Against Nothingness

More stuff from Cruciformity by Gorman He explores the idea of a cruciform faith (As well as hope, love, and power) in his book, and concludes with these 5 observations (pg. 153; my paraphrases, but mostly quotes): 1. Faith is the renunciation of (or crucifixion of) all other possible basis for justification. Faith means one can only boast in God or the cross. - How many times do I like to rely on other things to justify myself? 2. Faith is freedom from all powers that enslave humanity, including those about which we might boast about. - Freedom from pride? Money? Power? The question we always have to ask ourselves if we really want to be free of these things. 3. Faith is conformity to Jesus' faith, his posture to life and obedience and trust before God the Father. 4. Faith is both the initial and ongoing experience of the above, as it begins and maintains our restored covenant relationship with God. - Ahh the ongoing element of faith; often problematic to reformation thought (...

Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia: Konstantin Skvorecky's memoir of the alien invasion of 1986. London: Gollancz, 2009. 326 pgs. Adam Roberts writes strange and interesting books. I have read his work before, and enjoyed it. So, when I saw this on the shelf in the public library, I picked it up. And I am very glad I did. This book joins a very elite club, becoming the 3rd book that has ever made me laugh out loud while reading it. The first was the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide series. The second was Stephen Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series. This is the third. Normally, when I am reading, all of my emotional reactions stay pretty contained. After all, reading is largely an exercise in imagination, and so the process is almost wholly internal to begin with. Negatively, only one book has ever shocked me enough to extract a gasp (Iain M. Banks! so good...). Otherwise, the 'best' negative result that usually comes about is that I put the book down...

What did Christ accomplish on the cross? What did he do and how did he do? These are the questions atonement theology addresses. The most basic answer typically given in my own context is that He 'died for our sins.' Nothing wrong with that. But we can say more; much more in fact. I am currently reading Cruciformity by Gorman. I am not finished yet, but he lists 13 windows on the cross, and I wanted to share them here. So, what follows is Gorman's list, taken from pages 82-85, with my own paraphrased brief explanations of what he means by them. These 13 windows do not contradict one another, and they can be taken together to create a full picture of Jesus' work on the cross. The point is that we usually emphasize one or two of this while forgetting about the rest. 1. Obedience/Righteousness/Faith(fulness): When Christ died he was following the will of God. Clearly presented in: Phil. 2:8; Romans 5:18-19; Gal. 1:4. Ambiguously present (due to Greek grammatical unce...

Don't you just hate it when you can't sleep? Or, when you do fall asleep, but get completely woken up so shortly afterwards that you feel like you just had a nap and are ready to go? Yeah, so its 12:20, and I should be in bed. The women of the house are sleeping away, and I am jealous. So, what do I do with time like this? Check email, facebook, post on here and comment... then I play silly games, like this or this . I try to read, but usually I don't have the focus at this time of night unless I force myself to be really awake, and eat something, but then I won't be asleep for hours. So, I find things to do that wile away the time while my body and brain slowly shut down so I can go back to bed. Of course, computer screens are supposed to be bad for this process, as the light shining from them directly into your eyes tricks your brain into thinking its more like daytime, so maybe I will just go lay down and listen to music. Night.

N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters . New York: HarperOne, 2010. 307 pgs. I am a big fan of N.T. Wright. I don't think there is anyone I ever agree with completely (being in school for so long has taught me that if I ever found such a person, or read such a book, I would either have been insufficiently critical during my reading process, or else I am reading something I myself wrote :) but, that said, I have found very few scholars who can match Wright's coherence in presenting an overall biblical picture, or who are as compelling as he is in the details of their biblical analysis. Those, of course, are general comments. What about this book? After You Believe is, apparently, the third book in an unannounced, but now completed, trilogy written by Wright. It began with Simply Christian , continued in Suprised by Hope , and is completed in this volume. In itself, this book is an argument for, and outline of, the idea of Christian character and v...

