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I can haz tiketz?
Link.
Yeah, this is being held in Atlanta Sept. 11 and 12, for Becky and I to go will be $130 dollars, but I think I’m going to pull together the scrath to pay for it.
BTW- If anyone is attending and needs a couch to crash on (and isn’t allergic to out dogs and our cat) then shoot me an email.
pluralism
For starters, I should lay out my beliefs on heaven/hell. I’m not a literal interpretation guy, I don’t think that there is actually a lake of fire that souls will burn in eternal conscious torment. I believe there is such thing as separation from God, but don’t necessarily think that the choice has to be made here. I think I’ll be spending quite a bit of time with some Hindus, Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of many other religious in the life after death, and as Wright terms it “The life after life after death.”
Now that that’s out of the way… I’m not a pluralist either, at least not a religious pluralist. In fact, I’m downright against religious pluralism, at least in the sense that there are many ways to heaven. Let’s face it, the notion that any way is OK is a complete crock of contrived bull manure. I think there is only one way to heaven, or the New Earth after heaven (again if your an N.T. Wright fan), I think the whole “Way, Truth, and Life, No one comes to the Father but by Me” thing is true.
So to recap- I think that pretty much everyone gets to be in “Heaven” but I think the only way to “Heaven” is Jesus. (Please forgive my use of the quotes around Heaven, that whole issue is murky) So to repeat myself, I am not a religious pluralist.
Now, in case you missed it, a recent Pew Study shows that 70% of Americans (please note it says Americans here, not Evangelicals) believe that there are many paths to heaven (Religious Pluralism), and “57% of Evangelical Christians were willing to accept that theirs might not be the only path to salvation.”
This is actually bad news to me. In my opinion, we need to understand other religions, work with other religions, learn from other religions, but fully understand that Jesus is the only way to into “Heaven.” Some may say this is a good thing, and I hope they are saying it because it shows that Evangelicals and Americans in general are more accepting of other religions, but we need to understand that deeper than that acceptance is what appears to me as a weakening of our religious understandings.
I don’t want to come across as Fundamentalist or even Evangelical here, but I do what to emphatically state that we need to understand that if we believe the narrative of the Bible to be true, than Jesus is the only way of restoration, and that way is not narrow in the sense that not many people will be allowed through (as some Bible thumpers beleive) but is narrow in the sense that it is the only way.
Forgive me for the repetition, but I take this issue quite seriously, and I feel like it just shows another way that the church as we know it is failing to provide any sort of solid theology for the laeity to understand the gravity of “salvation theology.”
(HT: Blake Huggins)
the truth project
So I’ve made it no secret that I’m not a big fan of certain things that the college group I’m a part of does. From the “apologetics” to the attempt to mimic the now defunct 7:22, some of the things just don’t sit right with me.
A couple weeks ago I was told that I would really want to attend the summer series that the group is putting on, and then I checked out the video trailer for the DVD series they’re doing. While I wasn’t entirely paying attention, I did see that Ravi Zacharias was one of the speakers, which piqued my curiosity. The last recollection I had of Ravi was in a video where he quips, about Emergent, “Did they get bored with God?” I didn’t really give it all much thought at the time, I think I was working on another project, so it just kind of fell to the back of my mind.
Well, we played the trailer for the college group on Thursday night, and I’m the video guy, so I watched the thing through a couple hours before the service. That’s when I really started to notice things. The video seemed to be set up as a highly (literal six day) Creationistic account of things, which I guess shouldn’t have surprised me. But something else bothered me, their whole “Worldviews” thing, I just hadn’t heard it used and sound like that before. Well, that’s when I saw the biggest key, the big old “Focus on the Family Ministries” blurb right at the end of the video. Oh boy, it’s on.
That’s when I started doing a bit of research into the whole deal. Unfortunately there was not but one “critical” view of the DVD’s, so I had to use other sites, but here’s the essence of what I discovered.
It can be summed up with this blurb, from christianpost.com
Some 700 believers sat in the pews of First Baptist Church Friday night to learn of the “great battle” they are waging in at Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project training session. The cosmos battle: Truth vs. Lies; Christian worldview vs. Postmodern worldview; God is vs. God isn’t.
That’s right ladies and gentlemen; Postmodernists are liars who don’t believe in God. The Truth Project’s own website states that the series was created because of a Barna study that says that only 5% of adults surveyed have a Biblical Worldview. What the hell? Who are they to define Biblical worldview? Barna, by the way, defines biblical worldview thusly;
For the purposes of the research, a biblical worldview was defined as believing that absolute moral truths exist; that such truth is defined by the Bible; and firm belief in six specific religious views. Those views were that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life; God is the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and He stills rules it today; salvation is a gift from God and cannot be earned; Satan is real; a Christian has a responsibility to share their faith in Christ with other people; and the Bible is accurate in all of its teachings.
