World of Sven

Shadows Of Divine Things: Wright on Justification in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Part 1)

2006-02-25T10:09:00.000+01:00

Shadows Of Divine Things: Wright on Justification in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Part 1)

The End of World of Sven?

2005-05-16T01:09:00.000+02:00

Well yes, in a way...

This will be the last post I make on this blog, but in case this makes any of you want to die then let me reassure you that I intend to carry blogging for a long while yet. If that makes you want to die, then don't update your bookmarks.

From now on, all my blogging will take place here:

http://worldofsven.co.uk/weblog/

All theology and Bible related stuff will take place here:

http://worldofsven.co.uk/theology /

See you there!

Sven out.

Absence

2005-05-14T00:30:00.000+02:00

I'm away this weekend so there won't be any blogging.

There hasn't been any blogging today either. The reason for this is that I've been desperately, desperately trying to create a template that is compatible with the Pivot blogging software. I have to say though, I used to think that Blogger was pretty ace but Pivot kicks Blogger in the face without even breaking into a sweat. Seriously, it can do everything.

I'm very easily pleased, but I'm also becoming a nerd.

Tomorrow I'm off to hear Greg Haslam give a series of lectures on the Holy Spirit, which should be quite good. It's very rare that we ever get English speakers coming here to Germany so I'm looking forward to it.

Is it just me, or am I beginning to write boring blog entries?

Hurrah

2005-05-13T03:18:00.000+02:00

World of Sven has had it's first visitor from Bulgaria, now that is exciting.

Perhaps even more exciting, I've now bought my own webspace (thanks for the tips John) and slowly but surely I will start building a proper grown-ups website that will still have all my blog stuff on but a whole load more things besides, though I'm still not 100% sure what that will be. One thing I do guarantee is that there will be lots of buttons, oh yes, there shall be buttons. I'm not about to move this blog across any time soon though, it'll take a while to sort out.

I've concocted a template that I intend to use as front page. The blogger version is currently being tested on my photo blog. I know the green-brown colours are a little vomit inducing but all opinions welcome. Thanks to Ruthsarian for the templates.

I really miss Bryony. We've been apart for three months now (though we saw each other for about a week during April) and I hate being away from her. I'm still so excited to see her when I get back and I still get goosebumps when I think about being with her again. She makes me feel more special than I think anyone else ever has :)

"Steady on with the soppiness there Sven" I hear you say, "I thought you were all about guns and fighting and kung-fu and football?" Well I'm not, but I'll try and keep the mushy-love down to a minimum, for all your benefits.

A plea and lament for those who are being tortured

2005-05-13T02:52:00.000+02:00

Why, O LORD, do you stand far off?
Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak,
who are caught in the schemes he devises.

He boasts of the cravings of his heart;
he blesses the greedy and reviles the LORD.

In his pride the wicked does not seek him;
in all his thoughts there is no room for God.

His ways are always prosperous;
he is haughty and your laws are far from him;
he sneers at all his enemies.

He says to himself, "Nothing will shake me;
I'll always be happy and never have trouble."

His mouth is full of curses and lies and threats;
trouble and evil are under his tongue.

He lies in wait near the villages;
from ambush he murders the innocent,
watching in secret for his victims.

He lies in wait like a lion in cover;
he lies in wait to catch the helpless;
he catches the helpless and drags them off in his net.

His victims are crushed, they collapse;
they fall under his strength.

He says to himself, "God has forgotten;
he covers his face and never sees!"

Arise, LORD! Lift up your hand, O God.
Do not forget the helpless.

Why does the wicked man revile God?
Why does he say to himself,
"He won't call me to account"?

But you, O God, do see trouble and grief;
you consider it to take it in hand.
The victim commits himself to you;
you are the helper of the fatherless.

Break the arm of the wicked and evil man;
call him to account for his wickedness
that would not be found out.

You hear, O LORD, the desire of the afflicted;
you encourage them, and you listen to their cry,

defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more.

"Because of the oppression of the weak
and the groaning of the needy,
I will now arise," says the LORD.
"I will protect them from those who malign them."

But to the wicked, God says:
"What right have you to recite my laws
or take my covenant on your lips?

These things you have done and I kept silent;
you thought I was altogether like you.
But I will rebuke you
and accuse you to your face.

"Consider this, you who forget God,
or I will tear you to pieces, with none to rescue."

Amen, so be it.

Taken from Psalms 10,11,12 and 50

A thought about grace

2005-05-13T02:24:00.000+02:00

Once upon a time back at college we had a guest lecturer who came and taught us Romans. He wasn't very good as I recall, and due to him talking endlessly off the topic he was left to teach us all of Romans 5-16 in a single day, which quite frankly cannot be done. One thing he did say stuck with me however:

"Imagine it's Judgement Day. You've been received into eternal paradise by God and behind you you see all those who have rejected the Gospel about to be cast into hell forever. All the Hitlers of history, Osama bin Laden, the atheists you argued with, the rapists and the murderers and all God's enemies are weeping floods of tears as they realise that you were right to follow Christ and that they are now going to be damned forever.

Then imagine that God says 'Stop! I've changed my mind. Everyone who hated and rejected me can come into heaven too.' How would you feel if that happened? Would you feel overjoyed, or cheated and secretly disappointed?

The way you answer that question shows just much or how little you appreciate God's unconditional love and kindness to you."

Blog updates

2005-05-12T17:06:00.000+02:00

1. My oldest sister Gemma is blogger of the week.

2. Dr Alban is early 1990s artist of the week, as requested by Kieran.

3. Sven of the Week is a rather fetching jacket spotted by Thérèse. It is available in teak or 'classic' black. 'Classic' black hahaha, is there a 'non-classic' black?

4. I'm listening to Chopin, who is not very metal, but not too bad overall.

5. More books! Current favourite is 'What St Paul Really Said' by N T Wright, highly recommended to anyone interested in studying the New Testament seriously even if you have no background in biblical studies. Reformed people be warned, you won't like it.