How does love trigger the disintegration of the loved one? How do efforts to control another become an adaptation to the other's weakness? Why does dependency kill? How does rigidity in one person create self-doubt in another? Why is it the nature of craziness to drive those who try to understand it in others crazy? How does support weaken? or challenge become a form of caring? When does responsibility for others become irresponsible? How do words lose their power then they are used to overpower? - Friedman's Fables, pg. 107-108 The book had one good part, despite my review. So, what do you think? How would you answer those questions?

Still more to say. Kristina pointed out that I write about my time at Regent different than I talk about it. And she's write. When I talk, I am usually giving short, one or two sentence answers to easy questions. I am not reflecting, trying to mull it over and give a fuller presentation. Still, she also pointed out that I haven't really talked about friends and good times yet, which are things that come up in conversation. When she pointed this out, I realized not only that she was right, but that I have compartmentalized my experience at Regent. I no longer think of the friends I made at Regent as part of Regent; they are just friends, who I hope to continue being friends with for a long time. Still, I met them there, so I might as well put them in here :) One of the well organized good ideas that Regent tries to foist upon all new and married students is something called the 'Regent Spouses Network.' This is a way for spouses of Regent students to be involved ...

Reflecting continues. One of the things I realized as I was writing the last post, but decided deserved a post all its own, was that over my life there have been three key lessons I have learned that have affected my personality, decisions, and life in big ways. Its not that other things haven't had an affect, or changed me; of course they have. These three particular lessons, however, stand out for some reason. Realizing this, and thinking about it because of graduation, I thought I would share them. Lesson #1: Remember the good, forget the bad. I don't remember how old I was, I don't remember what we were fighting about, but my brother and I, as is typical of brothers I think, were fighting about something. My Mom, as is typical of mothers, caught us, stopped us, and tried to figure out what was going on. As reasons for our fight we brought up stuff that the other had done weeks or months before. Now, I know thats all rather vague, but I don't remember any detai...

So, comparing is done. Reflecting on my time at Regent, one of the things I want to ask is what did I learn? How well did my time there prepare me? and so on; evaluative questions. The immediate problem is that I learned far too much to put in a blog post; after all, it took over 3 years of schooling to get it into me :) A more central problem, however, is that one of the first, and maybe most important, things I learned at Regent was that I shouldn't treat it as merely preparation for something else. I didn't learn this in a class, and no prof told me this in so many words. But, at some point near the beginning of my time at Regent the inevitable question came up (I think from someone who subsequently left Regent because they answered the question differently): If you knew you were going to die in 1 year, would you still spend it in school? Of course, we don't know when we are going to die, and the real point of the question is to seek the value of your current activiti...

Edwin H. Freidman, Friedman's Fables . New York: The Guilford Pres, 1990. 213 pgs Yet another book I have mentioned before. In that post I linked to several stories which I was able to find online before actually getting the book from the library. They all happened to be stories I enjoyed... sadly, I cannot say the same of the entire book. This book, as the title suggests, is a collection of fables. Fables, in this case, being short stories with a lesson. Friedman divides them into sections, with a brief introduction for each section and 6 stories in each of the 4 sections of the book. The points he tries to make in these stories are, naturally, the same one's he spells out in much more detail in his other books. Sadly, both his writing and his lessons suffer as a result of the poor quality of many of the stories. In some of his stories, the point he is trying to make so overrides the narrative as to make the story boring or just bad. At other times, the point is so o...

