TIM KELLER on presenting the Gospel as both challenge and appeal

The following quotation is from a comment by Tim Keller in a blog discussion about his views on sharing the Gospel by connecting the story of Jesus to baseline cultural narratives. He says, "you have to show in line with the culture's own (best) aspirations, hopes, and convictions that its own cultural story won't be resolved or have 'a happy ending' outside of Christ." At the same time he explains that an effective presentation of the Gospel will both appeal to and challenge existing cultural narratives. He makes the following exegesis of 1 Corinthians 1.22-25 to help illustrate this:

1 Cor 1:22-25 is a good example of what I'm talking about. Your own Paul Barnett talks about it somewhat in his commentary on the text. Jews wanted a powerful Messiah, and the Greeks' ideal was the philosopher king. These were 'baseline cultural narratives.' For Jews--power, for Greeks--philosophy and wisdom. Paul preaches the cross to both challenge and appeal. He uses the weakness of the cross to show the Jews that they've made an idol of power, and the foolishness of the cross to show the Greeks they've made an idol of wisdom. And yet, he also is willing to preach Christ as the true power and the true wisdom. So on the one hand, he adapts and on the other hand he challenges. He is saying to Jews, 'You seek power? Well, here is the true power.' He says to Greeks, 'You seek wisdom? Well here is true wisdom.'

I thought this was a really helpful description of what Paul is doing here and a useful model for sharing the Gospel.

I was reflecting recently with someone about modern cultural narratives which provide opportunities for sharing the Gospel - connection points. We're all familiar with the way that films, for example, can provide what you might call 'leaping-off points' for talking about spiritual realities; for example, a movie like the Matrix gave us a whole new set of vocabulary for talking about choices and faith and reality. But are there other cultural narratives which we should be making better use of, thinking creatively about connections with the Gospel story? One I considered was the environmental narrative that's so current right now, as we think seriously about the consequences of our choices and our stewardship of this planet. Are there ways to speak into this theme and engage with these questions that bring the light of Jesus to bear? What about the big themes of national security, terrorism, personal liberty and the surveillance issue (privacy vs security)? How do we respond and what story are we telling in the light of these?


Tim Keller's 'The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism' sounds like an interesting read.


Thanks Matt!

Quote(s) of the Day, Olympic Style

"...a gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you're not enough without one, you'll never be enough with one."
Irv Blitzer, Cool Runnings

"Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever."
1 Corinthians 9.24-25

GREG BOYD on what it looks like when God reigns

Last week at camp I finally got hold of my own copy of Greg Boyd's talks on the Kingdom of God from Revive! 2005. I've listened to them before but these are such fantastic talks that I wanted my own copies to listen to and lend out!

I first heard these talks on CD about two and a half years ago and they made a huge impact on me. I'm not sure any sermons, or indeed speaker, have been as influential in my life. I remember listening to them and just going 'yes, yes, yes - that's what it's about!' and being completely moved, even overwhelmed by the truth of it. Faith-growing, brain-stretching, life-giving...

Here's a 3 minute clip of Greg Boyd talking about what the kingdom of God - the "dome (domain) in which God is king" - is like:

'What does it look like when God reigns?'

Link to mp3 if the player's not working for you.

DOROTHY L SAYERS on Jesus the Man

"For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is - limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death - he had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile."

From 'The Man Born to be King' by Dorothy L. Sayers

Wordle-ing

Whoever thought text analysis could be so fun! Wordle creates 'word clouds' from text you provide - and produces some surprisingly striking images in just a few seconds! Try it yourself to see...

Here's one or two I made earlier.. (well actually, just now!)


(from the -slightly edited- Wikipedia entry for Durham)


(from an old essay - can you guess what on?)


(from another old essay!)


(from a well-known song...)

It's a bit addictive really!

Here's one I didn't make:

(the complete text of the ESV Bible)
Isn't it interesting what words come up?

[Thanks to Matt!]

How fixed is the script?

I was interested to read Ben Witherington's view on God's 'script' and the significance of human decisions.

"Whilst, God could have done otherwise, he has chosen to allow us to be viable partners with God in ministry and the working out of his will and Kingdom on earth, beings capable of making un-predetermined choices that have incredible consequences. The issue is not the sovereignty of God - the issue is how God has chosen to exercise his power and will. And what the Bible says about this is that he has not pre-determined all things from before the foundations of the world.

Human history is not merely a preordained play, played out perfectly to a pre-ordained script. On the contrary while there is a blue-print, or a general script, God has allowed, indeed invited us to make the drama like a night at the Improv, improvising our roles as we go, and making viable choices of moment and consequence along the way. Are we supposed to follow the general instructions in the script? Well yes, as they provide the boundaries beyond which we ought not to go and show us what character and kind of roles we should play. But of course we may fail to play our parts well, or indeed at all."