6. Lookalike of the week is Scott from my youth group back in Manchester and the moany kid who wants to own a bike in the movie The Belleville Rendezvous.

7. Soon (ish) I'm going to move World of Sven away from Blogspot and have my own proper website. If anyone knows any companies I should avoid, let me know. I need about 50-100mb webspace and want to pay no more than £25 a year.

Tom Smail on Calvinism, Arminianism and Universalism

2005-05-12T13:26:00.000+02:00

There’s an awfully long discussion going on over at the Thinklings Weblog over the issue of God’s sovereignty, although as with so many debates of this nature it eventually comes down to a confrontation between Calvinists and Arminians over the issues of God’s sovereignty, human free will and predestination and election. Of course Christianity had been around for 1500 years before Calvin and then Arminius came along, so it’s hardly as those are the only two options one may take and still call oneself a Christian. Of course both claim to be ‘biblical’ (Lately I’m so sick of that adjective being used as a carte blanche for people to believe whatever they want as long as there’s a Bible verse that seems to say what they’re thinking) but then every theology claims to be ‘biblical’ so I’m a little wary of embracing a theological standpoint simply because its proponents claim that it is the ‘biblical’ way to believe.

Calvin thinking: "Now where did I put my razor?"
Personally I've still to be convinced that Calvinism (or Arminianism) are the biblically and theologically sound doctrines that their adherents claim, but by way of investigation I've startedto do a bit of digging. I’m kind of short on books whilst I’m away from home but I’ve still managed to gather some thoughts on the subject and to give my beliefs some thought. Yesterday I re-read Tom Smail’s book ‘Once and For All: A Confession of the Cross” and he discusses some of the major objections to both Calvinism and Arminianism, in particular the doctrines of limited atonement and double predestination (in Calvinism) and the semi-pelagianism and human sovereignty of Arminianism. What follows is a summary of his position.

Did Jesus really die for everyone?

Smail affirms that Christ’s death was for all humanity and not just for the elect. He cites New Testament scholars Jeremias and Cranfield in support of his argument and notes that Christ’s work is spoken of as having universal significance. Jesus carries the sin of the word (John 1:29), he is sent to save the world (John 3:17) and in his death he will draw all men to himself (John 16:31-32). Likewise in Paul the scriptures say that God reconciled the world to himself in Christ (2 Cor 5:19), which is our basis for summoning the entire world to Christ. Paul also notes that just as God has given all men over to disobedience, he will have mercy on them all (Romans 11:32). The cross is not only for humanity, but also to redeem the whole of creation from sin and death, and God one day will bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, Jesus Christ (Eph 1:17-20). The church then is not the gathering of God’s private elect, but:

“The present experience of God’s redeeming grace in the Church gives insight into and confidence about God’s ultimate purpose for the whole universe. What he has already done for us and has begun to work out in us, he has also done for the whole created universe and the day will come when he will fulfil that purpose on that cosmic scale.”[1]

What God has done in Christ will extend beyond humanity to the whole of creation. All things were made by Christ and for Christ, and all things will be redeemed through him. This is the hope of Romans 8:19-21, that once humanity has been renewed, so all of creation will be. In the light of Christ’s all-encompassing salvific work which encompasses both humanity and creation, there can be no room to cling to the belief that God had in mind only to die for a small number of elect, or to only redeem part of what he has made whilst wilfully condemning the rest.

However it is clear that not all of humanity has responded to the Gospel as it has been preached throughout the centuries. Most people have never heard it, and of those that have, many still reject it. The atoning act is done for many; it is received by few.[2] So how are we to relate our belief that Christ died to draw all people to himself yet that he appears to have drawn only some people to himself?

Double predestination and limited atonement?

Smail then outlines the ideas of limited atonement and double predestination found in historical Calvinism, which deal with the double outcome of the Gospel by accepting that the situation as it now stands is as things will finally be, and so the biblical passages about Jesus’ universal atoning work are restricted and conditioned.[3] The Calvinist side have tended to attribute this to a decision of the divine will, while the Arminian side has attributed the situation to human will.

Hyper-Calvinism plants this double-outcome firmly at the heart of God’s eternal purpose for humankind. From eternity God has chosen some people to be saved from their sins by his gracious love and the death of his Son. The flipside of this is of course that those who have not been chosen are left to face the consequences of God’s justice by being damned for all eternity. Smail summarises this viewpoint thusly:

“Christ died therefore, not for all people, but only for those whom God has chosen and who therefore by the Holy Spirit would be brought to justifying and sanctifying faith when they heard the Gospel.”[4]

This is clearly against the evidence of the universal atonement texts discussed above. Of course the normal Calvinist response to this argument is to argue that “all people” really means “all sorts of people”, rather than “everyone”, so essentially Jesus is promising to draw not all people to himself, but all categories of people to himself, which of course means that there are some people that he is pushing away.

Aside from the exegetical problems of making such texts appear to say the opposite of what they appear to say, such a reading of the universal atonement texts is also rejected by Calvin himself in his discussion on what Jesus means by the ‘many’ that his blood is poured out for in Mark 14:24:

“By the word many, he means not a part of the world only, but the whole human race.”[5]

Calvinism has often (dishonestly in my view) tried to read the terms ‘many’ and ‘all’ as being opposites, and that behind them is still the doctrine of double predestination. In Greek of course ‘many’ means only part of the ‘all’, but in Hebrew and Aramaic there is no word for ‘all’, so ‘many’ is substituted instead. In any case, Calvin seems to state in his own commentary on the passage that Christ intended to communicate that his blood was to be shed for the ‘whole human race’, not a select part of it.