Rules matter, but they aren't the center of it all. You can tell people that they must obey the rule to be generous. But if someone gives you a present merely because he is obeying a rule or doing his duty, the glory of gift-giving has slipped through your fingers. If rules are taken as the main thing, then the truly main thing seems to be missing. What happened to character ? N.T. Wright, After You Believe, (SanFrancisco: HarperOne Publishing, 2010) 47. Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while. Wesley, The Princess Bride

Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart. Hodder & Stoughton, 2008. 461pgs Not my usual fair. I admit it, I can be shallow. When I am choosing what to read I have to know something about the author or the book to get me past a bad cover. If I am just looking for new books, I won't even pick it up if it has a hoaky or girly cover. And look at that cover? I mean, come on :) If that wasn't bad enough, this is the description of the author on the back: "Jodi Picoult is the UK's number one bestselling women's fiction author." Women's Fiction? Clearly this is a marketing tool. Having now read the book, I don't think they would have trouble marketing it as just a book if they so choose... but they didn't. Picoult writes "women's fiction." Personally, I would be curious how one defines that exactly. Fiction written by a women? Fiction with female characters in it? Fiction with a book study guide at the back? Fiction with an element of...

Apparently my last post on this topic gave some people the impression that my time at Regent was terrible or something. That is not what I meant to convey. Rather, I was thinking about my time at regent, and my upcoming graduation, in comparison with my other graduation experiences. In High School I spent every day for 3 years with most of the same people. Upon coming to the end, I was with that same group, and we were all transition in the same way. We were moving on to the next step of our lives, looking forward to what was coming, feeling fear, trepidation, excitement, joy, etc. all together. In my undergrad at UofA I had spent four years living in a different city, in both residence and a home with a bunch of friends, and while not all of us finished at the same time, it was still a very close knit community to be leaving, and it was still a point at which many of us transitioned in the same way together. We were moving on to the next step of our lives, looking forward to wha...

Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Suffer. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. 310pgs This isn't the first time I have mentioned this book, but I just finished it today. As I have mentioned before, it is a topic of some interest to me. Depending on your particular bent or training, the question may seem easy to answer in the positive or negative. From a philosophical point of view, God is impassible, and so of course he doesn't suffer. From a gospel story point of view, the natural reply is "What about Jesus, the Son of God, one member of the Holy Trinity, suffering and dying on the cross?" Indeed, and such is the dilemma. Of course, it is only compounded by our 20th century focus on Empathy (I just recently found out that this word first entered the English language in 1919! Different book though) and our desire to have a God who shares our suffering, with the nearly assumed correlative position that if God does not suffer with us, then he can...

I predicted that I would have more to say about graduation, and I do. I don't know how much more, hence the question in the title. I just got an email today from Regent college inviting me to a free workshop they offer to help people deal with leaving regent. I was surprised, and commented to Tom that sometimes Regent is a little bit to touchy-feely for me. But, I also realized that my Regent experience has been different than what is considered the 'norm' (at least by the college itself). I have always lived off campus, and not just a little bit off campus, but waaaaay off campus (maple ridge, surrey, and coquitlam). So, I have never been able to base my life, in any way other than scheduling courses, around Regent events or community. For the same reason, I have always incorporated distance education into my Regent degree; less travel, easier to schedule. And if that wasn't disconnected enough, I took a year off in the middle of my degree, meaning that the v...

On Tuesday all of the staff of BAC went to a "Faith At Home" conference. I was one of the people who pushed for us to go to this conference. Upon seeing the short video where Mark Holmen outlines what the focus is, as well as their advertising which focuses on the alarming rate at which university students are leaving the church (an issue over which I am also concerned), I thought it promised some discussions and ideas we could really benefit from. (things like ministry silos, and moving the practice of Christianity outside of the church building) So, we went. And as I sat through the first session, led by someone from Focus on the Family, I couldn't help thinking: "What have I gotten myself into?" And I do not mean that in a good way. We were told all about how central the family is, and how if we aren't doing family ministry then we aren't really doing any good, and so on. The speaker went on to layout these facts: Jesus has promised, in Matt...

