Tuesday 27 February 2007 at 7:37 pm
I saw Amazing Grace last weekend in the theater. The CT review of Amazing Grace said this: "Like Shadowlands, it's played rather strait-laced and predictably, like a glorified Masterpiece Theater special on BBC or PBS."
That was exactly my impression. I was frankly disappointed. The movie was way too safe when it comes to dealing with a movement that, at least by the witness of the movie itself, was a very unsafe pursuit when it was begun.
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Monday 26 February 2007 at 6:21 pm
The Gospel , (free download) Isaiah 53:4-11; 54:1-5, 11-14
1. Intro: The gospel is not moral conformity (religion), neither is it self-discovery (secularism), it is something else. There are three results that will flow into our lives:
a. Restructuring of your heart
b. Removal of your sin
c. Reversal of your values
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Thursday 22 February 2007 at 10:02 pm
This first came up for me in a clearer way listening to Tim Keller’s sermon entitled “The Heart of Jesus” He referenced C.S. Lewis’ chapter on Hope in Mere Christianity. Peter Kreeft also goes into this in some detail in a lecture on suffering, death and evil. All three treatments (Lewis, Kreeft and Keller) are a bit different but I wanted to work through it too a bit with some other thoughts.
The basic assertion is that suffering is essentially the difference or gap between our desires/expectations for life and our realizations or experiences of life. That’s basic and simple. We want something and we get something else, therefore we suffer. The amount of suffering depends both on the variable degree of desire and the degree of realization or actualization of our desire. This is of course why not just the poor suffer but the rich do as well. Suffering isn’t simply “not getting needs met”, it is much more variable.
Approaches to this reality are varied but consistent.
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Thursday 22 February 2007 at 9:06 pm
He treated this in his sermon "Does God Control Everything" . He was wrapping up his series on Romans 6-8 and a few weeks before he had promised to take on the subject. It is the relationship between human responsibility and divine sovereignty. The Bible asserts that people are responsible for their choices and their choices have consequence while at the same time God governs history and his purposes cannot be thwarted. The interplay between these two forces within Biblical narrative is always interesting and dynamic.
Keller first notes J.I. Packer’s assertion that this conflict is an antinomy, an apparent contradiction. John Piper has an interesting treatment of Packer’s assertion on his own website. Keller notes that the conversation in our culture usually poses these two forces (human responsibility and God’s sovereignty) as an either/or proposition. The Biblical cultures didn’t seem to have the same difficulty. It is also important to note that even within our own culture we swing between the polls of determinism vs. free will. Physics and psychology have tended to assert determinism
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Thursday 22 February 2007 at 8:22 pm
Evil is always parasitic. Evil takes a man, a woman, an angel, a world and twists created glory into instruments of pain, of torture and of death. Evil holds the gift of life hostage and uses it to bring death.
Miroslav Volf, a Croat who knew the war in Sarajevo first hand noted how often soldiers on both sides asserted “we have no choice, it’s them or us.”
We hear that all the time. It’s us and our way of life or the Islamic terrorists. Mujahadim press their population: “The great Satan of America controls our economies, controls our governments, has bombs and movies to threaten our bodies and seduce our minds. It’s them or us!” Palestinians protest Israeli land grabs and missile assassinations. Israelis declare they have no safety from suicide bombers. Both sides cry “we have no choice. It’s them or us.” Everyone knows, the strong inherit the land!
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Thursday 22 February 2007 at 10:26 am
This morning I listened to Kreeft's lecture on "The Dark Side" about suffering, evil and sin.
http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio/26_dark-side.htm . A very fine piece of work. There is a lecture and the Q/A time. I believe one of the people asking a question is NT Wright. I recognized his voice. I've listened to a number of his lectures as well via MP3.
One of the things I enjoyed about college and seminary was the opportunity to listen to good lectures. The web and MP3s allow me to do this in my time and space. It is a wonderful thing.
