:: in a mirror dimly :: A theology and culture blog with the Bible in one tab and a news feed in the other.

• Reclaiming the Mission :: The Weblog of David Fitch
  Is there a work of “ideological cynicism” at work in Christians supporting Obama? Is the Obama bandwagon a positive or a negative (or neutral) for the church’s role in bringing justice to the nations? Is energy by Christians spent on Obama politics misgui
  (tags: politics mission theology)
• Why Liberals Are Weak When Faced with Fundamentalism
  The problem with Biblical literalism: “Put two readers of any complex text together and you’ve got two differing interpretations. If those two readers can appeal only to the literal sense, then those two divergent evangelical interpretations inevitably
  (tags: theology)

• Weblog » Emergent Village » Scot McKnight on “Rethinking How You Read the Bible”
  McKnight advocates reading with tradition, not necessarily through tradition. It’s a helpful way to balance the primacy of scripture with tradition.
  (tags: theology)
• My Travels with George W. Bush - TIME
  The success of George W. in Africa.
  (tags: politics poverty)

While praying at the local Taize service last night I had a little nudge from God, a small voice saying, “Receive my love.”

My first response?

“But God I’m still such a sinful selfish mess.”

After all these years of reading the Bible and following Jesus, the simple act of receiving God’s love, grace, and forgiveness is still rather hard at times. While God doesn’t just sweep our sins under the carpet, he doesn’t want us wallowing in them, beating ourselves up, alienating ourselves from his love and grace.

I tried to let go. I tried to step away from who I thought I was and tried to hear what God thought of me. It was a relief, a refreshing relief.

In an instant I realized that so much of my life is spent in a futile effort to be good, loving, and kind. And then John 4 came to mind, the part where Jesus tells the woman that those who believe in him will have living water bubbling up within them and overflowing.

I’ve been cranking away at the well of my soul, pumping up drops of water–hardly enough for myself let alone for those around me. But God wants to drill deep in where his Spirit resides and sent his life and love gushing up into and out of me.

If only we could believe how much God loves us.

Technorati Tags: theology - prayer

• The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence: What Are The ‘Grand Challenges’ for Theology for the 21st Century?
  This is well worth thinking about.
  (tags: theology emergent emerging christian)

Back in 1996 and then in 1999 This America Life broadcasted a show about the lack of inspiration and hope in America’s political scene. Here is the intro to the story:

“As we head into another Presidential primary season filled with candidates that few people find very inspiring, This American Life broadcasts stories of political idealists, stories designed to provide some small sense of hope about American politics.”

How times have changed. It’s hard to be certain about anything in politics, but if Barack Obama can keep up the momentum through November and win this election, we may see a new kind of politics and a chance to realize some of the foolish idealism and empty dreams that send us into the voting booths every four years for a Republicrat who will most likely bring us more of the same.

Whether or not you think Obama is the real deal, you have to admit that part of the wave he’s riding is our nation’s frustration with politicians and the attack or be attacked nature of Washington. According to This American Life, we’ve had this coming for a long time–at least since 1996. I think that helps put the election of 2008 into a sharper focus.

A power outage has a way of reminding you that our modern world is rather fragile, hanging on a thin wire that can be cut off by a falling tree. In reading the book The Luminous Dusk: Finding God in the Deep Still Places, the author Dale Allison states that with electricity, reliable heat, a reliable food supply, and refrigeration, we are able to overcome many of the hazards of our environment, save for the large-scale natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. This disconnect from our environment deeply impacts our relationship with God.

It’s hard to fathom this, but losing our power last night helped. While trying to fall asleep last night in the dark with the temperature dropping and little I could do, I began to catch on a little bit of what it means to be at the mercy of the elements as it were. The freezing rain and snow weighed down the tree next to our house and it thumped continuously on our roof all night. Each thump a reminder that it only takes one fallen tree to disrupt our neat, orderly lives.

Allison also touches on the importance of silence for religion, in fact that our modern culture’s assault against silence may be one of the most important contributors to secularism and atheism. We fill our lives with noise: radio, TV, cell phones, conversations, music, and even the hum of our appliances such as computers, always distracting, always preventing our minds from resting, from being still, from finding a sanctuary.

What is the net effect of all this?

As we remove ourselves from the natural, convince ourselves that we can control our own destinies, and deprive ourselves of true silence and quiet, Allison believes that we lose that sense of awe and wonder, that natural connection we experience with God while in nature. It becomes difficult to stop, to be still, and to let God speak.

Allison does not state that our removal from the natural world and estrangement from silence is the sole cause of secularism and atheism, but he does contend that these have made it quite easy to forget about God.

