Archived Posts For 2007 September
look at me, look at me!
Posted on September 28, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Site Notices | 2 Comments
Just a bit of a plug for any bloggers out there who read this and want to link to us - I’d be more than happy to add to our current (pitiful) blogroll at the bottom of the screen. Apart from anything else, I’m a self-absorbed attention seeker, so I want as many people to see Amateur Theology posts as possible; but especially to trigger more conversation (and more contributions: submissions@amateurtheology.org is the place for that!).
Let me know in the comments if you’ve linked through to here, and we’ll make sure you get added. I’m away from today (I’m posting this in the past), but Monday you should see some very happy linking going on.
legalism or legitimacy?
Posted on September 27, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Emerging Questions | 9 Comments
Newsweek has reported on the story of A. J. Jacobs (previously famous for reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one year), who has spent the past year trying to follow every rule written in the Bible. So as well as the nice obvious ones like not lying or coveting, he was growing a beard, observing the sabbath and not blending his clothing fibres. From the article:
“The Bible project was a lot more difficult than the encyclopedia project. The Bible affected every single part of my life, it affected the way I walked, the way I dressed, the way I hugged my wife, the way I ate. The year was the most extreme makeover of my life.”
It’s a fun read. But the following quote triggered something in me:
“One of the lessons of the book is, there is some picking and choosing in following the Bible, and I think that’s OK. Some people call that cafeteria religion, which is supposed to be a disparaging term, but I think there’s nothing wrong with cafeterias, I’ve had some delicious meals in cafeterias. I’ve also had some terrible meals in cafeterias. It’s all about picking the right parts. You want to take a heaping serving of the parts about compassion, mercy and gratefulness—instead of the parts about hatred and intolerance.”
Everything in me cringes at that. It’s the stuff that makes it easy to take pot-shots at post-moderns. And yet, looking at the list of rules this guy has followed in the year: I struggle to be able to tell you which of those should be part of living as a Christian under the new covenant, and which are just part of the religious Jewish law. It feels a lot like I’m doing the same thing? Because at times that line can seem pretty arbritrary. How do we decide what parts of the old testament law are still valuable today, and which are a religious absurdity.
But then maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to grow a beard…
this way to the door
Posted on September 24, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Church | 12 Comments
On our first foray into some proper discussion on Amateur Theology, we threw around the idea of at what point of theological disagreement should you leave a church, which prompted Ron (my father) to tell his story:
Back in what seems like an earlier life, my young family and I were in a church in a smallish country town - the denomination is not relevant. Up to this point in time, I had largely been ignorant of the gifts of the holy spirit. My wife and I were involved in assisting to run a youth group, and I was in fact on the elders council of the church, despite being at least 20 years younger than anyone else on this inflated body, and a relatively new christian.
Together with another couple, the leaders of the youth group, we had some responsibility for running monthly youth services on Sunday evenings. We made several mistakes, one was to include an ‘altar call’ for people who wanted to commit their lives to Jesus, and the other was to have someone speak about the gifts of the spirit as something that was real and to be apprehended in this age. To be summoned to the regional overseer (no titles to give denominational hints) and told that perhaps we would be better off in the local Baptist church (there you go, it wasn’t them) sort of put the writing on the wall for us, particularly as there wasn’t a local Baptist church.”
Dad’s story triggered the thought: should churches ever ask people to leave? Obviously any time this happens, it becomes a deeply hurtful experience - likely not just for the person being ejected but also for the person doing the ejecting. Should it ever happen on a point of theology? I’d be very interested to hear what people think.
collective language
Posted on September 21, 2007 by Matt Stanford
Filed Under Church, Emerging Questions | 8 Comments
Prompted by my LifeGroup: what does the language of a corporate experience of God look like?
I think it’s quite a poorly developed area of communication for us.
In my experience, when we talk about what God’s doing, we talk about it from a first-person perspective: “something I’ve learned this week…”, “God told me…”, “my experience this week has shown me…”; I’m really not sure our 3rd-persons language is familiar or well developed: trying to describe what God is doing with the upper or lower case C church seems to result in us pulling specific instances.
At the very least, it’s not something we spend much time talking about.
This, to me, contrasts against the things I read about when God spoke about Israel, his people, as a singular entity: we don’t seem to think of ourselves in the same way today as much, instead focusing on the individual or the intimate church group. Is that a result of post modernism, and is it what God wants from us? If we’re called to be other-centred, doesn’t that mean collective language should be our primary language type?
What’s God doing with us as a people? How does Jesus feel about his bride right now? What’s my role as part of that as an individual, a church member, a Church member? A hand, or a foot? Or a cell IN a hand or foot?
the emerging critique of certainty
Posted on September 20, 2007 by Tim Ogilvy
Filed Under Emerging Questions | 6 Comments
Recent reading on this site, and also at Rick’s blog, has got me wondering why emergent thinking appears so threatening to many church leaders, some of whom in their own heyday were considered quite radical themselves. This is just one guy’s perspective (mine) and I’m not too fragile, so feel free to unleash intellectual hell (or careful critique) on me if you feel the urge.
My personal feeling is that postmodernism carries us to CS Lewis’s cliff experience a la pilgrim’s regress. We must, under a postmodern critique reach a kind of spiritual agnosticism that can never be resolved by knowing, critiquing, or analysing, and must instead be solved with beautifully idiotic faith.
To me it was always this simple stupidity of choosing to believe that is why “the simple things confound the wise”. As long as we are determined to “know with certainty” we’re not living by faith, we’re actually just using dissociative mind-tricks to convince ourselves we are certain. Faith must occur in an environment of doubt.
On that basis, however you slice your postmodernism, it must leave you with the agnostic premise: there may be absolutes, but we can never be certain what they are. Then in choosing to put our faith in the best representation and interpretation of the ancient tradition that we can find, we make an honest choice of faith.
To do anything else is not a higher morality or a more stable belief system; it’s simply poor logic, and bad psychology. There’s nothing new under the sun. Modernism constructed an increasingly complex and diverse worldview-cluster based on some assumptions. Post-modernism is mostly just the equal and opposite reaction, the re-questioning of the assumptions.
To me, whoever claims to have a certainty, however strongly they believe it, is likely being self-deceived. We do not have, we never have had certainty. We only believed that we had it.
Those who fight so doggedly, with closed eyes and ears to defend these ‘absolute tenets’ of their faith against what appears to be an unquenchable relativism, do so because when they chose faith, they chose it in a falsely constructed environment of certainty. The psychology of certainty demands the dissociation of any thinking that indicates possible doubt. The story that is told about the certainty comes later and is built to justify the pre-chosen response to ‘cognitive dissonance.’
The problem is that those opposed to the questions raised by emergent’s are genuinely threatened by them… they are at risk of bigger problems if they can’t resolve the tension between question and belief. I think Christ knew the dilemma of certainty when he said to Thomas “You believe because you have seen, but blessed are those who believe, even when they have not seen.”
I’m learning to be compassionate to those who are threatened by an environment of uncertainty… their world does come crashing down, at least for a while, if they accept the truth about doubt.