Biblical problems aside, there are also severe pastoral and preaching problems with holding to a doctrine of double predestination and limited atonement. How are we able to reconcile preaching messages where we call everyone to follow Jesus when at the same time we sincerely believe that the

“very decree of God himself has prevented people from responding to that call [of the Gospel]? It can easily seem that God is offering Christ with his open hand and simultaneously taking him away with his closed predestination hand, and that is not an attitude consonant with the revealed character of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[6]

What sort of picture of God does double predestination and limited atonement present? Does it correlate with God as we see him revealed in Jesus Christ? This is questionable. Against proponents of this view such as John Owen and Jonathan Edwards, Scottish theologian John Mcleod Campbell made clear his reasons for rejecting the traditional Calvinist stance:

“While they set forth justice as a necessary attribute of the divine nature, so that God must deal with all men according to its requirements, they represent mercy and love as not necessary, but arbitrary, and what therefore may find their expression only in the history of only some men. For according to their system justice alone is expressed in the history of the non-elect, in their endurance of punishment; in the history of the elect, in Christ’s enduring it for them. Mercy and love are expressed in the history of the elect alone.” [7]

In the system of limited atonement, God’s justice is meted out to all, either directly to the non-elect in the form of wrath and hell, or it is meted out to Christ instead of the elect. God’s justice is universal, but his mercy and love are expressed only to the elect. God is fundamentally “a God of justice who gives to sinners what they deserve and his love and mercy are restricted to those he has, for inscrutable reasons of his own, decided to redeem.”[8]

There are of course pastoral problems with such an approach. How are people to trust in God’s love for them when there is no way of knowing until judgement day whether he has in fact chosen you or not? How can we preach that God loves the world when in fact he has decreed to reject and cast away huge parts of it? Does this correspond with the accepting love and open invite that Jesus offers to sinners? Hardly. Jesus says that he will draw all men to himself, and that he will not drive away anyone who comes to him. How can it be said then, that Jesus is revealing a Father who has already chosen to damn some people for all eternity whilst saving others? Even for Christians, there can be no real assurance as to whether or not God has chosen you until all is revealed in the last judgement.

There is of course election in the history of God’s dealings with humanity. God chooses Jacob over Esau and Israel over the other nations as the bearers of the divine purpose. However, these double outcomes are never ultimate, and God does not elect people simply for them to enjoy the privilege of salvation instead of others. To be chosen as God’s people is a calling to the responsibility of mediating and proclaiming God’s salvation to the whole world.

Jacob Arminius: Not the most exciting author you're likely to read this summer

What about Arminianism?

Calvinism is not the only answer to the double response to the preaching of the Gospel. Contrary to Calvinism, the ultimate deciding factor in who is saved and who isn’t is not rooted in an eternal divine decree, but in human free will. Modern evangelistic techniques encourage people to make ‘decisions for Christ’, which will lead to their salvation. The ultimate deciding factor in whether or not one is saved is whether or not we have rejected or accepted Christ.

In this system, God respects our free will and doesn’t interfere with our free choices. Such a few is of course flattering to our ego, but it is also a fearful situation to be in because ultimately our eternal destinies are in our own hands and not in the hands of God. Heaven and hell are simply the ultimate endorsements of human choice, and God’s function as judge is simply to be the executor of our free wills, and so ultimately he will be dispensable.

Does the New Testament really paint such a picture though? Smail muses:

“Do we not flatter ourselves more than a little when we see ourselves as independent free agents competent to stand in our freedom over against the Gospel and reach our own independent decisions about it? Is our human condition not more realistically described by Paul when he says that, left to ourselves, we are ‘slaves to sin’ with sinful minds that are hostile to God (Romans 8:5) so that our alienation from God prevents us from knowing him and from being able to respond positively to him? Our freedom to be in right relationship with God is the very thing we have lost and that needs to be restored to us before we are in any position to decide anything.”[9]

We do not choose God, he chooses us, and our ability to respond to Christ does not have its source in ourselves, but is itself his gift to us. Faith is something we are given by grace, not something we summon up for ourselves (Eph 2:8-9). Both the grace and faith that enable us to respond to God appropriately originate entirely with him.

There is also little room for the Holy Spirit in the Arminian model where individuals decide to accept or reject God of their own accord. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of responsiveness who first comes from the Father to the Son to enable his responsiveness and who is then given by the Son to enable our responsiveness to him and his atoning and renewing work.[10] Such responses generate the faith and repentance which are essential to our incorporation into Christ, and a strength of the Arminian position is that it emphasises the need for personal human responsibility before God. The responsiveness of course does not have its origin in us, but in God and his grace.

To confess Jesus as Lord cannot be done without the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 12:3), and we can only relate to God as Father by the Holy Spirit (Gal 4:6). We can only pray because the Holy Spirit is given to us (Rom 8:26), our conformity to Christ happens by the Spirit (2 Cor 3:18), and it is the Spirit which enables us to respond to God, though it is always God who chooses us first, and only then can we choose him (John 15:16).

Neither the double predestination and limited atonement of Calvinism or the human free-will decision of Arminianism seem to adequately resolve the tensions between an atonement for all of humanity (and indeed all of creation), the election of God, and the need for human responsiveness to God enabled graciously by the Holy Spirit. Smail similarly finds both schools of thought problematic and proposes another way forward.

A universal hope?

Both Calvinism and Arminianism are the result of the double outcome of the preaching of the Gospel, and as the Gospels and Church history show, both the Son of God and the Spirit can be rejected. The Holy Spirit, sent by God to draw men to Christ, can be rejected (Ephesians 4:30), and Christ himself was despised and rejected by humankind. “The Gospel is answered with the No of alienation rather than with the Yes of liberation,”[11] and the world which crucified Jesus still rejects the overtones of his Holy Spirit today.

The world’s rejection of Christ led to Calvary, but just as death and evil did not finally triumph over Christ, so evil and rejection cannot be the final outcome of the Spirit’s encounter with the human heart.[12] The New Testament looks ahead beyond the rejection of the Messiah (and his people) to a day when “at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:10-11) Likewise Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor of the church and of Christ, becomes an apostle for Jesus Christ after encountering him on the Damascus Road.

