Preaching the Gospel

The gospel we preach shapes the kind of churches we create.
The kind of church we have shapes the gospel we preach.
  Scot McKnight..A Community Called Atonement.

Interview with Eugene Peterson

Many people assume that spirituality is about becoming emotionally intimate with God.

That's a naïve view of spirituality. What we're talking about is the Christian life. It's following Jesus. Spirituality is no different from what we've been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It's just ordinary stuff.

This promise of intimacy is both right and wrong. There is an intimacy with God, but it's like any other intimacy; it's part of the fabric of your life. In marriage you don't feel intimate most of the time. Nor with a friend. Intimacy isn't primarily a mystical emotion. It's a way of life, a life of openness, honesty, a certain transparency.

Yet evangelicals rightly tell people they can have a "personal relationship with God." That suggests a certain type of spiritual intimacy.

All these words get so screwed up in our society. If intimacy means being open and honest and authentic, so I don't have veils, or I don't have to be defensive or in denial of who I am, that's wonderful. But in our culture, intimacy usually has sexual connotations, with some kind of completion. So I want intimacy because I want more out of life. Very seldom does it have the sense of sacrifice or giving or being vulnerable. Those are two different ways of being intimate. And in our American vocabulary intimacy usually has to do with getting something from the other. That just screws the whole thing up.

It's very dangerous to use the language of the culture to interpret the gospel. Our vocabulary has to be chastened and tested by revelation, by the Scriptures. We've got a pretty good vocabulary and syntax, and we'd better start paying attention to it because the way we grab words here and there to appeal to unbelievers is not very good.

You make spirituality sound so mundane.

I don't want to suggest that those of us who are following Jesus don't have any fun, that there's no joy, no exuberance, no ecstasy. They're just not what the consumer thinks they are. When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world's values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

The Gospel of Mark is so graphic this way. The first half of the Gospel is Jesus showing people how to live. He's healing everybody. Then right in the middle, he shifts. He starts showing people how to die: "Now that you've got a life, I'm going to show you how to give it up." That's the whole spiritual life. It's learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.

It involves a kind of learned passivity, so that our primary mode of relationship is receiving, submitting, instead of giving and getting and doing. We don't do that very well. We're trained to be assertive, to get, to apply, or to consume and to perform.

Since the Reformation, though, we've championed the idea that the church can be reformed.

Hasn't happened. I'm for always reforming, but to think that we can get a church that's reformed is just silliness.

I think the besetting sin of pastors, maybe especially evangelical pastors, is impatience. We have a goal. We have a mission. We're going to save the world. We're going to evangelize everybody, and we're going to do all this good stuff and fill our churches. This is wonderful. All the goals are right. But this is slow, slow work, this soul work, this bringing people into a life of obedience and love and joy before God.

And we get impatient and start taking shortcuts and use any means available. We talk about benefits. We manipulate people. We bully them. We use language that is just incredibly impersonal—bullying language, manipulative language.

One doesn't normally think of churches as bullying.

Whenever guilt is used as a tool to get people to do anything—good, bad, indifferent—it's bullying. And then there's manipulative language—to talk people into programs, to get them involved, usually by promising them something.

I have a friend who is an expert at this sort of thing. He's always saying, "You've got to identify people's felt needs. Then you construct a program to meet the felt needs." It's pretty easy to manipulate people. We're so used to being manipulated by the image industry, the publicity industry, and the politicians that we hardly know we're being manipulated.

This impatience to leave the methods of Jesus in order to get the work of Jesus done is what destroys spirituality, because we're using a non-biblical, non-Jesus way to do what Jesus did. That's why spirituality is in such a mess as it is today.

Humans from bacteria to amphibian to reptile to mammal....seriously?  However, I have known some humans that remind me of snakes.

Some thoughts on how evolution works...let me say in advance I'm all for dinosaurs, cavemen and fossil records.  I also believe in mutation and gene theory, etc.  However, some of the claims of evolution are summarized below.  To me they seem to be what Mark Twain would have called stretchers!