Wednesday 21 February 2007 at 6:09 pm
http://www.peterkreeft.com
Kreeft is a Calvin College grad, product of it's Philosophy department during it's golden age. I've read and enjoyed some of his books. His website has a fair amount of free audio from him and a bunch of CS Lewis stuff too. I'm looking forward to checking it out.
Monday 05 February 2007 at 8:44 pm
Christ Our Life: Colossians 3:1-14
1. Last week we saw the freeness of God’s love. If you try to earn or deserve God’s love it makes you a Pharisee... a big part of what’s wrong with this world... Moralistic people do good, they live good lives but they do it out of fear, out of pride, out of a need to control. A lot of people when they hear that say... “If I believed that it wouldn’t change the way I live...” This passage shows us that’s not true.
2. If you’re a Christian the gospel changes your life not just in spite of the freedom of God’s love but because of it. The gospel brings about radical change in the life.
3. 3 points
a. The inevitability of radical change
b. The gospel nature of radical change
c. Why it works
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Monday 05 February 2007 at 8:41 pm
http://willimon.blogspot.com/
Friday 02 February 2007 at 7:25 pm
At its core, however, the scandal of the cross in a world of violence is not the danger associated with self-donation. Jesus' greatest agony was not that he suffered. Suffering can be endured, even embraced, if it brings desired fruit, as the experience of giving birth illustrates. What turned the pain of suffering into agony was the abandonment; Jesus was abandoned by the people who trusted in him and by the God in whom he trusted. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). My God, my God, why did my radical obedience to your way lead to the pain and disgrace of the cross? The ultimate scandal of the cross is the all too frequent failure of self-donation to bear positive fruit: you give yourself for the other—and violence does not stop but destroys you; you sacrifice your life—and stabilize the power of the perpetrator. Though self-donation often issues in the joy of reciprocity, it must reckon with the pain of failure and violence. When violence strikes, the very act of self-donation becomes a cry before the dark face of God. This dark face confronting the act of self-donation is a scandal.
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Friday 02 February 2007 at 7:22 pm
Paul presumes a centered self, more precisely a wrongly centered self that needs to be de-centered by being nailed to the cross: "I have been crucified with Christ." Though the self may lack an "objective" and "immovable" center, the self is never without a center; it is always engaged in the production of its own center. "Weaving" would be a rather innocent way to describe this production, possibly a fitting image for how Rorty's books are written but not for how human selves are shaped. "Struggle" and "violence" come closer to being an adequate description (Volkan 1988). Psychologists tell us that humans produce and reconfigure themselves by a process of identifying with others and rejecting them, by repressing drives and desires, by interjecting and projecting images of the self and the other, by externalizing fears, by fabricating enemies and suffering animosities, by forming allegiances and breaking them up, by loving and hating, by seeking to dominate and letting themselves be dominated—and all this not neatly divided but all mixed up, with "virtues" often riding on hidden "vices," and "vices" seeking compensatory redemption in contrived "virtues." Through this convoluted process the center of the self is always reproducing itself, some- - times by asserting itself over against the other (a stereotypically male self), at other times by cleaving too closely to the other (a stereotypically female self), sometimes pulled by the lure of throbbing and restless pleasures, at other times pushed by the rule of a rigid and implacablelaw.
Exclusion and Embrace: pg. 69, 70
Friday 02 February 2007 at 7:13 pm
I first heard the name in Keller's defeater belief sermon on hell (
Hell: Isn't the God of Christianity an angry Judge?)with an astounding quote. He quoted him again somewhere else. Then Wright gave a big plug for him in Wright's book on Evil so I picked up
Exclusion and Embrace. What a wonderful book! I have had a hard time really connecting with a lot of the "identity" talk in Keller's theology. I would kind of get it but then not really. Volf, despite our philosophical the book is, is really helping me catch up on the modern philosophy behind the discussion and understand how some of the pieces work. It's really helpful stuff. I'm looking forward to reading some of his other stuff. I'll post a couple of short quotes from him.
