Do Faith Claims Have a Place? (RJS)

December 30, 2011 By RJS 51 Comments

There is an interesting column by Paul Pardi in the Huffington Post: Why Faith Claims Should Be ‘Corrected’: A Professor’s View (HT JT). In this column Pardi discusses a recent article and talk by Professor Peter Boghossian of Portland State University.

At the heart of Boghossian’s argument is the idea that students should leave a classroom more informed about the world than they entered it, and since faith claims aren’t publicly testable, students who make them “shouldn’t be given a seat at the adult table.” Boghossian makes a distinction between a private belief that impacts only the person believing it (like the belief that peanut butter tastes good) and public claims that are supposed to have implications for the rest of us (like the claim that God disapproves of contraception). Beliefs about God and his activity are private beliefs that students are welcome to hold but these beliefs should not be a part of the educational conversation. If a student makes a public argument that is based on a private belief, professors should call these students out and help correct their thinking.

What place do faith claims have in public discussions?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture, Science and Faith Tagged With: 51 Comments

The Gospel of Steve Jobs

January 20, 2011 By scotmcknight 17 Comments

From Andy Crouch’s insightful piece about Steve Jobs:

As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress……

Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress—and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It’s worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn’t say:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture, Gospel Tagged With: , 17 Comments

Top Trends of the last Decade (Andy Crouch)

January 3, 2011 By scotmcknight 4 Comments

Andy Crouch has a fascinating list of ten cultural trends of the last decade, and I swipe only the first one here.

From Q’s site:

Indeed, when I reflect on the most significant developments of the never-adequately-named 2000s (the aughts? the aughties? the naughties?), it seems that almost all of them were well under way in 1999, or even 1989. At the same time, in the last ten years some long-wave trends accelerated in notable ways. Acceleration matters. In one sense, walking, riding a horse, driving a car, and traveling by plane are simply variations on the millennia-old human theme of mobility, tracing back literally to the earliest signs of our restless race. But the difference between five miles an hour and 500 miles an hour is not just a quantitative matter of speed, but a qualitative change in the horizons of possibility.

Here are ten significant trends in North American culture that accelerated dramatically in the 2000s—almost always for better and for worse at the same time.

One | Connection

By far the most significant acceleration was in our technologies of connection. In June 2000, 97 million mobile phone subscribers existed in the United States; in June 2010, the number rose to 293 million. Urban and suburban Americans swim in a sea of WiFi (sitting in my living room on a quiet side street I can see 8 wireless networks)—and in the middle of Nebraska, you can get online at McDonald’s.

What did not take off in the 2000s was “virtual reality”—a world constructed entirely of disembodied bits, populated by avatars and existing only in the realm of the ideal. As the 2000s ended, the virtual-reality world Second Life was on virtual life support.

Instead, we used technology to reinforce our embodied relationships. Facebook was the highest trafficked website in 2010 (US subscribers in 2000: zero; in 2010: 116 million). Look at your Facebook friends—unless you are a celebrity, the vast majority of them are people you have met in the flesh. Same with the recents on your cell phone. Rather than replacing embodied connection, our devices supplemented and extended it, an electromagnetic nervous system to match the physical infrastructure of transport built in the twentieth century.

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: , 4 Comments

When is Enough Enough?

January 3, 2011 By scotmcknight 51 Comments

This post is from our friend in Dublin, Patrick Mitchel. Patrick blogs at Faith in Ireland, and he is a professor at Irish Bible Institute, in the heart of Dublin. Kris and I had the joy of meeting Patrick and the privilege of lecturing at IBI last summer. Thanks Patrick for your gospel work in Dublin. (By the way, this post and the one below it form a nice pair for our day.)

From Patrick…

I’ve been thinking a bit about money recently, not least prompted by Ireland’s recent financial apocalypse that current and future generations will be paying off for years to come.

My proposal for this guest post (thanks for the invite Scot) is that we (western Christians) have, by and large, read the Bible in a way that neuters much of what Scripture says about money.

The question: how can Christians be subversive members of God’s kingdom in terms of how they use money within a hyper-consumerist culture?

