DISQUS

I have never considered an interpretation like this before. Thanks for sharing it. I think that some conservative people would still consider it "liberal" though because it seems to make room for saving 'pagans' outside of the redemptive power of Christ (i.e. that pagans can be saved through works).

I had a little smile too when I first saw the story as if I thought, "Well, you got what's coming to you."


But as I watch Bush in outgoing interviews, I do feel great pain for him. He knows how unpopular he is, he knows that he made major mistakes, and I can guarantee (almost 100%) that we will hear about all of those mistakes in forthcoming memoirs after he comes out of office. He is not a perfect man, and he made a number of mistakes because he surrounded himself with people who made the situation seem a way that it actually might not have been. This is what happens when you surround yourself with a unilateral voice that casts out of the diversity (like when they casted out Powell).

great poem! Thanks for sharing it.


I especially liked that you are "unreasonably" in love with sinners.



Too often the church tries to be reasonable.

I voted, but it wasn't for Obama or McCain

thanks for this timely post.


It is true that we have to work for change, and prayer really does help. It is not as easy as throwing money at a situation or wishing it all away. We have to be in this for the long haul.

That picture reminds me of how big a deal this election is to some people. I wonder if we will actually see more people than usual turn out for this election.

thanks for sharing the poem Jason.

The sexual view is dangerous because our reproductive organs were used by Aristotle to "prove" scientifically that men were superior to women and was used in the ancient near east to "prove" that women were to be submissive in a relationship (because their vagina goes inward, which Aristotle interpreted to be a deformed penis...you can't make this stuff up if you wanted to. haha). I just get nervous anytime someone tries to use sex to show something about gender roles. Your metaphor also might be subverted to say, "While the penis is giving the vagina, the vagina envelopes the penis."


----someone with authority can delete this if it is too explicit----------

I think this is what Sarah might be talking about in the article. You used the word "naturally" in reference to the way you speak. A stronger truth might be that sociologically, religiously, and culturally you have been taught to talk a lot. This is not just your maleness, but your family values and cultural values all playing into it. This is also why I think many teachers think that African-American students "act out" more than white kids in high school. They might say something like "African-Americans just naturally talk more," but it is a sociological and cuttural value system rooted in the fact that black students often see schools as the enforcer of racism and segregation (it is more complicated than this...but it is just an example).

I agree about the "broken record," but that often happens at any place where there is a central theme around which the users center. I hope also to see more diverse articles in the future, but I also like what I am already reading. It provides an alternative to nicely offset the rest of what I read in Christian literature. We just have to remember not to be "radical for radicals sake" (like Maria said recently).

Thanks Nathanael. You might have just said this better than I ever could.

Good question. I don't know if this directly Augustinian (someone told me it was, but i have never checked 'the sources' out in the primary sense), but evil is the absence is good. Thus, scarcity, in my mind, is only evil because no good is done to correct it. There are children starving in Africa, and as Jordon Cooper says, no one really cares "that much." (http://www.jordoncooper.com/2008/10/21/no-one-r...). The goodness of heaven comes when we do (the famous phrase of Bonhoeffer) "Life Together." The worldly way of thinking is like isolated.


I don't think of evil as an entity in and of itself.



The idea of knowing good by evil is more an eastern idea of the ying and the yang (although, if i understand it correctly, this is more about a balance than about an epistemological knowing of good and evil). This is somewhat scattered, but it is the first thing that came to my head.

If I could tack on the end of Dan's comments, I would suggest reading "Christians as the Romans Saw them." The book talks about how Rome's view of Christianity actually helped shape Christianity. It was in these responses to Roman criticism that Christianity found its wings. It was in opposition to the Roman way of thinking that Christianity emerged.

hahahaha.
That comic made me laugh out loud.

Are you condoning such uses of force (what specifically are you referring to within history)?

Yes. Christianity grew under the Roman Empire, but it often grew apart from political power.

Yes, but we still know who are the Nestorians ARE and we know about Matteo Ricci, and we know their legacies. All of these groups are important to Christianity, and much of the time, when Christianity is supported by empire, Christianity becomes stagnant (as it did in SOME places during SOME periods of the Middle Ages, I'm a historian, so I don't like to make generalizations about history). The facts also from Acts and other places that Christianity grows expotentially when it is in opposition to empire, as it was for the first three centuries to Nicea and Constantine.