Really? Those are the requirements? And they wonder why only 5% actually hold to them.
So, I’m deciding whether or not to attend at all during this “series” or if I want to boycott it out right, not that boycotting it would make any difference to anyone who propagates this DVD series within the church. We’ll see.
This by the way, all gives me fodder for my next post… stay tuned, there should be some interesting conversation that shoots for that one.
By the way, have you checked out the Indian Taxi Fund?
when theology and life come into conflict
I guess it’s inevitable, your theology (if it’s “growing”) and your life and lifestyle must at some point come into conflict. I guess the toughest thing to do is to act on whatever revelations have been given to you. But this is difficult for me (and I guess most people) for many reasons, it will likely bring conflict with those you have grown close to, it may make life uncomfortable for you, and if it is going to cut off a financial source, then it will hurt.
But, what do you do when you know that it must be done?
What do you do when you’re teaching and you have something to say, but know that the church you’re teaching at wouldn’t approve out it? Do you drop subtle hints about what your idea is, or do you come out and say it?
What do you do when you give several hours out of every week to support a ministry you don’t agree with? A ministry that, it seems, the further you move one direction tries to pull you harder in the opposite.
What do you do when you disagree with the foundation of the very system you find yourself within? Can you be prophetic from within the system? Will the system even listen to you while you are still within it?
What do you do when you desire conversation that goes deeper than pleasantries, movies, and music, but have friends who refuse, or you have friends who are uncomfortable with ideologies outside their own?
Ok, here’s the setup. All of the things I’ve mentioned above I have run up against in the past month. I could name specifics, but I’m afraid if I do, some of those involved would be hurt by it, so I won’t (the last time I mentioned specifics I hurt someone else, who I would never want to hurt). In regards to each of the above questions, here are my likely responses in the future.
I’ll probably find a new venue for teaching, or if I continue to teach within the same venue, I’ll alert them prior to my speaking of anything I might say that they’d not like. (Knowing full well that it would spell the end of my teaching there).
I’m divided on leaving the ministry that I’m working with but don’t agree with. I could talk to the head of that ministry, but I have a feeling that person wouldn’t quite get my perspective, as it leaves the status quo (and I’m finding that most people are quite uncomfortable with diverging from the norm).
The system I find myself within is coming to a close whether the proprietors know it or not. The post modern era can’t (and won’t) stand for a continuation of it, so I guess I have to decide if I should jump ship now, or wait till the ship has sunk.
The hardest question is of course, my friends. I’m faced with having to drive an hour and a half (to freakin’ Tennessee of all places) to actually have a meaningful conversation with anyone but my wife. Again, I love my friends dearly, but I don’t think some of them are at all open to conversation or viewpoints other than their own, which is frustrating.
So there you have it, theology and life coming at each other full head. Whirlwind experience, but who knows, maybe it will end up being a fun one?
books, beer, and wings
It seems like my wife and I have the most interesting conversations at Taco Mac. For those of you not familiar with the chain it’s a bar with a restaurant attached, with a selection of hundreds of beers, and pretty good wings. But it seems that when we sit down the theology light switch gets flipped and that’s all we really discuss the entire time.
We don’t normally argue or disagree during these conversations, but we tend to build upon each others thoughts, it’s pretty fun. Now, in the case of Saturday we did have one argument going on, in which I was completely, to say it politely, pwned.
We were discussing our reading habits, Becky, an English major, reads through fiction all the time (she’s on a Flannery O’Connor kick if you’re interested), and I spend all of my time reading non-fictions, mostly emergenty stuff. So we we’re discussing who’s form of reading presented a purer form of information and theology.
I could not, for the life of me, see how information could be garnered from a fictional book the way it is from a non-fiction. And the argument continued on for some time that way, she insisting that fiction does indeed provide a purer source of information, because you are not told what to think, you are given various perspectives and gain insight based on those. I didn’t agree with her because most of the books I read don’t tell you what to think, they just give you information on various topics and let you build your own conclusions around them.
But then it happened, in one statement my whole argument was nullified.
My viewpoint on the Bible is such that I don’t feel like it should read like a non-fiction, I feel like it’s the story of a relationship, not basic instructions before… eh you get the point.
So Becky came out with: “For someone who thinks that we can gain insight from understanding the relationship portrayed in the Bible, you sure do loathe to let that happen elsewhere.”
Game, set, match.
Thoughts? Opinions?