I absolutely agree. Saying that God always gets his way makes no sense of Jesus' instructions on prayer, in particular the Lord's prayer:
"Let your kingdom come, your will be done..."

Another interesting link I came across on Ben's blog is a 'blogalogue' between Bart Ehrman and N. T. Wright on the problem of suffering. Ehrman has just published a book called 'God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer'. NT Wright is as eloquent and graceful in his replies as ever. I always find him refreshing on this subject as he takes the existence of evil seriously and isn't content to attribute all suffering in the world to human choices.

"...the Gospels constituted, and still constitute, a challenge to all expectations, particularly in that they link – as readers for hundreds have years have found it difficult to do – the story of Jesus’ kingdom-inauguration with the story of his crucifixion and resurrection. Somehow, they are saying, this is what it looks like when the good, all-powerful and all-loving God is in charge of the world. You may say that if this is what they’re saying then the God of whom they speak is not ‘all-powerful’ in the way we might have imagined, and I suspect that is in a sense correct. Near the heart of Jesus’ proclamation lies a striking redefinition of power itself, which looks as though it’s pointing in the direction of God’s ‘running of the world’ (if that’s the right phrase) in what you might call a deliberately, almost studiedly, self-abnegating way, running the world through an obedient, and ultimately suffering, human being, with that obedience, and especially that suffering, somehow instrumental in the whole process. What ‘we would want God to do’ – to have God measure up to our standards of ‘how a proper, good and powerful God would be running the world’! – seems to be the very thing that Jesus was calling into question.

The mystery of Jesus himself, then, is for me near the heart of – not ‘the answer’, because I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘the answer’, but – the matrix of thought and life within which God’s people are called to continue to grapple with the problem. This is where, in Evil and the Justice of God, I try to draw together traditional discussions of ‘the atonement’ and traditional discussions of ‘the problem of evil’ and suggest that it’s odd that they should ever have been separated, since they seem to go together so closely in the Bible itself. (And can’t be reduced, I suggest, to the ‘God punishes sin’ logic; I have tended to include some elements of that within the Christus Victor motif, which, yes, involves suprahuman cosmic powers and all that. Hard though they are to describe adequately, they are even harder, in my view, to ignore.)"

EUGENE PETERSON on Well-Worn Paths

"Christians tramp well-worn paths: obedience has a history.

"This history is important, for without it we are at the mercy of whims. Memory is a databank we use to evaluate our position and make decisions. With a biblical memory we have two thousand years of experience from which to make the off-the-cuff responses that are required each day in the life of faith. If we are going to live adequately and maturely as the people of God, we need more data to work from than our own experience can give us. ...

"A Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingertips and Christ in his heart will know how much and how little value to put on his own momentary feelings and the experience of the last week. ...

"What we require is obedience - the strength to stand and the willingness to leap, and the sense to known when to do which. Which is exactly what we get when an accurate memory of God's ways is combined with a lively hope in his promises."

From 'A Long Obedience in the Same Direction' by Eugene Peterson

No Neutral Ground?

“There is no neutral ground in the universe; every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counter-claimed by Satan.”

CS Lewis

Theological highlights from Revive!

Chris Forster - Revelation, not Information
Andrew tells Peter...'Come and meet the man who is the Christ' (John 1)
But it is not until later that Peter truly recognises Jesus: "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God" and Jesus tells him "this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven." (Matt 16:16,17)

Greg Boyd

God looks like Jesus Christ.
(Anything that doesn't look like Jesus Christ is the result of wills other than God's)

"Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." (Eph 6:12)
- therefore, no person can be the enemy. If it has flesh and blood, we're not fighting it. On the contrary, people in bondage are those people we're trying to save - this is who we're fighting for, not against!

Regard every sin you see in someone else as a speck of dust, and your own as a two-by-four.

When Jesus was faced with sickness and oppression, he didn't pray 'accepting' prayers...he got angry. He had a theology of revolution, of revolt! In which we lay down our lives...

Faith is the 'substance of things anticipated'. We're rarely certain about anything, but faith is the having enough confidence in order to act on something (e.g. to get on a plane).

All prayer is powerful and effective...you have pushed the world further in a kingdom direction.
No such thing as a wasted prayer.

How you look at something determines what you see...which affects your life.

TERRY WAITE on Whatever Comes

"...three resolutions to support me through whatever was to come: no regrets, no sentimentality, no self-pity."

In 'Taken on Trust', his autobiographical account of five years in solitary confinement as a hostage in Lebanon.

DWIGHT L. MOODY on being read

"Of one hundred men, one will read the Bible; the ninety-nine will read the Christian."