The earliest known reptiles are so amphibian-like that their assignment to one category or the other is largely a matter of opinion. In this area of life, however, there was no missing link; all the gradations from amphibian to reptile exist with a clarity seldom equaled in paleontology.

Information taken from http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/evolution/evolution7.htm

Evolution is a set of principles that tries to explain how life, in all its various forms, appeared on Earth. The theory of evolution succeeds in explaining why we see bacteria and mosquitoes becoming resistant to antibiotics and insecticides. It also successfully predicted, for example, that X-ray exposure would lead to thousands of mutations in fruit flies.

Here are three common questions that are asked about the current theory of evolution:

• How does evolution add information to a genome to create progressively more complicated organisms?
• How is evolution able to bring about drastic changes so quickly?
• How could the first living cell arise spontaneously to get evolution started?

According to Carl Sagan in "The Dragons of Eden":

Large organisms such as human beings average about one mutation per ten gametes [a gamete is a sex cell, either sperm or egg] -- that is, there is a 10 percent chance that any given sperm or egg cell produced will have a new and inheritable change in the genetic instructions that make up the next generation. These mutations occur at random and are almost uniformly harmful -- it is rare that a precision machine is improved by a random change in the instructions for making it.

According to "Molecular Biology of the Cell":

Only about one nucleotide pair in a thousand is randomly changed every 200,000 years. Even so, in a population of 10,000 individuals, every possible nucleotide substitution will have been "tried out" on about 50 occasions in the course of a million years, which is a short span of time in relation to the evolution of species. Much of the variation created in this way will be disadvantageous to the organism and will be selected against in the population. When a rare variant sequence is advantageous, however, it will be rapidly propagated by natural selection. Consequently, it can be expected that in any given species the functions of most genes will have been optimized by random point mutation and selection.

Creating a New Species

Imagine that you take a group of Saint Bernards and put them on one island, and on another island you put a group of Chihuahuas. Saint Bernards and Chihuahuas are both members of the species "dog" right now -- a Saint Bernard can mate with a Chihuahua (probably through artificial insemination) and create normal puppies. They will be odd-looking puppies, but normal puppies nonetheless.

Given enough time, it is possible to see how speciation -- the development of a new species through evolution -- could occur among the Saint Bernards and the Chihuahuas on their respective islands. What would happen is that the Saint Bernard gene pool would acquire random mutations shared by all of the Saint Bernards on the island (through interbreeding), and the Chihuahuas would acquire a completely different set of random mutations shared by all of the Chihuahuas on their island. These two gene pools would eventually become incompatible with one another, to the point where the two breeds could no longer interbreed. At that point, you have two distinct species.

Because of the huge size difference between a Saint Bernard and a Chihuahua, it would be possible to put both types of dogs on the same island and have the exact same process occur. The Saint Bernards would naturally breed with only the Saint Bernards and the Chihuahuas would naturally breed with only the Chihuahuas, so speciation would still occur.

If you put two groups of Chihuahuas on two separate islands, the process would also occur. The two groups of Chihuahuas would accumulate different collections of mutations in their gene pools and eventually become different species that could not interbreed.

The theory of evolution proposes that the process that might create a separate Chihuahua-type species and Saint Bernard-type species is the same process that has created all of the species we see today. When a species gets split into two (or more) distinct subsets, for example by a mountain range, an ocean or a size difference, the subsets pick up different mutations, create different gene pools and eventually form distinct species.

Is this truly how all of the different species we see today have formed? Most people agree that bacteria evolve in small ways (microevolution), but there is some controversy around the idea of speciation (macroevolution).

A Testament to Freedom

The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
to look inside:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060642149/ref=pe_180020_24304920_pe_vfe_dp1#reader_0060642149

This book contains excerpts from sermons, books and letters written by Bonhoeffer. He was only 39 when he was executed in a Nazi concentration camp.

