giving and receiving
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Yesterday’s reading in the excellent advent collection Watch for the Light was from William Willimon. Here’s an extract:
Charles Dickens’ story of Scrooge’s transformation has probably done more to form our notions of Christmas than St. Luke’s story of the manger. Whereas Luke tells us of God’s gift to us, Dickens tells us how we can give to others. A Christmas Carol is more congenial to our favorite images of ourselves. Dickens suggests that down deep, even the worst of us can become generous, giving people.Yet I suggest we are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people but because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story – the one according to Luke not Dickens – is not about how blessed it is to be givers but about how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers.We prefer to think of ourselves as givers – powerful, competent, self-sufficient, capable people whose goodness motivates us to employ some of our power, competence and gifts to benefit the less fortunate. Which is a direct contradiction of the biblical account of the first Christmas. There we are portrayed not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers we are.…This strange story tells us how to be receivers. The first word of the church, a people born out of so odd a nativity, is that we are receivers before we are givers. Discipleship teaches us the art of seeing our lives as gifts. That’s tough, because I would rather see myself as a giver. I want power – to stand on my own, take charge, set things to rights, perhaps to help those who have nothing. I don’t like picturing myself as dependent, needy, empty-handed.…It’s tough to be on the receiving end of love, God’s or anybody else’s. It requires that we see our lives not as our possessions, but as gifts. “Nothing is more repugnant to capable, reasonable people than grace,” wrote John Wesley a long time ago.…This is often the way God loves us: with gifts we thought we didn’t need, which transform us into people we don’t necessarily want to be.
Tags: books, grace, provocations
Todd Hunter on the goal of forgiveness
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Thanks to Jonny for pointing out the release of Todd Hunter’s new book Christianity Beyond Belief. You can get samples on the IVP site. The following quotes stood out for me, nicely joining up the thoughts rolling around my head this week…
I believe that in responding to Jesus, people do not merely receive forgiveness of sins so they can go to heaven. Rather, they are forgiven so they can begin a different kind of life, a cooperative relationship with God, a new and eternal kind of life right now (which ultimately includes heaven).
…
Far from trying to make forgiveness less important in the Christian story, my aim is to show that understanding sin in the context of God’s story is crucial to forming a new life, a cooperative friendship with God. I want us to see forgiveness as a starting line, a threshold to a new, fully human life. In my experience, forgiveness is often viewed as a finishing line, with a “whew” and a wipe of the brow while thinking I’m in. I have no quarrel with the notion that forgiveness gets us in. But I want to emphasize that it gets us into a new life story, not merely into heaven when we die.
Tags: books, praxis, Todd Hunter
favourite books of 2008 (addition)
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
See, I knew when I listed favourite books that I would forget one…
9) The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts, ed. Treier, Husbands, Lundin
The main attraction of this book was the two essays by Jeremy Begbie (which were excellent), but I gradually dipped into others through the year and enjoyed the whole thing greatly. The essays nicely cover a range of arts — music, film, poetry, etc. — as well as discussions on beauty-as-apologetic and other theological thoughts.
Tags: books
favourite books of 2008
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
No more train rides this year, so it seems an appropriate time to list my favourite books read in 2008. It’s from memory, so in no particular order…
1) The Reason for God, Tim Keller
Generous and understanding of those who might disagree. Clear and fresh on the essentials of Christian belief. All round great.
2) Culture Making, Andy Crouch
Many good things could be said about this. Excellent on why we need to move on from analysing culture to making it. Important in relating cultural engagement to everyone, not just the elites & full-blown artists.
3) Everyday Theology, ed. Kevin Vanhoozer, Charles Anderson, Michael Sleasman
Vanhoozer’s initial chapter on ‘cultural hermeneutics’ is easily worth the price of the book. The following chapters work well as examples but are also enjoyable and interesting in their own right.
4) Resounding Truth, Jeremy Begbie
This book does so many things: a fresh look at theology using musical analogies, music within a Christian ‘ecology’, lessons applicable to culture more generally. Likely to return to the reading list in 2009. The only negative is the lack of accompanying CD…
5) Political Visions and Illusions, David Koyzis
A great look at politics and key ideologies from a Christain perspective. Not sure there are many other books that give this kind of overview. Very informative for an amateur like me…
6) Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, Hans Boersma
I’m going to have to read this again, but I really appreciate the way Boersma faces up to the big issues for our culture: why violence appears so prominently in Christianity and in the atonement particularly.
7) A Community Called Atonement, Scott McKnight
Welcome for his expansive view — bringing in multiple ‘atonement theories’ and expanding the atonement beyond just the cross — as well as moving onto how we should act as a result.
Eat this Book, Eugene Peterson
Taking the Bible seriously while making room for the poetry, imagination, lived-ness, etc. that is involved…
Tags: books
the total fabric of life
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Every time a believer says that, say, religion and politics do not mix or that we should concentrate on saving souls and leave the affairs of the world alone, she is implicitly denying the cosmic scope of Christ’s redemption and thereby diminishing God’s sovereignty. Every time a follower of Jesus Christ forsakes a so-called secular occupation and claims an intention to go into “full-time Christian service,” she is in effect relegating a huge portion of the total fabric of life to something or someone other than the Savior of the world. For the biblically astute Christian, however, there are no “sacred” and “secular” occupations, only obedient and disobedient ones. The obedient farmer or carpenter is as much in full-time Christian service as the pastor or missionary.
Which I think makes the point in a particularly bracing way…
reading culture: what’s the point?
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I was planning to write this post before reading the recently posted extract from Culture Making. Having looked at that, it’s even clearer that we must not miss this step out.
The mission of the church is to witness to the truth of the gospel by participating in God’s building project, realizing the well-wrought world redeemed in Christ.
…
The church is to be a glimpse of the new world in the midst of the old, a reminder that the old order is passing away and a standing witness to the new. Accordingly, it is charged with the task of being a permanent revolution to prevailing plausibility structures.
Crouch is even clearer on the need to make culture as well as analyse. A key point for him is that
The only way to change culture is to create more of it.
His contention is that the church tends to try to change culture one of four ways: either by condemning, critiquing, copying (forming a sub-culture) or consuming. None of these work in practice, the only way to change culture is
to create something new, something that will persuade our neighbours to set aside some existing set of cultural goods for our new proposal.
[w]e may produce very sophisticated analyses of the cultural goods around us. … But the depressing truth is that critique and analysis rarely change culture at all. … The academic fallacy is that once you have understood something — analysed and critiqued it — you have changed it. But academic libraries are full of brilliant analyses of every facet of human culture that have made no difference at all in the world beyond the stacks.
Although both agree on this, it is notable that Vanhoozer’s book gets very close to the problem Crouch notes (as discussed in the last post):
you would think that the solution to disembodiment would be embodiment—the living out in the flesh of the transforming vision. … But the emphasis always somehow stays on perception and vision, on thinking, on analysis.
Tags: books, culture, Culture Making (Crouch), Everyday Theology (Vanhoozer), hermeneutics
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...