God as Engineer or Programmer?

I enjoyed this excerpt from the 'Christianity and Science' chapter of Christianity on Trial by Vincent Carroll And David Shiflett.

Some clerics, such as the Dominican friar Giovanni de San Gimignano (d. 1323), actually encouraged sermonizing on technical topics. He included in his encyclopedia for preachers a description of everything from windmills to fortifications, to glass making. For that matter, observes Gimpel, "the greatest homage the Middle Ages offered the architect-engineer was to represent the Almighty, in thirteenth and fourteenth century miniatures, as an architect-engineer Himself, measuring the universe with a large compass. It is as if today, in film on the Almighty, God were to be represented programming a computer."

G K CHESTERTON on the eternal appetite

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy

EVDOKIMOV on Vocation

"One's vocation is found exactly on the crest between necessity and creative freedom, along the line of faith, which reveals the direction as its free and strong confession grows... One's entire vocation is an option, an answer to a call that has been heard. It can simply be the present condition. It is never a voice that clarifies everything. The dimness inherent in faith never leaves us. "

Paul Evdokimov, quoted in 'Real Sex' by Lauren F. Winner

It's no turkey

"Warren stresses that he's not for the right wing or the left wing but for the whole bird. Amen to that as well. Just need to make sure the bird one is holistically endorsing is the Gospel bird, and not a turkey."

Ben Witherington praises Rick Warren as a model of faith on his blog.

It's great to see one Christian writer being so generous about another, and both Rick Warren (the author of The Purpose Driven Life) and Ben W come across very well. The USA Today article Ben cites on 'America's most influential pastor' is also well worth a read.

CS Lewis on Time

We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. "How he's grown!" we exclaim, "How time flies!" as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.

CS Lewis in Reflections on the Psalms

Why you should sit still in church

Dave read me this excerpt from The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass (aged 37 3/4) last week and it made me laugh out loud! I haven't met any Doreen Cooks in Kings yet, but the near-familiarity of this story made it all the funnier!

Sunday December 15th

Our church is getting like an auction room. One blink and you get ministered to. Sit still and keep your eyes shining - that's my motto. This morning was Edwin Burlesford's fault. Forty-five minutes on 'sin'! A record nine-fruit-gum talk. Halfway through, I was checking supplies when Edwin suddenly shouted 'LUST!', and made me drop the packet under my chair. Put my head down between my knees to locate it, then couldn't get up because Doreen Cook pressed her hands down on the back of my head. She prayed that 'our despairing brother would move from darknes to light'. I was all for that - I couldn't see a thing. When she let me get up she had one of those roguish Christian smiles on her face. Came very close to really giving her something to forgive me for. Everyone thinks I've got a big lust problem now. At coffee time they all smiled reassuringly at me. Leonard Thynn hugged me. I signed Edwin's carol-singing list for next Saturday to show that I'm not all bad.

A real rest

"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me - watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly."

(Matt 11:28-30 in The Message)

A letter from Cyprian

This seems a cheerful world, Donatus, when I view it from this fair garden, under the shadow of these vines. But if I climbed some great mountain and looked out over the wide lands, you know very well what I would see-brigands on the high roads, pirates on the seas; in the amphitheatres men murdered to please applauding crowds; under all roofs misery and selfishness. It is really a bad world, Donatus, an incredibly bad world. Yet in the midst of it I have found a quiet and holy people. They have discovered a joy which is a thousand times better than any pleasures of this sinful life. They are despised and persecuted, but they care not. They have overcome the world. These people, Donatus, are the Christians - and I am one of them.

St. Cyprian, c. 258, a letter

God in her arms

Mary, did you know that your baby boy
is Lord of all creation?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy
will one day rule the nations?

Did you know that your baby boy
is Heaven's perfect Lamb?
The sleeping child you're holding
is the great I Am!

From the song 'Mary, Did You Know?', by Mark Lowry and Buddy Greene.

I came across this song today on an old CD, remembering how much I like it, despite the cheesiness. For me, it captures perfectly some of the thrilling impossibilities of the Incarnation. Reminds me of a joking comment made half-seriously by a (believing) friend earlier in the week: "How can an infinite God be contained in a finite body? It doesn't make sense!"

The question is brought into even starker relief in this song. In the Gospels our account of Jesus is of an adult, mature and in control, but here we're reminded that Mary held the Creator of the universe asleep in her arms. As an earlier line in the song puts it: "When you kiss your little baby, you kiss the face of God!"

Wow! What an incredible mystery, a miracle beyond miracles. The Lord of creation, "through whom all things were created" (1 John 3) was himself created as a little baby, who fed and cried like any other. As Philippians 2:7 states, this is a God who "emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness."

And I thought quantum physics was crazy!