Quote:
Christ has become a matter of the church or rather of the churchiness of a group of people, not a matter of life.

My observation is that Bonhoeffer understands community, discipleship and the cross on a very deep level.

Examples of Tenacious and Pervasive Eastern Paradigms: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism

Interesting, brief overview of essential tenets:

From Northern California State University: Comparative Religions:

Homo Sapiens: "Humans the wise". Ever wonder why we are called that? (Answer: Because we named ourselves.) As the thinking animal, humans are at the same time economic, political, social, psychological entities. But that is not the whole story. Humans also need to be recognized as symbolic and religious beings, as homo religiosus, homo symbolicus, and homo orientus. Indeed, humans orient themselves, as do many animals. However we not only orient ourselves geographically in terms of physical space but psychologically, temporally (indeed time and history are crucial to our self-understandings), and spiritually. As far back as we can reconstruct humanity we discover traits and activities that demonstrate concerted efforts to orient lives and activities in relationship to the sacred. From burial sites to cave paintings archaic humanity displays religious significations that are hard-pressed to be accounted for without the recognition of a deeply rooted propensity for religion in the essential nature of humanity.

To read more click below.

http://www.csun.edu/~rcummings/TheoiesMethods/TheoiesMethods10.html

                Write your own caption: Mine...Dude, check out the
                rims on that car.

PRAYER AND IMPORTUNITY

by Pastor E.M. Bounds

Excerpt:
Importunate prayer is a mighty movement of the soul toward God. It is a stirring of the deepest forces of the soul, toward the throne of heavenly grace. It is the ability to hold on, press on, and wait. Restless desire, restful patience, and strength of grasp are all embraced in it. It is not an incident, or a performance, but a passion of soul. It is not a want, half-needed, but a sheer necessity.
The wrestling quality in importunate prayers does not spring from physical vehemence or fleshly energy. It is not an impulse of energy, not a mere earnestness of soul; it is an inwrought force, a faculty implanted and aroused by the Holy Spirit. Virtually, it is the intercession of the Spirit of God, in us; it is, moreover, "the effectual, fervent prayer, which availeth much." The Divine Spirit informing every element within us, with the energy of His own striving, is the essence of the importunity which urges our praying at the mercy-seat, to continue until the fire falls and the blessing descends. This wrestling in prayer may not be boisterous nor vehement, but quiet, tenacious and urgent. Silent, it may be, when there are no visible outlets for its mighty forces.
Nothing distinguishes the children of God so clearly and strongly as prayer. It is the one infallible mark and test of being a Christian. Christian people are prayerful, the worldly-minded, prayerless. Christians call on God; worldlings ignore God, and call not on His Name. But even the Christian had need to cultivate continual prayer. Prayer must be habitual, but much more than a habit. It is duty, yet one which rises far above, and goes beyond the ordinary implications of the term. It is the expression of a relation to God, a yearning for Divine communion. It is the outward and upward flow of the inward life toward its original fountain. It is an assertion of the soul's paternity, a claiming of the sonship, which links man to the Eternal.

Link: http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Books,%20Tracts%20&%20Preaching/Printed%20Books/NOP/nop-chap_06.htm

Index of all 14 chapters:  http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Books,%20Tracts%20&%20Preaching/Printed%20Books/NOP/nop-intro.htm

A Paradigm for reading and interpreting scripture:

There is a great danger, when once we have adhered to one particular school of thought or adopted one particular system of theology, of reading the Bible in the light of that school or system and finding its distinctive features in what we read. …  The remedy for this is to bear resolutely in mind that our systems of doctrine must be based on biblical exegesis, not imposed upon it.
                                                                                                  FF Bruce:

The Rule of Elders

On the Relation of Elders and Congregations

http://lavistachurchofchrist.org/LVarticles/RuleOfElders.html

An interesting article on how elders are to lead congregations and to function in their God ordained role. It addresses common misunderstandings and offers a definition of all the words that address the leadership function of elder.

