Archived Posts For Books
the example of the cross
Posted on February 8, 2008 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Bible Study, Books | 3 Comments
I’ve been reading the very very good book “A Community Called Atonement” by emerging blogger/theologian Scot McKnight. I was deeply struck by the following passage:
“We are not being fair to the Pauline texts on the cross if we narrow them simply and woodenly to resolution of my sin problem. The cross addresses our sin problem - “our” in the sense of yours and mine and the Western world’s and the Eastern world’s and the northern and southern hemisphere’s problems. It addresses the world’s captivity by evil” (emphasis Scot’s)
This goes into the basket of “I know it is true as soon as I read it, but I don’t think that’s how I live”. Because I don’t think that I have believed that God’s response to the problem of the Holocaust is the cross. It’s easy for me to see forgiveness as a product of the cross, but I’m not sure that it’s anywhere near as simple or as easy to recognise that a huge part of the work of the cross is in the example of the cross.
“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” 1 John 3:16
“Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Matthew 16:24
What does it mean for us to follow the example of the cross? In the christianese cultural bubble, it is so easy to see these passages as wonderful and lovely expressions of how nice God is to us, but that don’t require us to participate at all. But that can’t be what it really means to be crucified with Christ.
So what does that look like for a twenty-something IT Nerd in his comfortable 21st century existence: to die for those who are still sinners? Does this thought both excite and frighten anyone else? Feel free not to assume that I’m being rhetorical.
dawkins’ deity, part ii - responding to transcendence
Posted on November 25, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Books, Emerging Questions | 3 Comments
In the first chapter of “The God Delusion”, Richard Dawkins describes the difficulty he has with reconciling that which scientists know and hypothesise about the natural world with traditional religious belief. He quotes Carl Sagan in “Pale Blue Dot”
“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded ‘This is bigger than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our great prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, my God is a little god and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
In embracing the belief that all good things come from God, we have drawn boundaries around what God is, and then dismissed anything which does not fit into our traditional understanding of God. Our response to a world that is more complex, more beautiful and more vast than we have understood it to be has been to protect the ground we’ve always stood on, and to hold tight to the truth we know. It’s what the church did to Galileo, and when we put our fingers in our ears and sing “la la la I’m not listening” to increased scientific pontification around origins of life, etc we do the same thing.
So here’s the question: where are we as the church, still doing this? The challenge here has to be to recognise where we’ve limited God to our previous understanding of theology, and allow that theology to become flexible enough that we can see God in the Universe and even in scientific discovery, rather than seeing God opposed to these things. Where would your theology be too inflexible to accomodate for scientists discovering more about our world?
This could be a long series - two posts and I’m only 5 pages in.
dawkins’ deity, part i - preliminaries
Posted on November 22, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Books, Emerging Questions | Leave a Comment
This is the beginning of a series on Richard Dawkins’ book: “The God Delusion”. I’ll be writing the series “as I read it”, which given the way that life has been looking recently, could result in this series finishing around late 2020, but with a little bit of application, we should be able to get “something” out on this weekly (or so).
I believe that while the easiest, and most tempting response to the sort of criticisms that a fundamentalist atheist such as Dawkins presents is to dismiss him out of hand as a radical who doesn’t have any concept of what Christianity is really on about, I don’t believe that such a response is sensible, nor is it helpful. Whether we like it or not, voices like Dawkins, along with Sam Harris, etc. are being heard loud and clear. So this is an attempt to respond to “The God Delusion” and to sort the truths that the church needs to hear from the “other stuff”.
Because I’m attempting to find the “things we need to hear” and even some issues to wrestle with, this will (attempt to) be the last time I’ll address the style in which Dawkins’ has written his manifesto. I admit, I’ve seen Richard appear on television interviews before, so I was a little prepared for what I would be reading. He writes as he talks, with a steady, calm, English gentleman sensibility - all the while conveying sentiments which border on ridicule. His rhetoric includes regularly referring to religion as one would a virus, commonly using references to the bodies immune system as imagery for those who resist religious thought and ideas.
There is little doubt in reading the little I have already, that Dawkins writes with a deep personal conviction that he is hoping to help people out of a “broken” way of thinking. I don’t think he “hates” religious people, but I think that he has seen a great deal of hurt and “backward thinking” and has identified that he believes the root cause to be this thing we call religion, or even this idea of “God”. Richard Dawkins sets out his intentions early in the book:
“If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.”
and I’ve laid out mine. I realise this post might not have much to comment on it, but stay tuned because coming soon: chapter 1 - a deeply religious non-believer.