Thanks so much for this post, having worked in the inner-cities I resonate very strongly with this story. About five or six years ago I would have been defensive about this story, but I think that this is sooooo important. Thank you.

Thanks Bill.
I stand corrected.

See what I mean about the education thing?

It really would help us if I even knew what language they spoke in Pakistan.

Excellent poem. I especially like the ending.

Great post, Mark. While many do argue that socioeconomic rifts based on class/race are not their fault, if we take on a Biblical worldview, we will note that when Jews celebrate the passover meals they imagined themselves actually back in Egypt---remembering oppression. I think your remembrance here is a stark prophetic reminder to many huge churches that pride comes before the fall.

I would agree wholeheartedly with your post, Michael. Having done two years of choral music at the high school level, I remember how nit-picky my teacher would before choir festivals. Any group can sing through a song using the right notes. It takes a director to form it, mold it, and bring it to beauty. It reminds of Balthasar and his thoughts on biblical exegesis. He argued, unlike many modern biblical critics, that unity of the scripture was found in treating it like a score---with different parts having different functions to bring beauty to the whole piece. Thanks for your great thoughts.

great post. This is really good political commentary at a good time for us to hear it.

Thanks for the wonderful article. I have a feeling that the rootedness of there being more than just a "personal relationship" between God and us is happening primarily at the academic level. It is being taught by frustrated professors who want their students to understand what the bible actually says. In the American church, where average men and woman gather everyday, most do not have the exegetical tools available to them to understand scripture in the deep way that you have described above. They do have exegetical lenses, they are simply different than the ones that we "learned" students have because we have had the privilege of years and years of theological training in our fields. I have this feeling that there are enough people writing about change (myself included), but the average man or woman who goes to these churches is not surfing the net for good blogs on the subject of reading Jesus Manifesto.


The average man or woman is working, taking care of a family, attempting to do their best to keep a hold on their own spirituality (much less the spirituality of others). When they come together for these "small groups" the Bible study that happens is within their context. They don't have language to describe the word in the beauty and depth that Jason has described above, so what are we supposed to do? If we tried to take these messages into the church, they would probably be shot down by a skeptical elder board or pastor who doesn't want to change from the way things have always been. If we try and introduce all of these new terms that we have learned at seminary or Christian college, we will be accused of invading the sacred world of the church will too much secularized university non-sense that makes the Bible too "heady."



What can we do, then, practically to change the life-blood of the church. Do we change it from the inside? If we cannot change it from the inside, do we leave the established church? If we leave the established church, are we given up on all those people (most over 30) who simply have a different mindset about the bible? Is their mindset wrong? These are all questions that I have no answers to, but I want to start a meaningful dialogue about them.

Thanks for the wonderful article. I have a feeling that the rootedness of there being more than just a "personal relationship" between God and us is happening primarily at the academic level. It is being taught by frustrated professors who want their students to understand what the bible actually says. In the American church, where average men and woman gather everyday, most do not have the exegetical tools available to them to understand scripture in the deep way that you have described above. They do have exegetical lenses, they are simply different than the ones that we "learned" students have because we have had the privilege of years and years of theological training in our fields. I have this feeling that there are enough people writing about change (myself included), but the average man or woman who goes to these churches is not surfing the net for good blogs on the subject of reading Jesus Manifesto.

The average man or woman is working, taking care of a family, attempting to do their best to keep a hold on their own spirituality (much less the spirituality of others). When they come together for these "small groups" the Bible study that happens is within their context. They don't have language to describe the word in the beauty and depth that Jason has described above, so what are we supposed to do? If we tried to take these messages into the church, they would probably be shot down by a skeptical elder board or pastor who doesn't want to change from the way things have always been. If we try and introduce all of these new terms that we have learned at seminary or Christian college, we will be accused of invading the sacred world of the church will too much secularized university non-sense that makes the Bible too "heady."

What can we do, then, practically to change the life-blood of the church. Do we change it from the inside? If we cannot change it from the inside, do we leave the established church? If we leave the established church, are we given up on all those people (most over 30) who simply have a different mindset about the bible? Is their mindset wrong? These are all questions that I have no answers to, but I want to start a meaningful dialogue about them.