33 years

Tomorrow I celebrate my 33rd wedding anniversary. While our core values and commitment to God and to one another have never altered, we've seen lots of change over 33 years. Life has a way of doing that.  Marriage has a way of doing that.  Children have a way of doing that.

To grow and to mature, whether in Christ, in life or in marriage, one must be ever expanding one's paradigm
( set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them).

Hopefully, as we travel through life, our core convictions, deepen.  Our love broadens and we continue to press on to take hold of that for which God has taken hold of us. It is a dynamic process. As we grow older, may we remain forever young.

Elwood

Review of the Moral Vision of the New Testament by Richard Hays

http://www.directionjournal.org/article/?1039

I want to suggest this approach as a framework that is sound for reading ,discussing, evaluating and applying scripture as the church seeks to be a community that is transformed into the image of Christ. It is taken from a rewrite of Richard Hays' book on New Testament Ethics, the story retold.

Personally, I like this approach because it avoids the extremes of fundamentalism and subjectivism and allows for ongoing conversation that is centered in wrestling with the text..I think this framework allows us dynamic freedom within the context of the gospel narrative and other writings to allow the word to be a lamp unto our
feet and a light unto our path.  I also think it helps us to place contemporary cultural ideas about community in a place that is subservient to the gospel and the gospel message.

Excerpt:
Hays recognizes the difficulty the church experiences when attempting to identify the message or application of Scripture amidst diverse and often variant readings of the New Testament. The problem is that “unless we can give a coherent account of how we move between the biblical text and normative ethical judgments, appeals to the authority of Scripture will be hollow and unconvincing” (2).
Hays begins by “mapping the field” with a survey of six current approaches or models of New Testament ethics. These approaches include the attempt to merely describe the ethical teachings of the New Testament or the morality of the early church. One model seeks to use Scripture as an abstract source for principles or moral ideals with little concern for a detailed exegesis of the text. Other approaches use contemporary experience as a grid through which the New Testament text is evaluated or assert that it is the moral character of the church which enables it to faithfully read the biblical text.
Hays defines his approach as a “metaphorical embodiment of narrative paradigms” (18). The contemporary church is called to read the Bible as a story in which it discerns the correspondence between the present community and the people whose story is told in the New Testament. Hays affirms the priority of the canonical story, the need for careful exegesis, and a recognition that the “right understanding of the texts is possible only when we act in obedience to them” (19). He asserts that “New Testament ethics requires a confessional, self-involving commitment to put what we read into practice” (19). {72}
Hays suggests that New Testament ethics involves four overlapping tasks. First, the descriptive task calls for a careful reading of the text. The synthetic task seeks to discern a coherent perspective within the diversity of the canon. Hays claims that the unity of the New Testament is centered around the gospel story, which itself requires a cluster of images (community, cross, new creation) to adequately identify what is fundamental to the ethical witness. The hermeneutical task is to place “our community’s life imaginatively within the world articulated by the texts” (33) and to “see our lives anew by reading them in metaphorical juxtaposition with this story” (35). The church is called to stand under the authority of Scripture and to allow its life to be confronted with the vision of the New Testament. Finally, the pragmatic task is for the church to embody the meaning of the text as it is continually being shaped by the text.

http://www.licc.org.uk/engaging-with-the-bible/book-reviews/richard-b-hays-on-new-testament-ethics-925

This blog about paradigms and periwinkles is posted to be a place to dynamically and respectfully discuss and understand scripture.  It is named paradigms and periwinkles because our paradigms influence how we view and understand scripture.  Periwinkles are a beautiful shade of blue and the name of a plant and a type of snail.
It is symbolic of the beauty of scripture, the glory of nature and the painstakingly slow process involved at times to understand scripture and be conformed to the image of the messiah.