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Inigo Montoya "God is unconditionally adaptable in his dynamic and passionate love because his love is immutably and impassibly in act." Thomas Weinandy

I'm finished! Done! It's over! Today I took a trip to Regent College to hand in the last assignments for the last course of my MDiv program. It's hard to believe, and it feels strange. I've been a student for a ridiculously long time now... going back to grade 1, its been 20 years (and if you add breaks its been 22). Just at regent, I have been a student for nearly 5 years now (with 1 off in the middle). Suddenly, I am no longer a student. And I probably won't be again for some time (though I do still hope to do a PhD one day). Have I lost part of my identity? Is that why I suddenly have this unquenchable urge to read and write? Maybe, but I don't think I want to go there right now. Feels too much like a touchy feely spirituality assignment. Regardless, its good to be done. I don't walk across the stage until April 26th, but between then and now all I do is wait. Probably in the next couple of days I will do another, or a few other, posts on this ...

Peter S. Beagle, We Never Talk About My Brother. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2009. 219pgs My leisure reading has been, for a very long time, focused largely on the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres. There are some exceptions, naturally, but at least 90%, if not more, falls into this category. As such, I have reached a point, several times now, of despair. I often wonder if I've read all the really good authors and must now settle for passable entertainment at best. My despair rarely grows too deep though; I usually find another good author before too long. In this case, the man who has lifted the fog is Peter S. Beagle. I feel like I've found something new under the sun. Of course, this is not actually the case. The reality is that Beagle has been writing since 1958, and his most famous novel, The Last Unicorn, is on many lists of "top 10 best fantasy books" and the like (and on my short list of fiction to read soon). How I missed him for so long i...

Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. New York: Seabury Books, 2007. 260pgs Introduction: I'm pretty sure this isn't a trend, but here is my second book review and it happens to be of another work published posthumously. Friedman was working on this book when he died in 1996. Three years later, it was published privately (what of it there is, including an introduction, epilogue, 5 completed chapters and 3 incomplete chapters. Apparently this is the entire book in outline, but not in the content of each chapter). In 2007 it was published on a larger, public, scale. Summary: In this book, Friedman argues that the current lack of leadership in America is a symptom of the regressive emotional processes reigning in our culture. To do this, Friedman compares modern day America to Medieval Europe before the renaissance, arguing that despite our technological advances we are in much the same place now as then. The positive assertion whi...

She is at peace, restful, sleeping. Her world secure, time is sweet, and all is right with the world. Laying in her cage with padded bars. True, those bars constrain, but they also comfort and welcome. Huddled close and warm; what more could she want? Crises, catastrophe, panic. Source unknown, the world is wrong. Tremors like giant hiccups shudder through her entire body, ringing gasping cries from unwilling lungs, forcing awareness on a mind not present. From head to toe she shakes. Now, now this panic has a source. Giant arms reach down through the non-existent ceiling of her cage, each longer than her entire body. Panic intensifies and shudders turn to writhing. It is true, those arms bring comfort and welcome, but they also constrain. To unwelcome awareness and sound is added unsettling movement. But, slowly, everything changes. Awareness gradually narrows to a nearby heartbeat not her own: steady, firm, secure. Soothing whispers break through the gasping cries. And ...

"As long as I keep talking children are dying." - Catherin Wong (who continued to talk for several more minutes) "You can't rely on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." - Mark Twain "Rather than simply telling it like it is, the social science construction of the reality of relationships is virtual reality. Psychodynamics is a model, culture is a perspective, gender is a dimension. They are angels of entry into human problems, ways of organizing our minds, and they should not be confused with "the truth," much less the whole truth." - Edwin Frieman, A Failure of Nerve , 192-193

"The most insidious message that children - and adults - get from the average television program is the notion that motivation is singular, that all questions have answers, that justice always triumphs, that love conquers all, that life is unambiguous, and that there will always be a deus ex machine 'in the wings' waiting to rush in." - Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve (New York: Seabury Books, 1997/2007) 82. _________________________________________________________ "When we begin relying on the Internet for all of our news and information we will turn into a nation of zombies." - Neil Postman (source unconfirmed. I found this on Wikiquote, through Wikipedia, using Google, immediately after reading the internet news and eating my afternoon brains-snack)

Young artists for Haiti - Wavin' Flag link courtesy of Christopher

"Its like rubbing my back with a small cat." - Anonymous "The safest place for ships is in the harbor, but thats not why ships were built." - Anonymous