Christians too know dark nights of the soul when we are in rebellion against God and can say with Paul that:

“When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:21-24)

But ultimately of course, Christ sets us free from our body of death and the power of sin and the law (Romans 8:2), and evil and rebellion do not finally triumph. The Spirit who is grieved and rejected shows himself again and again to be the Lord and the giver of life to the very people who have turned him away.[13] We should not be surprised that the Spirit does for us what he intends to do for all creation, because the Spirit is mediating to us the work of Christ, whose dying and rising was for all of creation. Such a universal hope has good grounding in the scriptures. God does not reject anyone, and neither does he leave us helpless and ensnared in our own choices, and in his Son and in his Spirit he has a love that is mighty enough to bring us home to himself. Smail notes that such an argument sounds like a wholehearted universalism, but having a universal hope is not the same as saying dogmatically that everyone will definitely be saved and that no one will be lost. To avoid such a theological minefield, Smail sets out three criteria by which the path to a universal Christian hope may be negotiated.

i) A Christ-centred Universalism

This is to distinguish from a pluralistic universalism that states categorically that God loves everyone and they will all definitely be saved regardless. Such a position would render the atoning work of Christ completely unnecessary.

The only way for humanity to be saved and to be brought back to the Father is through his Son Jesus Christ (John 14:5) and by being incorporated into him and being ‘in Christ’. Universal salvation is only possible because it is by the Holy Spirit that Christ draws all men to himself, but a pluralistic universalism makes the cross unnecessary, and it makes conversion unnecessary. Indeed universal reconciliation is only possible by universal conversion (metanoia) to Christ,[14] but with the foundation of a universal atonement and the gracious saving activity of the Holy Spirit this is certainly possible, especially if God is indeed going to fill everything with his fullness (Eph 1:23), has reconciled everything with himself (Col 1:20) and is willing that all should be saved (1 Timothy 2:3-4).

ii) Universal hope – not dogma

We are not permitted to state dogmatically that everyone will be saved, though there is a well-grounded hope that they will be. The outcome of man’s rejection of the Holy Spirit is not a closed situation, and the situation remains open. Man greets God sometimes with a big No, yet other times with a Yes – not only prior to conversion, but also during the Christian life.

The evangelistic battle is a tough one, yet God’s announced strategy is to draw all men to Christ through the Holy Spirit, who may blow anywhere he pleases. When we seem to face opposition and tribulation from the world, we should take heart in the Lord who has already overcome the world and is who now reaching out to it by his Spirit.

iii) The warnings of Jesus

It would of course be unwise to dismiss the warnings of Jesus. We are to enter the narrow way that leads to life, not the broad road that leads to destruction (Matt 7:13-14), and there of course many other such warnings. Both in Jesus’ day and in our own there are those who walk paths of self-destruction that are taking them straight to hell – the final state of being separated from God’s love forever.

A merely optimistic universalism that overlooks the seeds of self-destruction that are present in human sinfulness is nothing more than a facile daydream. The power of sin and death is so real that it took the death and resurrection of Christ to destroy its power. Yet it is precisely because of the Christ’s death and resurrection that we can hope that the threat of sin, death, and destruction can be overturned. Furthermore, the Spirit that flows from the cross into the world is able to make effective to everything and everyone the reconciliation of all things on earth and in heaven which Christ has won by his blood.

Karl Barth: a very clever man who you ignore at your peril.

In closing, Smail quotes Karl Barth as saying: “I do not believe in universalism or any other –ism, but I do believe in Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world and of all men.”[15] Barth himself would not affirm a dogmatic doctrine of universal salvation, but he does affirm a strong hope of universal salvation:

“If we are certainly forbidden to count on this [universal restoration] as though we had a claim to it, as though it were not supremely the work of God to which many can have no possible claim, we are surely commanded the more definitely to hope and pray for it…to hope and pray cautiously and yet distinctly that, in spite of everything which may seem quite conclusively to proclaim the opposite, his compassion should not fail, and that in accordance with his mercy which is ‘new every morning’ he ‘will not cast off for ever.’[16] (Lamentations 33:22, 31)

God is our saviour, and he wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. “For there is one God and one mediator between God and humankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men.” (1 Tim 2:3-6) This is a prayer that pleases God, and as it has already been made concrete by the mediation of Jesus Christ, it has every chance of being answered.

So that was Tom Smail from his book “Once and For All”. Next I’m going to examine the views of German theologian Jürgen Moltmann on the problem the doctrine of double predestination and some possible outcomes of the final judgement.

[1] Smail, Tom Once and For All: A Confession of the Cross (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1998) p166

[2] Ibid. p167

[3] Ibid. p168

[4] Ibid. p168

[5] Quoted in C E B Cranfield The Gospel According to St Mark (Cambridge: CUP, 1959) p227

[6] Smail, pp168-69

[7] Mcleod Campbell, John The Nature of the Atonement (London: Macmillan, 1886) p54

[8] Smail, p169

[9] Smail, p171

[10] Ibid. p172

[11] Ibid. p173

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid. pp172-3

[14] Ibid. p174

[15] Ibid. p176

[16] Barth, Karl Church Dogmatics IV: 3.1 (ET) (Edinburgh, T&T Clark, 1961) p478

Blogs in general #3 - the quiz blogs

2005-05-11T15:13:00.000+02:00

(Blogs in General #1 and #2.)

Sometime ago, someone came up with the idea of stifling blogging creativity by simply encouraging people to take a series of quizzes and post the results on their blogs. I've been partial to the odd quiz every now and then but it's far more interesting to read about people than discovering 'what letter of the alphabet are you?', or whatever. Here's roughly what's happening with the quiz blogs:

Which World War Two battle are you?

You scored: Battle of Stalingrad 72%

You are cold and brutal and hate fascism and communism in equal measure. You enjoy needless bloodshed and see it as necessary to halt the advance of German military power. Your favourite weather is snow and your hobbies include sniping and starving to death.

