the church & the world

Fried & Hansson offer wisdom on ignoring your competitors, in not letting what they're doing set your own agenda.

"...worrying about the competition quickly turns into an obsession. What are they doing right now? Where are they going next? How should we react? (That mindset) leads to overwhelming stress and anxiety. That state of mind is bad soil for growing anything...When you spend time worrying about someone else, you can't spend that time improving yourself. Focus on competitors too much and you wind up diluting your own vision...(and)...You wind up offering your competitor's products with a different coat of paint." (p.148)

Their words have real application to the life of the church and its mission in the world. Of course, the church needs to know the world it is engaging with, no question about that, and to know it well and deeply. But that kind of knowing is to be grounded in a settled vision (gospel) that allows for the engagement to be redemptively creative.


Or so it seems to me.

ebtg: acoustic

Ben & Tracey: thank you so much, for so much, over so many years. And now I find this on spotify - an unexpected, joyous gift.

I have to say, I never expected to hear EBTG singing Springsteen (Tougher Than the Rest is on here) but it works amazingly well.


All in all: delightful!

thinking out loud 3 - the birth of hope

When we suffer, we need hope. And if we have hope - real, solid hope - we can go on and, somehow, get through the hard times.


I don't doubt that that is true. But I want to set it in the light of Romans 5:4,5 where Paul is speaking about Christians doing the seemingly-odd thing of glorying in their sufferings - how can that possibly be so? He tells us that it can, and does, happen because

we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (v.4)

In his formulation, hope is at the end of the process; it grows out of the development of attested character, which is itself the product of persevering under trial.

If I had been asked to write that sequence I would have opted for suffering-hope-perseverance-character, or possibly with perseverance and character reversed. But I definitely would have put hope next to suffering as the dynamic which alone will allow for perseverance and character, however they are then ordered.


Can we persevere without hope? In 1 Thessalonians 1:3 Paul is quite clear that the endurance seen in that church was the product of hope. I don't think he's suggesting in Romans 5:4 that hope is entirely absent until character is securely formed on the back of perseverance. But maybe he is suggesting that the energising reality of hope is most securely-grounded where perseverance and attested character are the soil in which it is birthed.


Does this mean, then, that such hope is a human construct or achievement, since it depends (at least in part) on perseverance and character? Perhaps Romans 5:5 helps us here: the hope in which we can boast and rejoice will not ultimately be seen to be empty because God has poured his love into our hearts through the gift of his Spirit.


But maybe the even more important question is how we can help those who are suffering - do we simply urge them to hope in God, giving solid biblical reasons for doing so? Clearly that is never out of place and can be of great value. But maybe we need to somehow help them to just keep going, even in the absence of deeply-felt hope, standing with them, holding them up insofar as we can, seeking to encourage the perseverance that develops character and that then gives birth to a deeper, more secure hope.

jeanette winterson: on poetry

A poem is an act of memory. Poetry was first forged out of the need to remember what would otherwise be forgotten – in an oral tradition record-keeping is an art, not an act of administration.

You can read the whole piece here.

nichole nordeman: brave

Brave is a gently rocky, poppish album with some lyrical depth & substance. You might want to give it a listen.

george herbert: the call

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life!
Such a Way as gives us breath,
Such a Truth as ends all strife,
Such a Life as killeth death.


Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength!
Such a Light as shows a feast,
Such a Feast as mends in length,
Such a Strength as makes his guest.


Come my Joy, my Love, my Heart!
Such a Joy as none can move,
Such a Love as none can part,
Such a Heart as joyes in love.

friday night spotify: sound affects

The Jam's penultimate album and from the height of their popularity and prowess. The only shame is it didn't include the single, Going Underground, from a few months earlier - possibly their best moment ever.

powerpoint is dangerous

This article is an interesting read, but for more than just its comments on powerpoint. It was commented that it is dangerous "because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control...Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable." And the problem with bullet lists is that they "take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces."

I think that's also a salient warning against bulletized theology. We want to be in control but grasping after it we fail to see the problem for what it really is, we miss the connections that would make us pastorally more helpful to others. We forget that life is too complex for neat solutions, even biblical ones.

sons of korah: psalm 23

keller: on proverbs

More from the 'pen' of Tim Keller on handling the book of Proverbs.


I especially appreciate his emphasis on the cumulative interpretation of Proverbs - without that, the understanding and application of material from Proverbs can be very two dimensional.