The Bible has an astonishing amount to say about money. Yes, some of it is comforting to Westerners – it seems to legitimate private property, affirm personal responsibility and (within limits) views prosperity as valid fruit of hard work and a sign of God’s blessing.

But the vast majority of the Bible’s teaching on money should make us very wary indeed of all that money brings.  I suggest that in both in the Old and New Testaments the overwhelming message is this:

‘Money is highly dangerous to your spiritual health’ [Read more...]

Filed Under: Christianity, Culture, Economics Tagged With: , 51 Comments

The Day Metallica Came to Church 2

October 30, 2010 By scotmcknight Leave a Comment

This is the second and final part of David Opderbeck’s interview with John Van Sloten, author of The Day Metallica Came to Church.  The first part of the interview is here.

Dave: So let’s talk a bit about theology for a moment.  In Chapter 3, you use the term “co-illumination.”  What are you getting at here?  How does this idea relate to the classical locus of authority for Protestant Christians — sola scriptura?

John:  Co-illumination occurs when either of God’s two books (creation or the Bible) shines light onto the other; resulting in a fuller/deeper understanding of God’s truth. The underlying assumption is that we need both books, synergistically co-illumining one another, in order to fully understand what God is revealing. While the Bible uses words to describe how the heavens declare the glory of God (Ps 19), the Hubble Space Telescope gives us a picture of what one of the 100 billion galaxies in our known universe actually looks like. Once we’ve seen Hubble’s amazing images the psalm can never be the same. In fact it might even feel 100 billion times more powerful. Nor will looking at Jupiter while on Canada’s remote Galiano Island ever be the same. Because I know the truth of the psalm I now have more with which to see God’s face beyond the solar system’s sacred page. The revelation of God is most fully experienced as we read his words with both reading glasses and a telescope.

For me, the experience of co-illumination has been the most amazing part of this theological journey. I can read about God’s anger in the Old Testament, and I may be able to imagine what it is like. But when I feel it, at a heart trembling 120db at a raging Metallica concert, as the band gets angry about the same things God does, I’m totally blown away. I can read Psalm 34:8 and get a sense of what the psalmist is talking about, but there was something about the amazing Persian meal I shared with friends’ last night that really helped me taste and see that God is good. We are multi-sensory beings. And I believe that God means to engage all of our senses, via two books, both at the same time. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture, Public Issues Tagged With: , Leave a Comment

The Day Metallica came to Church

October 16, 2010 By scotmcknight 3 Comments

This interview is by David Opderbeck … and is the first part of an interview with John Van Sloten, author of The Day Metallica Came to Church.  In this book, Pastor Van Sloten talks about finding God in culture — from the “high” culture of Van Gogh’s paintings to the pop culture of the heavy metal band Metallica.  This is no manual of seeker techniques.  Rather, it’s a delightful and enlightening riff on culture and common grace.  If you preach or teach or just are interested in the relation between faith and culture, this book is a great resource.

Dave:  You mention in the book’s Preface that you’ve preached sermons on movies such asCrash, the paintings of Van Gogh, video games, sports, and other cultural pursuits.  It might be tempting to think, “Great — more ‘relevant’ sermons with a hip video clip before the same old three expository points…” But you’re up to more than that.  Tell us a bit about how you got into this more extensive mode of cultural exegesis.

John:  Yeah, we’re up to way more than mere relevance here.  And looking back, I’d say it happened to us.  Eight years ago I was researching a sermon series on The Lord of the Rings with a group of local pastors.  At one of our meetings someone said, “Tolkien’s story is just so epic, it would be a shame to break it down in order to ‘hang’ it onto the biblical narrative.  What if we did it the other way around and kept Tolkien’s tale intact, let it lead and hung the Bible story onto it instead?”  And that’s what we did.  We let God’s truth in a fictional myth lead us to God’s truth in the Bible.   A mere halfling pointed us to God’s humble, servant-like, upside-down plan for salvation. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: , 3 Comments

Christ and the Dragons 3

June 28, 2010 By scotmcknight 11 Comments

Dragons.jpgJames Emery White , in his new book ( Christ Among the Dragons: Finding Our Way Through Cultural Challenges), takes on big themes, and the 3d chp is about culture.