Other battles you matched:

Battle of Britain: 17%
Battle of Arnhem Bridge: 23%
D-Day: 15%

What is your German aristocratic name?

Your name is: Isabella von Mitzy-Bratwurst

Who should you vote for?

You read the Daily Mail and other right-wing propaganda leaflets. You hate immigrants and hope to one day re-establish the British Empire. You strongly support the death penalty for sodomites and in fact for most things, and are in favour of the arming of teachers and the use of deadly force to deal with yobbish behaviour in the classroom. You should vote for the Nazi Party or join the Young Conservatives.

How patriotic are you?

You rated: Damn straight I'm patriotic! 99%

You are so patriotic that you are utterly convinced the only wrong your nation can do is not kill everyone. Your favourite weapon is the H-bomb and you are mortified by the idea that anyone else should even consider wanting to have one. Your love for your country is so great that you even imagine God is exactly like you and that he won't hold you to account for all the killing, torture and bloodshed for which you are directly responsible.

Are you a chav?

Your answers were as follows:

1) Do you own a Staffordshire Bull Terrier that has a piece of string for a lead?
YES
2) Do any of your seven brothers and sisters all have different surnames?
YES
3) Is your idea of a good night out drinking a bottle of cider in the park and trying to get off with an orange tan minger?
YES
4) Argos sell high-quality jewellery that looks classy. True or False?
TRUE
5) Your highest ambition is to drive a Ford Escort with shiny alloy wheels and homemade twin exhaust, yes or no?
YES

You scored a chavtastic 100%. Report to your nearest Job Centre for immediate sterilisation and reassignment. Don't forget to pick up your giro!

What gender are you?

Male: 50%
Female: 50%

You are an hermaphrodite. Other hermaphrodites include earthworms and some kinds of tropical fish. Your teenage years may be confusing and you may find solace in poetry, solitude, and music.

R.I.P Thérèse

2005-05-10T02:51:00.000+02:00

Thérèse, who died as she lived, chuckling away on MSN

It is with heavy heart - but light kidneys - that World of Sven announces the tragic blogging demise of shoe-lover and megalomaniac Thérèse. Thérèse announced earlier today that she was to suspend blogging and MSN-related activities in order to go 'on hiatus', though she is believed to have died as a result of hiatal complications, and has not been seen since she cruelly tore herself away from Jonny, VJ and I earlier this afternoon.

The loss of Thérèse is a cruel blow to the universe, coming so soon after the death of John Paul II and the relegation of Stockport County into League Two. How will the citizens of earth cope now that their bright ray of Canadian sunshine has been extinguished and replaced by some kind of cosmic death-ray?

Already being hailed as 'the people's blogger' by some and as 'Mother Thérèse' by others, Thérèse never lost her common touch or sense of humour and all of us who knew her will have a Thérèse shaped hole in our lives. Here's what some mourners had to say:

"Now I don't have any friends with accents on their name" - President Sven

"This is a darker day than when the sun blew up" - Jonny

"*dies*" - Valancy Jane

"I cried uncontrollably" - The Queen

"I'm so overcome with grief I want to die" - Dalai Lama

God bless you Thérèse, blogging buddy 2004-2005

President Sven announces cat policy

2005-05-10T02:11:00.000+02:00

Katzen sind ein blödes Tier,
machen Augen rot.
Und Hustenreiz im Hals, dafür
besser Katze tot*

This policy was partly inspired by German punk band Wizo. Click here to hear the chorus (bandwidth permitting).

*Cats are awful animals/They make your eyes go red/and they make your throat tickle/therefore cats are better dead

Why I like Brian Mclaren

2005-05-10T02:05:00.000+02:00

I like Brian Mclaren because he says things like this:

"I have felt for a long time that Western Christian theology (in its Catholic and Protestant forms) had somewhere become preoccupied with getting individual souls out of hell after death, and had too often lost a sense of God's continuing love for all creation in this life - in other words, we had substituted something else for the gospel of the kingdom of God, which was at the heart of Jesus' message. It was as if the doctrine of the fall had eaten up the doctrine of creation. The issue of hell-avoidance became the centerpiece of salvation, and I felt this perspective was neither true to Scripture nor healthy."

Brian McLaren on his new book The Last Word and the Word After That.

Of course this is likely to have you branded as a liar and a damned heretic by a lot of folk, but I think there's a lot of merit to his arguments.

My tuppence worth on the election

2005-05-09T23:37:00.000+02:00

Well last Thursday was the General Election and now it's all out of the way I'll chip in with a few thoughts on the subject...

Tony Blair and Co won though with a hugely reduced majority of just 67 seats. Historically speaking, a parliamentary majority of 67 is still pretty large although it does of course seem rather small when compared to the two huge majorities that Labour won in 1997 and 2001. I think it's a shame that Blair didn't use his majority to introduce some changes to the electoral system, which is incredibly unfair when you think about it. Consider this:

Labour vote: 35.2% = 356 seats
Tory vote: 32.3% = 197 seats
Lib Dem vote: 22% = 62 seats

But I'm not holding my breath for them to change the system to a more proportionate one anytime soon.

The Tories were happy of course, though secretly I think they'll be a bit miffed. Their support levels have only risen by just under 1% since 1997, which shows that almost no one outside of their core demographic has switched back to voting for them. I think the anti-war factor (amongst others) turned a lot of people away from Labour and towards the Tories, although most of the anti-war vote went towards the Lib Dems.

Blair is now clearly an electoral liability since the Iraq war, though he has announced that he still intends to be Labour leader at the next election, which combined with the coming downturn in the economy (yes) will I expect lead to a Tory government in 4-5 years time, especially if Uncle Tony leads us into another war of dubious legality.

Things that should be on the agenda in this Parliament:

* Pensions - nobody is going to get any by the time people my age get around to retiring but no one seems to be taking it seriously and the government aren't encouraging people to save.

