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More than Comfortable

// January 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // church

This weekend we talked about setting goals that shoot towards more than the obvious

January 18

How I made My Email Work Again

// January 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // random

Or Gmail + iPhone equals Email bliss

This is not a post about configuring my email settings although I have done some of that of late as well. No, this is really about how my iPhone cured not just my blackberry addiction but the underlying email addiction that was fueling my gadget fetish. I know there are a lot of Apple evangelists out there who will waste no time telling about how the iPhone is the greatest phone ever created, that Mac OSX can solve world hunger and that the new unibody MacBook Pros were really the secret force behind propelling Barrack Obama to the fore of the world stage but… that’s not really my point either. (although I do love my iPhone)
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Yes and No

// January 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // church

un’ed.i.ted spirituality for Jan 11, 2009
Via Sacra Part 2: Yes and No


Rachmaninov had Big Hands

// November 24th, 2008 // No Comments » // creativity

Death of Jesus: Part 4 of 4

// October 30th, 2008 // No Comments » // church, collected thoughts, theology

Obviously the metaphor of Christus Victor was born out of the context the early Christian church found itself in, facing directly into an unprecedented barrage of persecution. It was shaped by the struggles they were facing and the cultural context in which it was born. These early Christians were giving imagery and metaphor to help them articulate their fundamental belief that through Christ they had been reconciled to God.

This is part of the healthy way that the church has evolved throughout its history in a continual effort to find new and meaningful ways to talk about their faith. That process of cultural evolution has continued.

Substitutionary Atonement
The predominant metaphor that is heard today as the evangelical church talks about the atonement is one we call substitionary atonement. Sometimes we call it vicarious atonement or propitiation or judicial theory or penal substitution, but all of these subtle variants are a form of a metaphor that paralleled the development of the modern legal system. This framework focuses on the divide from the diagram earlier (see Part 1). Paul writes to the Roman church and says, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” and we are disconnected from God by those shortcomings. The theory of substitutionary atonement lines this reality up against the model of the developing legal system. We have transgressed the standard that God has set for membership in his social order much the same way a criminal transgresses the social order that society has set for itself. Similarly to when someone breaks rules and must be penalized through fine or imprisonment, God has set a penalty for our transgression, and that penalty is death. Now that is a bit of a kludge on the metaphor, which has been articulated much more eloquently to reflect the nuances of the relationship between God, law and sinner by better theologians. However, in its most basic form, substitutionary atonement is a legal picture of our relationship to God. The twist comes in because God sends his son, to pay that penalty for us. In his death he saves us from the consequence of our own actions by stepping into the gap for us.
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Death of Jesus: Part 3 of 4

// October 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // collected thoughts, theology

This brings us to our second major lens on the meaning of the death of Jesus

Moral Influence
CS Lewis, among others, wrote a lot about this concept I’m calling moral influence. Lewis described the very appearance of a moral objective standard as an argument for God. At the same time his belief was that this appeal to an objective moral standard could not be explained as mere instinct, because it does not always win out, nor as mere social convention, because it appears to transcend and is appealed to across cultural divides, nor as a law of nature because the very idea of morality is prescriptive for our world rather than descriptive of our world. Therefore he argued that morality, in and of itself, points us towards not only God, but his intervention into the human story. Jesus steps into that story to bring us a more full picture of what a human life can be. This divine example of humanity becomes an influence on us of unequaled proportion. In fact, Jesus demonstration in his life and in his death is so perfect, and so powerful that it has altering effect on the course of human history helping to point us towards God.
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Death of Jesus: Part 2 of 4

// October 26th, 2008 // No Comments » // random

All the way
So as we imagine this story; the at-one-ment of humanity and God, we need to embrace the larger story and walk ourselves through the ongoing journey of how the church has attempted to articulate and tell this story. As we do that we’re going to end up with what is probably the most common frame on the atonement we hear today but I want to start somewhere else precisely because I want to us to take some time to walk through this concept in a new way and starting with what we are familiar with can quickly become a short circuit to exploration.

And the starting point for our exploration of this concept is in the words of Paul, one of the great thinkers and theologians of the early Christian movement. Philippians 2 is one of the great passages of the early Christian tradition. Most scholars think this may actually have been an early hymn or catechism of the fledgling faith.

In it Paul writes (or recites)

Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death —
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Phil 2:6-11

What strikes me about this, in the context of this conversation, is the phrase, “obedient to death”. The word rendered “to” in this English translation is the Greek word, “mekh’-ree” and means, “as far as” or “until”. So perhaps the original Greek phrase is perhaps better rendered as, “obedient as far as death” or, “obedient even unto death”. What catches my attention here is the idea that Jesus death was not a singular choice made in a contextual vacuum. It was the result of making the right choice, and then the next right choice. He was obedient not just to die but to do the right thing all the way along even when it led to his death. Sometimes we take the posture that Jesus life was almost solely about his willingness to die. His teachings were nice, his wisdom helpful but in the end the meaning of his life was wrapped in its last moments. There is this idea that everything else in Jesus’ life was at best a precursor to the main event. Paul, here, gives us a slightly different picture with the simple idea that Jesus was obedient all the way to death. The reminder being, that the importance of Jesus’ death can’t be separated off from the rest of his life because it was the consequence of living the life God called him to. A life which begins and ends, not just with a personal decision made in a vacuum, but with the social and societal contexts and implications of all the choices and decisions he made.
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Death of Jesus: Part 1 of 4

// October 25th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // church, collected thoughts, theology

I taught a session last week on the death of Jesus as part of our Backstory curriculum.

Since then a number of people have asked for the audio and/or notes so I figured I would rework the info into an article for the blog… then I remembered that I have my regular job/writing to keep up with. I still think it’s a good idea (for my own personal thought as much as anything else) but I need a bit more time to put the information into proper(ish) sentences… so I’m going to be posting it in pieces over the next week or so as I go.

Hopefully it can help shape a different (or at least broader) frame on Jesus life and death than the sometimes myopic view presented in the evangelical church.

Intro
There are a number of traditions in the family of the Christian Church and each of those have placed a different emphasis on parts of the life of Jesus. The Eastern Orthodox church has primarily focused on the birth of Jesus – his entry into the world as the focal point for their theology. The Roman Catholic Church has built much of their emphasis around the resurrection, that fact that he died and came back to life as their focus. The protestant tradition which is where Westside has come out of, by contrast, has primarily focused their attention around the death of Jesus. Of course none of things can really be separated off in a meaningful way, because they were all a part of the story of Jesus.
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Election Results

// October 15th, 2008 // No Comments » // random

Exactly what I (and about a million other people) predicted on the day the election was called: a slightly stronger Conservative minority. Almost exactly where we started. Well done guys. Money well spent.

Heima

// October 15th, 2008 // No Comments » // creativity, random

Beautiful.

That is all.