The big question is his: What would the world look like if there were no Christians? what is the measurable and real impact of those who follow Jesus? How much are Christians culture-changers and culture-influences?
White examines five major strategies:
Retreat from society and culture
Revive culture via evangelism
Recapture via political influence
Reflect by being like others
What are the strengths and weaknesses of each of these?
And he proposes the 5th R: Renewal. Which is to renew the culture and the society via faithful living. Prayer, evangelism, example, argument, action, and suffering.
One of the issues that Christians need to face is what they are aiming at when they focus on being influential in culture. White focuses on the three major ones:
Truth
Beauty
Goodness
Big question: Who is doing these things well today?
Filed Under: Culture 11 Comments

Perilous Times 2

May 13, 2010 By scotmcknight 10 Comments

Peril.jpgRobert Wuthnow’s newest book, Be Very Afraid: The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, and Other Threats
, provides for us an opportunity to have a pastoral response to peril.

In the last fifty years, he argues in chp 1, three things have happened:
First, peril has become a constant.
Second, peril is now seen as the product of an organization — like Hitler’s Germany or (in the mind of many Americans) Ahmadinejad’s Iran.
Third, and this is a big one, the solution to peril increasingly is assigned to organizations and governments and to experts.
I’m hoping some pastors will weigh in on this one today: After reading the blog post, what are you doing in your churches to make sense of peril? What “story” or “narrative” do you tell? Now, to dig a bit deeper, what behaviors do you see and what stories do the behaviors tell? 
Peril has always been part of the human condition, but in former years it was otherwise. Listen to his words: “Were the problem solving involved to occur in any other era but our own, it would be tempting to imagine that it would entail religion, magic, and ritual. The danger facing the society would very likely be perceived as that of an angry god, the devil, or an evil spirit” (20).  He continues: “The ‘enlightened’ view is that people in earlier times were deluded.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture 10 Comments

On Changing Culture 10

May 3, 2010 By scotmcknight 8 Comments

Screen shot 2010-04-12 at 7.51.22 PM.pngThis book proposes a “new city commons” and it does on the basis of a singular text in Jeremiah.

James Davison Hunter, in his new book, (To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World
), suggests that Jeremiah 29:4-7 offers a 4th Way, a way beyond Right and Left and Neo-Anabaptist, and a way that is beyond politicization of the faith and beyond Constantinianism. Here is the text from Jeremiah — “seek the welfare” of that City — Babylon:
29:4 ”The Lord God of Israel who rules over all says to all those he sent into exile to Babylon from Jerusalem, 29:5 ’Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat what they produce. 29:6 Marry and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and allow your daughters get married so that they too can have sons and daughters. Grow in number; do not dwindle away. 29:7 Work to see that the city where I sent you as exiles enjoys peace and prosperity. Pray to the Lord for it. For as it prospers you will prosper.’

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture 8 Comments

On Changing Culture 9

April 30, 2010 By scotmcknight 11 Comments

Screen shot 2010-04-12 at 7.51.22 PM.pngThis book is now getting to the nittty gritty of a genuine 4th Way proposal:

James Davison Hunter, in his new book, (To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World
), makes a proposal and I would call it a quietistic form of anabaptism or a quietism. He is against activism in the use of political power. He is for an activism at the ecclesial and personal level.
How would you “label” the approach of Hunter? Is it a gentler form of Anabaptism? Is it Reformed? Do you think it is better than the “striving” approach of the Right and the Left?
God’s faithful presence is in the Incarnation: that Word ends the dissolution of world/word (from previous post) and reveals the difference of world and Christ. The way to change culture is to embody God’s own faithful presence in this world. It means faithfulness in being present to one another, to our tasks and within our spheres of influence. (Again, his thesis remonstrates with the will to power and ressentiment of the Right, Left and Neo-Anabaptists through a more quietistic approach of embodiment of Christ in this world.
It is shaped by covenant commitment to others and to the world.
Filed Under: Culture 11 Comments
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