* War on Terror - Blair won't risk another war if he wants to keep his job, though I wouldn't be surprised if Dubya decided to attack Iran, Syria or North Korea in the near future, especially if Iran gets the bomb. I'm not a huge fan of nuclear weapons, but why is Iran a threat to world peace when it isn't even a nuclear power? I could name one or two nuclear powers who have started more unilateral wars than anyone else since WW2 and who clearly are a threat to world peace (world peace, not peace for the west).

* The 192 bus that runs from Stockport to Piccadilly is always late. It is supposed to run every 4 minutes but sometimes you have to wait up to 20 minutes for one to arrive.

* The economy is slowing down, consumer spending is dropping, unemployment is rising and businesses that are relying on marginal profits to stay afloat will go under. Debt is at an all time high, and inflation is rising so expect interest rates to go up and exports to drop.

* TV - why is there never anything good on? Hm?

* Europe - didn't feature in the election campaign and with good reason. Generally speaking, the British public are staunchly anti-Europe, so the largely pro-European Labour and Lib Dem parties kept quiet on the issue. The Tories also kept quiet because even though they are largely anti-Europe, the last time Europe was a serious issue in the early 1990s their party was torn in half and with defections and whip withdrawals over the issue John Major almost lost his majority. We're due a referendum on the EU constitution this Parliament, and given that the EU have still not allowed its contents to be available to the public for them to make their own minds up, I would advise a 'No' vote at this moment in time.

* To the person who googled 'Tony Blair Nude' and arrived at this blog, I say shame on you.

*

VE-Day

2005-05-09T18:28:00.000+02:00

Sven-Reuters news

Trillions of people turned out all over the world to mark the end of World War Two in Europe yesterday. Many war veterans, some of whom are now over 200 years old, gathered to pay tribute to their fallen comrades.

Sadly Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill were too dead to attend the celebrations, though this didn't dampen the spirits of those taking part. Trafalgar Square was packed with revellers singing old wartime musical favourites such as 'My gal's got rickets' and 'Oops Mr Hitler, you've trodden on my bloomin' flowerbed.'

A generic cockney old woman recalled the jubilation felt in 1945 when it was announced that the war was over. "We heard on the wireless that Germany had surrendered and we all celebrated by having an extra half-slice of spam and singing the national anthem. Of course at the time we didn't know that the Daleks would soon come and annihilate most of London, but you just get on with life."

Joseph Goebbels is 126.

Pondering.

2005-05-09T01:16:00.000+02:00

If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you'll probably be aware that my faith is important to me. There are of course a great many things in Christianity that I dislike, and some that I'm downright hostile to (mentioning no atonement theories in particular.)

I think one of the things that is most rewarding is when I've written something or said something that has really encouraged, challenged (in a good way), or strengthened them on their journey of discipleship. The flipside is that one of the worst things that ever happens is when something you've said bruises someone's faith and causes them to doubt some parts of their faith in a way that is harmful.

I do believe of course, that part of growing spiritual maturity will almost certainly involve the slaughter of several sacred cows, but there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. My own journey of faith in Christ has been greatly helped by questioning, and at times by doubting. Questions have never pushed me away from God, they have always drawn me further into his mystery.

I am aware though that some of the things I've written on here have caused one or two brains to frazzle and maybe one or two hearts to sink. This hasn't ever been my intention, and sometimes I forget that maybe not everyone is as comfortable that kind of thing as I am. I still don't buy a literal six-day creation (controversial), a pre-tribulation rapture a la Left Behind (shouldn't be controversial, but it is), or the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement (which has undeservedly achieved the status of unquestionable dogma in many parts of the Evangelical world. I criticise it and people look at me as though I've just kicked their Gran in the face and robbed her pension money), or a host of other things.

I think the greatest thing about studying the Bible and Theology is that you realise just how much you don't know, and that there's so much that everyone doesn't know. So now when I come across people who think they know it all and that their particular denomination/movement has the answer to everything (you don't) and doesn't need to learn from anyone else ("Agh! The Emergent Church - they're different! Quick, demonise them!") I think I'll just quietly chuckle to myself rather than get all worked up and bang my head against the wall.

Imposter!

2005-05-09T01:13:00.000+02:00

Another World of Sven? Bah.

Previous imposter here. Thérèse thought he was hot.

Fascinating facts

2005-05-08T02:28:00.000+02:00

It's exactly 2.30am as I post this, which means that I have now been alive for a total of 204,529 hours. Alternatively, one may say that I have been alive for 8,522 days, or 12,271,680 minutes, or 736,300,800 seconds.

Yes, I am that uninspired to blog at the moment, and yes there is a calculator on my desk that just happened to be lying around.

As a generic white western male, this means I will have eaten approximately 14 tonnes of food up until now, which statistically is likely to have included over 100 insects accidentally eaten in my sleep.

I have been stung 5 times by wasps and bees, bitten by 1 dog, spawned 0 children, visited 13 countries, got 10 GCSEs and 4 A-levels, achieved 5/6ths of a degree in Theology and 1/3 of a degree in Politics and History, had 9 different jobs and punched 5 people in the face, all of whom were asking for it, and all of whom I punched in 1995 or 1996. I have been baptised once, lost my temper with a customer once, learned 3 non-native languages (with varying degree of success), been on TV 5 times and won a total of £235 plus expenses.

Weighing it all up, I don't really think I've achieved as much as I could have done in that time, but then if you subtract the hours when I couldn't walk, talk, or read and write I'm not doing too badly overall. My life to do list (in no particular order):

1. Get Ph.D in New Testament Theology
2. Pay off stupid student debt (currently standing at £16,000, or $30,281.58)
3. Write novel satirising various things, make enough money from aforesaid book to cover #1 and #2.
4. Learn more than 3 chords on the guitar
5. Move away from Manchester before I'm 30 and never live in a city again.
6. Write books that will help ordinary Christians to get a better intellectual grasp of our faith, partly with the aim of encouraging Charismatics not to have minds that are so 'open to the Spirit' that their brains fall out, causing them to talk nonsense, albeit very loud and passionate nonsense.
7. Spawn a dynasty
8. Live long enough to witness the the collapse of western civilisation. Nations as greedy and violent as ours are bound to come to ruin sooner or later. Learn the lessons of history people.
9. Wake up earlier than Jonny. This may be impossible.
10. Learn to fly.
11. Destroy Internet Explorer forever and ever.

