column :: crisis
Posted by Paul | Filed under columns
Yes, another column from 360 magazine…
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Here’s my question: when our culture is in trouble, what should the church do? Maybe we can find some provocation from movies.
Arguably the most famous financial crisis in film history comes in the middle of the classic “It’s a Wonderful Life”. The film’s hero, George Bailey, is just leaving for his honeymoon when there is a run on the bank. In panic, the townspeople want their money. George manages to calm the crowd down, but this still leaves a problem: how are the people going to survive? The solution is creative and sacrificial – the newlyweds help those in need by using their own savings – the money that was going to fund their honeymoon.
In giving what he has to save others, it’s not hard to see George as a Christ-like figure. Perhaps the church too should look for unexpected, creative (maybe even costly) ways to help those in crisis.
Identity, ethics and apologetics
Posted by Paul | Filed under apologetics
Over on Adrian Warnock’s blog, Andrew Wilson has written some ‘guest posts‘ on Tom Wright’s book Justification. This got me thinking about this whole debate again. So, here’s a random thought…
I want to come at it from a different angle. And, as happens for me often right now, that angle is in Tim Keller-like direction.
In his article The Gospel in All it’s Forms, Keller says:
I take a page from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and define sin as building your identity—your self-worth and happiness—on anything other than God. That is, I use the biblical definition of sin as idolatry. That puts the emphasis not as much on “doing bad things” but on “making good things into ultimate things.”
OK, so what he is doing here is moving the focus in gospel presentations from ethics to identity. But it seems to me that this is exactly what Tom Wright has been doing in his ‘new perspective’ of justification. His reading of Paul is that the Law was a ‘good thing’ that had become ‘ultimate thing’; that the Judaism of Paul’s time had come close to treating the Law as an idol. More than this, and famously, he interprets the big issue that Paul is addressing as the separation between Jews and Gentiles. And that separation being based on observation of the Law. That is, that the issue was that the Jews were building their identity on the Law rather than faith in God. Which, of course, is precisely Keller’s working definition of sin.
In the spirit of Andrew Wilson’s post (‘we can have our cake, and eat it’), we should remind ourselves that this doesn’t require us to reject a gospel presentation that is concerned with ethical questions. This is a big gospel, with deep and wide implications.
Going back to Tim Keller:
…there must be one gospel, yet there are clearly different forms in which that one gospel can be expressed.
And perhaps we can go further. Perhaps, for us, to miss the identity aspect is to miss something important. In a culture where identity floats, it possible to get the beliefs right, get the praxis right and still miss something important.
Tags: apologetics, culture, N.T. Wright, Tim Keller
column :: changes
Posted by Paul | Filed under columns
A little context is probably in order for this column from 360 magazine: This issue came out alongside some organisational changes in the church, hence the theme and especially the last line…
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In his recent book Culture Making, Andy Crouch points out that every cultural change is two-edged. On one side, they open up new possibilities; on the other, they often make some parts of life far more difficult than they used to be.
For example, think of cars: their invention has given us amazing freedom to travel, but at the same time it has become increasingly impossible for people to live car-free. Or how about supermarkets? They have given us incredible convenience, but you have to wonder if we lost some community that came with local bakers and corner shops. And as for music — I have vinyl in my garage that I fear will never make it onto my iPod, but I know which I’d rather carry around…
But, it not just big changes that work like this, is it? We all have cultural shifts in our lives. We’re constantly making old routines difficult for the sake of a new set of possibilities. It might be getting married, having children, changing jobs, or even someone suggesting two services on a Sunday…
mp3s galore
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
A couple of useful mp3 finds…
I discovered over the weekend that L’Abri have now put an amazing number of their lectures on-line. Think of a topic and there is probably at least on talk that covers it. Well, maybe. The L’Abri Ideas Library is at www.labri-ideas-library.org.
Also, Redemeer in New York have put out a podcast of Tim Keller sermons. They seem to be adding files faster than anyone could possibly listen to them…
Tags: mp3s, web sights
column :: purpose
Posted by Paul | Filed under columns
Another column from 360 magazine. In fact, due to large overlap with the lead article, this one never got used. Nice to be able to get it out in some form before Lost vanishes from our screens…
There seems to be a current trend for TV shows in which no one has a clue what is going on.
Take the series ‘Lost’. If you haven’t seen it, it features a group of air crash survivors who are trapped on a desert island. For many, many episodes the characters discuss and explore without really getting closer to understanding their predicament.
Or how about ‘Heroes’, in which a number of ordinary people suddenly find they have developed super-human powers. They don’t understand why this has happened and most of them can’t quite figure out what to do about it.
Maybe these shows reflect something in our culture — a general feeling that we don’t really know ‘what on earth we are here for’. We find ourselves in this universe but we don’t know why, or what we are supposed to do.
But here’s the really interesting part: through it all we can’t seem to give up the idea that someone, somewhere knows where the stories are heading.
Mission and work
Posted by Paul | Filed under work
Another post rediscovered in the process of moving to Wordpress. This one is a great quote from Tim Keller, taken from The Missional Church. I found the paper as a whole really helpful, but particularly in explaining why thinking about all of life from a Christian perspective has (or has to) moved up the agenda:
In ‘Christendom’ you can afford to train people just in prayer, Bible study, evangelism — private world skills — because they are not facing radically non-Christian values in their public life — where they work, in their neighborhood, etc.
In a ‘missional’ church, the laity needs theological education to ‘think Christianly’ about everything and work with Christian distinctiveness. They need to know: a) what cultural practices are common grace and to be embraced, b) what practices are antithetical to the gospel and must be rejected, c) what practices can be adapted/revised.
In a ‘missional’ situation, lay people renewing and transforming the culture through distinctively Christian vocations must be lifted up as real ‘kingdom work’ and ministry along with the traditional ministry of the Word.
Tags: mission, Tim Keller, work
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...