems exam­ines the decon­struc­tion­ist philoso­phies of Jacques Der­rida and Jean-Francois Lyotard and from this, attempts to show that within a post­mod­ern frame­work, the Bible can be viewed as author­i­ta­tive. Willems sug­gests we can claim an author­i­ta­tive view of the... Read More

Cultural Theology

In fight­ing fire with fire there comes a dan­ger in reinter­pret­ing the truth of Scrip­ture in view of soci­ety, rather than pre­sent­ing the truth of Scrip­ture in a way rel­e­vant to one’s soci­etal con­text. The dan­ger of the for­mer is that as soci­ety changes, so too does the ‘truth’ of Scrip­ture change. A sys­tem which needs con­stant rede­f­i­n­i­tion is nei­ther author­i­ta­tive nor deserv­ing of speak­ing... Read More

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