That's it for now. Night!

Yer daft ha'porth

2005-05-05T15:49:00.000+02:00

In the near future, everyone without one of these will be denied human rights, including the right to breed:

Soon there shall be trouble at a mill, office, home, and Parliament near you. Southerners are advised to flee now or be forever enslaved. Rest of the World, prepare for defeat.

Slight Plagiarism

2005-05-05T15:41:00.000+02:00

Today I went to vote in the General Election. They wouldn't let me vote for anyone...specifically.

I'll get me coat.

Attention Citizens

2005-05-05T15:08:00.000+02:00

President Sven's utopian society is now up and running online thanks to the people at Nation States. To view my perfect world, click here.

Here's what the UN had to say:

UN Category: Psychotic Dictatorship
Civil Rights: Few	Economy: Reasonable	Political Freedoms: Unheard Of

Location: The North Pacific

The Empire of President Sven is a tiny, devout nation, renowned for its compulsory military service. Its hard-nosed, cynical population of 5 million are ruled without fear or favor by a psychotic dictator, who outlaws just about everything and refers to the populace as "my little playthings."

The enormous, corrupt government concentrates mainly on Law & Order, although Religion & Spirituality and Commerce are secondary priorities. The average income tax rate is 34%, but much higher for the wealthy. Private enterprise is illegal, but for those in the know there is a slick and highly efficient black market in Retail.

Crime -- especially youth-related -- is relatively low, thanks to the all-pervasive police force. President Sven's national animal is the muppet, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests, and its currency is the sven.

By 'eck

2005-05-04T19:56:00.000+02:00

Yes.

Go on, you know you want to.

News

2005-05-04T12:22:00.000+02:00

At the risk of turning into a here's-what's-happening-in-the-news kind of blog, here's what's happening in the news:

1. Saturn 'has 12 new moons'

Well of course they're not new to Saturn, puny earthling scum.

Not content with having lots of rings, Saturn now rather greedily has 46 moons. It turns out that many of the moons were not original features but that they were 'captured' by Saturn's gravitational field in some huge astronomcal act of mugging.

To be honest I think it's high time the Earth had some extra moons, I mean how many planets are stuck with just one? Granted that the extra gravitational pull may cause environmental carnage and kill billions of people in floods, but it would look pretty in the sky.

Full story here.

2. The number of the beast is actually 616.

Turns out that the discovery of some early Revelation manuscripts have the number of the beast down as as 616 and not 666. I'm not sure how reliable the manuscripts are, but 616 would make a lot more sense.

The number given to describe the Antichrist who will persecute the church is usually given as 666. This is part of a kind of literary game called gematria where coded numbers are used to avoid naming someone's real name. 616 would be the number for the Roman Emperor Caligula, who was indeed an evil tyrant who persecuted the church. Caligula died in 41 AD, but the date for Revelation is usually held to be much later at around the end of the 1st Century, so not sure how this all works out without some further study.

Perhaps now people will start and read Revelation in its first century context rather than using it to engage in endless pontificating about who the Antichrist is and when the end of the world will be? Maybe? Nah.

Full story here.

3. Election

Apparently there's an election tomorrow. Happily the Tories have taken a last minute nosedive in the polls and now have levels of support even lower than during their disastrous election campaigin of 1997. That said I think this election will be a lot closer than the polls suggest, and I think the Lib Dems will do well. I predict Labour to stay in power with an overall majority of 50-80, and Michael Howard to be forced out/resign when the Tories wake up and realise that even fewer people are voting for them than in 1997. Happy, happy days.

Pretend to be Peter Snow here.

The Story of Jesus: part 6

2005-05-04T02:19:00.000+02:00

Mark 1:35-45

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: "Everyone is looking for you!"

Jesus replied, "Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come." So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons.

A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, "If you are willing, you can make me clean."

Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. "I am willing," he said. "Be clean!" Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured.

Jesus sent him away at once with a strong warning: "See that you don't tell this to anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them." Instead he went out and began to talk freely, spreading the news. As a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places. Yet the people still came to him from everywhere.

Jesus continues his itinerant ministry of preaching the Kingdom of God and putting it into effect by driving out demons, but Mark adds an extra detail here which helps unlock the key to much of what Jesus does. Before Jesus does anything, he goes and spends time in solitary prayer. With the exception of the Garden of Gethsemane, Mark never gives us an insight into what Jesus says when he prays, but already in the first chapter of the Gospel Jesus goes and spends time alone in prayer for the second time (1:12-13). There is a direct link between Jesus’ prayer life and his ministry of preaching.

He is the Messiah and the Son of God, and acts in complete dependence upon his Father, for it was his Father who commissioned him at his baptism (1:11). The previous evening the crowds had come to Jesus, and when Simon comes and finds him the crowds are waiting for him again. The crowds can become fickle however, and Jesus’ mission to Israel cannot be dependent on popular support for its success. This is the way of the Pharisees and the nationalists, and it is the way that is going to lead to the destruction of Israel. Jesus’ authority comes not from men but from God, as we have already seen (post here) and it is to God that he goes in prayer and to draw his strength.