If you’re intrigued by these ideas, I encourage you to pick up a copy of this book. Though the cover design is nothing short of hideous, the writing is clear, and easy to read. I rarely find a book that deals with devotional/religious/spiritual topics that is so easy to pick up.

Technorati Tags: Christianity - silence

• What to do when compact fluorescents crack - The Boston Globe
  We have these bulbs all over the house and I had no idea a break was so serious. Sheesh! If you have kids, don’t have these bulbs too.
  (tags: energy environment)
• America’s Unfaithful Faithful - TIME
  “The single biggest “winner,” in terms of number gained versus number lost, was not a religious group at all, but the “unaffiliated” category. About 16% of those polled defined their religious affiliation that way.”
  (tags: religion church)
• Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
  The full report on the religious life of America, February 2008.
  (tags: religion church)
• Obama’s Ohio Grassroots Advantage - TIME
  The bottom-up is trumping the top-down approach.
  (tags: politics)
• UCLA Study: Students Become More Spiritual in College
  (tags: religion)
• The Audacity of Hopelessness - New York Times
  A very clever article that picks apart some of Hillary Clinton’s talking points with comparisons to the Bush administration. Very clever indeed.
  (tags: politics)

• Daily Kos: I Refuse to Buy into the Obama Hype (now a supporter)
  A great comparison of Obama and Clinton’s records in the Senate with analysis.
  (tags: politics)
• Obama’s Senate Record - Daily Kos: State of the Nation
  Obama’s record is looking pretty good for a Junior Senator.
  (tags: politics)

It’s 1:21 AM and I have just finished the last of the edits in my book Coffeehouse Theology. There will still be things to tweak down the line I’m sure, but I am so relieved to have set this milestone.

What a trip this has been!

Writing a book has been one of those experiences filled with mountaintops and valleys, moments of elation and moments of despair. I have pushed myself to work like I never have before. It’s like I’ve never quite been done because there’s always some part of the book to work on. I’ve always had it on my mind.

There were moments when I really felt lost, unable to go on with a particular chapter that seemed to be going no where. Sometimes I had to scrap it all and start from scratch, remembering that everything I wrote was not wasted, but merely helped prepare me for the draft I will eventually keep. At other moments the words flew into place. I felt sharp and on target, as if there is nothing in the world I’d rather do.

And now I’m on the edge of another abyss of sorts. I’m done my first book, but it’s not going to be released until September 2008. That means I’ll have time to start chipping away at other projects, planning promotion, and doing who knows what else to keep myself out of trouble.

Maybe I’ll just come home after work and sit in the living room, doing absolutely… nothing.

• Clinton Aides Split on How to Take On Obama
  Hillary’s own politics of hope… “She is pressing challenges to Mr. Obama’s qualifications as a candidate and as a president, and to a certain extent playing for time, hoping that some unexpected event will alter the dynamics of the race in her favor.”

There’s a brief excerpt from theologian and agnostic Bart Ehrmann’s latest book God’s Problem at the Fresh Air web site where he was recently interviewed. Take a look at what Ehrmann has to say about faith:

“The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith. After many years of grappling with the problem, trying to explain it, thinking through the explanations that others have offered—some of them pat answers charming for their simplicity, others highly sophisticated and nuanced reflections of serious philosophers and theologians—after thinking about the alleged answers and continuing to wrestle with the problem, about nine or ten years ago I finally admitted defeat, came to realize that I could no longer believe in the God of my tradition, and acknowledged that I was an agnostic: I don’t “know” if there is a God; but I think that if there is one, he certainly isn’t the one proclaimed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the one who is actively and powerfully involved in this world. And so I stopped going to church.”

Do you catch anything a bit odd here?

The words “think” and “know” come up a lot. And yet he lost his faith. Theology is faith seeking understanding or better yet, faith thinking. But thinking does not equal faith.

Remember Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

Faith does not mean we turn our brains off or discard logic or evidence completely. Nevertheless, faith implies hope, the unseen, the uncertain. Ehrmann tried to figure out suffering, could not think it through logically, and claims to have lost his faith.

Here is my question, in what did he place his faith? In scripture making perfect sense? Definitely–see his book Misquoting Jesus.  In life having a clear meaning we can parse out? Definitely again–see his latest book.

I don’t see a former follower of Jesus here who says that God failed him: he doesn’t say that God ignored his prayers, he doesn’t get into the personal relationship end with God. His focus is theology: places where God doesn’t line up, the facts did not line up with his faith–wherever he placed his faith.  This is the failure of theology, the failure of an intellectual to put his faith in a neat box where all of the loose ends tie up. I don’t see faith at all. Ehrmann did not lose his faith in God because he doesn’t seem to have had all that much faith in God. He placed his faith in theology. Even if he had a personal conversion experience, at some point he placed his faith in something other than God.