He also writes helpfully on a way to discern and appropriate the riches of Proverbs: in community with others.

ferguson: on grace

A (brief) interview with Sinclair Ferguson on the topic of his new book: grace.

a flavour of koester

This small extract might give some idea of why I'm enjoying Koester's work on the theology of John's gospel. In many ways it's the perfect complement to Riddderbos' theological commentary.

The prologue sets the ministry of Jesus in a cosmic framework. The narrative that follows will tell of Jesus encountering people in Galilee, Samaria and Jerusalem. But in light of the prologue readers can see that the story of Jesus encountering particular people is also the story of God engaging the world. Note that the prologue does not offer a complete summary of the Gospel.Its themes of belief and unbelief, the world, glory and truth are played out at length, but the passion and resurrection remain implicit. Rather than actually telling the whole story, the prologue establishes a perspective on the whole story. It gives readers a transcendent vantage point, enabling them to see things about Jesus that are hidden from the people described in the Gospel. Readers know of Jesus' heavenly origin at the outset, and from that perspective can chart a course through the debates and misunderstandings that emerge during his ministry.

Craig Koester, The Word of Life: A Theology of John's Gospel

lions!

I can't remember where I saw this but it's a great line:

If you’re getting chased by a lion, you don’t need to run faster than the lion, just the people running with you.

(TIC)

the end of the line

A bus with the printed destination, 'Nowhere'? A coffin with the slogan, 'Too fast to live, too young to die'? It can only be the funeral of Malcolm McLaren.

divorce & remarriage

I think we all realise it's a tricky subject, biblically-speaking (& otherwise, too). Dick France has, imo, given a great summary of the subject in his little commentary on Mark in the People's Bible Commentary series (it qualifies as being termed 'little' when you compare it to his huge tome in the NIGTC series).


Commenting on Mark 10:10-12, he says:

"Mark therefore offers us an unqualified and total rejection of divorce by Jesus. Marriage is 'till death us do part.' But divorces do in fact happen, and Moses had already provided legislation to deal with what follows from a divorce. Are we then to say that Moses was wrong even to countenance the possibility? According to Jesus he provided for divorce 'because of your hardness of heart' - and human hearts are still hard, and marriages do break down. Should those who follow Jesus simply close their eyes to this reality? Or should they sadly accept that Jesus' ideal teaching, wonderful as it is, simply does not fit the way things are?


There is a way between these two extremes, but it is a difficult one to define and to practise without inconsistency. It is to insist both that God's standard is absolute and that divorce can never be good, and also that in a world which is characterized by human weakness and failure it must be possible to find ways of coping with a broken marriage (as Moses found that he had to). In that case divorce and remarriage, while it can never be good, may be the least bad of the options available. It may thus be the right thing to do in the circumstances, but can never cease to be a cause for regret and sorrow that God's standard for marriage has been violated."

(page 133)

koester: the theology of john's gospel

I can't speak highly enough of the Kindle app's sample chapter facility (I know you know that, faithful reader). There are times when it really comes into its own and here's another instance:

Having read a review of Craig Koester's The Word of Life: A Theology of John's Gospel, I downloaded the Kindle sample and will shortly be making my way over to the Kindle store to get the full book - it's a wonderfully promising read: richly suggestive, very well-written (not the least of my considerations) and illuminating.


The price will work-out the same as getting a paperback copy ordered but I'm at least as happy to have a book like this in electronic form. And to have it in a jiffy, rather than a jiffy bag.

paul's theology

Tom Wright (according to Michael Gorman) has suggested that Paul's theology is a

"christologically re-shaped and pneumatologically re-energized Jewish monotheism."

Seems good to me.

gentle; uplifting; healing

is the album, The Breaking of the Dawn, by Fernando Ortega.


You'll not regret giving it a listen.

mark dever's advice to pastors

Your main job - in order to reach the world for Christ - is to know God yourself, to know his Word, to faithfully preach and teach that Word to your people and, so, be used by God to create a community that does far more than you can ever do just by a cleverly-planned service - you know, the people that I preach to every Sunday are going to see far more non-Christians than we could ever fit in our building, so if I can equip them, if we can create a culture of evangelism where we're not trying to have an event that draws non-Christians to our gathering....

(And there the tape ran-out - argh!!)

themelios 35-1

Here ya go.


Public Service Post No.329