I remember reading Jurassic Park for the first time; I was young, and it introduced me to an author and a style that I enjoyed immensely. Since then, I have been a fan of Michael Crichton's books. Some of his books have been disappointing (like State of Fear and Timeline) but most of them have ranged from good to highly entertaining, which is the perfect range when one is looking for reading which is relaxing but still possessing some substance. That said, Kristina, Hannah, and I went to the library this weekend, and as I walked with Hannah, diligently keeping her from tearing pages out of library books, she pulled off of the 'popular' shelf a book entitled Pirate Latitudes . I wouldn't have given it a second glance, except that out of the corner of my eye I caught the author: Michael Crichton. How could this be? Sadly, Crichton passed away in 2008, and I was certain I had read all of the books he had published at that point. The answer was in the flap: appare...

More random lists of stuff I'm thinking about. Friedman's Fables. I just started reading " A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix " by Edwin Friedman, and I plan on getting " Friedman's Fables " from the library. In the meantime, I looked it up, and found several of them online: The Bridge , The Friendly Forest , and 'Round in Circles . Very interesting; worth reading. Go check them out. RIGHT NOW! Why are you still here? *boot* God's Impassibility. This is a big one for me; skip the paragraph if you don't care. I, like the majority of modern theologians, or so it seems, have been quick to push away from and deny the traditional philosophical idea that God is impassible; especially that he does not suffer. After all, how can we say this after Christ, the incarnation and the cross? Isn't it plain that God did suffer, already, past tense? And what about Auschwitz? We have all heard the famous story, shared by E...

Driving is, depending on your personality, a delight, a bore, a frustration, time wasted, a privilege, etc. I think most of us don't think about it very much. Lately I've been consciously seeking to use all my alone time in the car for prayer or worship. This has made a huge difference for me in attitude and driving habits, without even going into the spiritual benefits. That's not what this is post is about though. I want to share a game. Its something Kristina and I made up before we had Hannah, a way to hang out in the car, have fun, and spend time together. What you need: A car with gas to spare (this, and time, is the cost of your entertainment), along with all the other requirements that go with this (like a driver's license!), good company, and good music. Preferably your good company is also a good DJ, but this is not necessary. The Rules: How you spend the time is up to you; chatting, singing, listening, whatever. What isn't up to you is where you ...

Matthew 17:1-13 , Mark 9:2-13 , Luke 9:28-36 Jesus goes up on a mountain to pray, taking with him only Peter, James, and John (can you imagine being a disciples who was left behind?). As Jesus prays, His face changes, His clothes become as bright as lightning, and Moses and Elijah drop by for tea and crumpets. Ever wonder what they talked about? Me neither, at least not until now. Now, because I have to wonder. Not only that, I have to imagine and write down that conversation; it is my final assignment for my MDiv degree at Regent college. The only clue we are given comes from Luke who tells us that " They spoke about his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem." As for me, every time I try to start writing this paper I either feel like I am being arrogant and foolishly academic, or ridiculously irreverent and irreligious. Does Moses greet Jesus with a "Yo, dude, how's it hanging?" or does he fall on his knees before his lord?...

Most of my posts have topics. Anything titled 'on my mind' will be more like ramblings, lists, stuff I'm reading, random thoughts, whatever. Its like a journal entry which, if you possess the fortitude to venture into such untamed wilderness, you can read. So whats on my mind? Reason and faith, science and religion, and the impassibility of God. What do those have to do with each other? Nothing, except that I am reading a book on the first and last, and going to a conference on the middle one (but not until may). "Reason and the Reasons of faith" Excellent book; or at least most of the essays are. "Does God Suffer?" by Weinandy; just started. Regent pastors Conference; my first one, hope its good (Alan Torrance is one of the speakers, I'm excited). ICON Olympics this Friday. I wish I knew how to do video editing, or had time to learn before tomorrow, or had time to get someone to help me. Was going to ask on Tuesday night's prayer meet...