Perhaps I’m being a little rough on him. And I admit, I have a lot of compassion for him. It breaks my heart to see him struggling to figure all of this out. Nevertheless, he’s opening himself up and sharing his bones of contention with God. In doing that, I think he’s inviting scrutiny, and that’s where I’m coming from. I think he’s placing the blame in the wrong place, though of course I have not stood squarely in his shoes. I’m merely basing my assessment on his interviews and books.

Christianity is about something terrifying and hard to believe. Jesus says, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” That means we have to take that huge step of faith–and I mean this is the biggest leap we could ever take–and opening the door.

Will there be anyone or anything there?

We can’t know for sure.

But we can open the door in faith, leaving all theology and doctrines behind until later. Because our hope is first and foremost in God, not in theology or doctrines or theories or philosophy. We believe first in God, and then we seek to know God, even if we can’t expect everything to line up. Faith has to be enough.

God is knocking. We can open the door and have that supernatural encounter or we can turn up our theology and drown out the God who wants to know us.

This past Sunday morning the temperature hovered around 20 degrees. The snow was thin at best in our neck of the woods, but as Julie looked at our back yard she had an idea. Instead of strapping on skis or snow shoes, we laced up our ice skates at the edge of a huge frozen puddle in our back yard and went skating.

Read the rest of this entry »

Presidential candidate John McCain actually visited Vermont yesterday. Though I’m pretty sure he’s not getting my vote, it’s kind of nice to know he’s thinking of us, even if we were just a refueling stop on his way to see Romney in Boston. McCain has now been to Vermont more than George W., who has never visited Vermont in his eight years.

You’d think W. would want to at least take a ski vacation at some point.

I read through McCain’s talking points and realized it was the usual “blah, blah” of Republicans: cut taxes, small government, protect the sanctity of marriage (as opposed to the blah blah of Democrats: more jobs, more health care, and protecting the environment. To his credit, McCain tried to draw a bit of attention to Vermont:

“I will take my campaign everywhere,” McCain vowed. “I will not concede a single vote or a single state to my opponent,” former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. He told reporters after his speech that if he’s the nominee he would return to the state during the fall campaign.

We all know that McCain stopped by to get a Vermont teddy bear for his daughter and Champlain Chocolates for his wife, but it’s nice that he tried to make it look like a campaign visit.

Anselm defined theology as faith seeking understanding. How often does it become faith defending understanding?

I really struggle with this idea of “defending” Christianity. Can we ever really “defend” God? I suppose we could speak up on God’s behalf, but I wonder if our theology is really something to protect. That kind of assumes we have something that needs to be preserved. Anselm hinted that we should be looking for it, seeking, finding.

No one can simultaneously seek something and defend it. If you don’t know where or what it is, how can you defend it?

I’m sure the analogy breaks down at some point, but you have to admit that Anselm was really on to something.

Theology is one of those topics where people can get really, really worked up. Josh Brown has posted on friendship and theology critiques. Though he’s focused on the response of emergent to it’s critics, I think he has hit on a really pertinent point for all Christians to consider when navigating theological differences. I’ll let him say it:

That’s why Julie, Helen, Tina, and Christy to name a few can push back, and push back hard against my thoughts . . . but can still be friends. Because they are generous, they are open, they are thoughtful, they are engaging. And somebody like Lisa can come in and be a robotic, disconnected nut job. Some are committed to friendship, learning, openness, and conversation. And some just want to be right.

And before you start pulling out a bunch of proof texting talking about loving your enemies and all that jazz . . . Jesus wasn’t so patient with the religious leaders of the day. He gave his real enemies . . . Pilot, Rome, and others a pass . . . they knew not what they did. But the religious leaders . . . I think it went something along the lines of BUZZ OFF.

That doesn’t mean we give up on all attempts at unity and ecumenism, but I think Brown hits on the need to evaluate where our disagreements are going. Are our critics only trying to force us to agree with them? Are we only trying to make our critics agree with us? Or are we both trying to learn from one another, help the other follow Jesus better, even if we disagree on the details. I suppose this is why I don’t really care about many critics of the emerging church: they’re just attacking and trying to force this discussion to capitulate to their views. I know I’ve done the same thing.

Neither really helps anyone follow Jesus better.

On another note, regarding my post about the sharp, edgy tone of blogs, I think my quote from Brown’s post proves my point!