apologetics and the absurd
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
The latest article on the Everything Conference website is an interesting piece on the Theatre of the Absurd, with a tenative embrace of the art-form. Definitely worth a read.
Some of the discussion reminds me of Francis Schaeffer’s approach to apologetics: to talk with people to help them see the logical conclusions of their own worldview. And the difficulty of genuinely living consistently with what they believe. Taking a similar approach via the arts is an interesting idea. Has the potential to be a truly incarnational and compassionate apologetic…
Tags: apologetics, culture, Everything Conference
column :: grace
Posted by Paul | Filed under columns
The final column from 360 magazine (for now)…
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It struck me recently that many superhero stories feature a strange sort of grace. Here’s how it works in the Spiderman series: Peter Parker is a pretty unremarkable guy until an apparently random accident leaves him with extraordinary powers. He’s done nothing to earn or deserve them. He’s not particularly courageous or virtuous. In fact, he doesn’t start out as a particularly heroic character at all.
So, what is it that makes him a hero? As the story unfolds it seems to work in the opposite way to our expectations: rather than virtue being rewarded, it is the new powers that lead him to heroism. Famously, the recurring theme in the Spiderman stories is that ‘with great power comes great reponsibility’. In coming to terms with his powers, the changes in Parker are more than just the ability to climb walls. Maybe it is the same with all acts of grace.
As Mumford and Sons sang recently, “… that’s exactly how this grace thing works/It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart/But the welcome I receive with the restart.”
Tags: column, culture, superheroes
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
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...