More preaching and healings then follow, but Mark then chooses to focus in on one specific healing, that of a man suffering from leprosy. In the days of Moses when Israel had camped in the wilderness, God’s Holy Presence dwelled in the Tabernacle in the centre of the camp. The Israelite tribes camped around the Tabernacle, but outside the camp were the unclean. They were the outcasts, and who were not allowed to come near God’s holy presence and who had no place amongst God’s people. In Jesus’ day, Israel no longer lived in tents, but the unclean people were still excluded from fellowship with others, and by being shut out of the Temple and synagogues, they were excluded from fellowship with God. So the leper in this story is not only suffering from the physical effects of leprosy, but he is ostracised from his family, from his community, and from fellowship with God because he is unclean. Notice he begs Jesus not to heal him but to make him clean. Jesus responds by touching him, and his touch brings cleansing from the leprosy.

This is a very subversive and radical thing for Jesus to do, and it turns Jewish notions of holiness upside down. By all expectation, rather than the man being healed, Jesus should have also become unclean when he touched him, but the opposite happens. Jesus is the Holy One of God, but he does not express God’s holiness by withdrawing from the unclean and the sinners, but his holiness and compassion transforms the unclean man and makes him clean again. The coming Kingdom of God is not bad news for the unclean and the outcasts, but rather it invites them to holiness, forgiveness and fellowship that Jesus is now bringing through his own person.

This is no private blessing or individual healing. By abolishing the division and discrimination between clean and ‘unclean’, and between the righteous and sinners, Jesus is not only restoring individuals, he is restoring the whole community of Israel. Remember of course that it was through a restored and renewed Israel that God’s salvation was to come to all nations. Israel had returned from Exile many years before geographically speaking, but the forgiveness of sins, the defeat of Israel’s enemies, the healing of the sick, and the liberating of the oppressed had still not come. Now however all these things are coming to Israel in and through Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, and Israel is being restored and renewed at last. The renewed and restored Israel will not be centred on the corrupt Temple or sustained by violent nationalism; it will be centred on Jesus and the Kingdom of God.

The passage closes with the cleansed leper being commanded to present himself to the priest. The priest would verify the man’s cleanliness and he would be readmitted to fellowship with others and readmitted to the Jewish religious system, though his healing had of course come not through the Temple system, but through Jesus. Jesus again forbids those who have witnessed the events to keep quiet, and so we have another glimpse of the ‘Messianic secret’ here. Why does Jesus want his work kept quiet? Why does he try and keep quiet what is happening? Once again, I’m going to put off discussing this until a further post.

Reflection

There are two things I want to draw out here. First of all, Jesus drew his strength not from the popular support of the crowds, but by withdrawing to a place of solitude to spend time in prayer with his Father. God had called and anointed him, and it was God’s mission in which he was engaged. Likewise called has called us to take the Good News of the Kingdom of God out into the world, but we are to draw our strength from God. He sustains us, he is with us when we suffer and are rejected, and it is he that will deliver and vindicate us. Any Christians who rely on popular support and who are driven by people power to accomplish our mission are building on a very shaky foundation indeed. As happened with Jesus, the crowds can herald you with songs of praise at the start of the week, but a few days later the same crowd were baying for him to be crucified. Our mission it to the world, but it is from God, and can only truly be sustained by him.

Few of us are likely to encounter many lepers as we go about our daily lives, but we do encounter those who society deems to be outcasts and unclean. There are people that no one else will touch. There are the homeless that no one talks to, the people at work or in college that no one else wants to be seen with, or those in prison, asylum seekers who are demonised by the media, or paedophiles, and so on. If we are to follow Jesus, we are not to affirm and maintain the divisions that exclude people and deny them a place in society. There is more to this than simple humanitarian altruism however, because as Christians we are not called simply to be good people, we are called to be holy people.

Holiness conjures up images of strict rules, of doom and gloom, of miserable legalism and of separation. Indeed this is not dissimilar to some ideas of holiness in Jesus’ day, but to hold up such notions as being holy is to be guilty of idolatry because they are contrary to Jesus Christ. Jesus demonstrates God’s holiness not by separating himself from what is ‘unclean’ and sinful, but by going to it and transforming it. God’s holiness displayed in Christ does not push sinners away or torment them forever in a lake of burning sulphur, it goes to those who are excluded and unclean (in this case someone who was both socially and religiously unclean) and through healing, forgiveness and love it transforms them. We should also not overlook the fact that Jesus physically touched the leper. Not only did the touch heal the man, but it testifies against all the stigma and isolation that was the leper’s lot, and affirms him as being loved by a Holy God. To be holy does not mean withdrawal from the world, but touching it and transforming it with God’s love.

What of those of us who feel unclean, who have guilt and shame? How are we to face God and what are we to expect from him? God does not condemn us, but says the same to us as he said to the leper in the story. If we turn to God and ask to be cleansed he will not send us away, but in his compassion he says to us too: "I am willing - be clean!" Such is God's desire to forgive us, to restore us, and to rescue us from the sin, shame, and guilt that destroys us.

Prayer

Father,

We thank you that you have made, chosen and equipped us to serve in your Kingdom. We did not choose you, but you chose us, and you have sent us out to proclaim the Good News of your Kingdom to a world bound in sin and darkness. Help us to trust in you, we know we can trust in you because you are always faithful. Forgive us for when we have sought to derive our power and authority from popularity and not from you. Teach us to love you more than loving the praises of men.

We ask that you cleanse us from our sins, and wash us and make us new. We thank you that you delight in forgiving us, and that it is your desire to make us clean.

We thank you that in your holiness you do not despise us in our sins, but that you love us and free us from all uncleanness, shame, and stigma. Lead us into paths where we also may take your Good News and your healing to those who are outcasts and who are shunned by the world, but who are welcomed by you.

We pray in the name of your Son Jesus Christ,

Amen

My 3 favourite albums

2005-05-03T18:32:00.000+02:00

I'm currently trying to get people to compile lists of their three favourite albums and the particular memories each one holds. To see everyone else's choices go here. To add yours to the list, leave me a link to your page in the comments section. For the record, here are mine:

1. OK Computer - Radiohead.

When this album came out in 1997 I was sharing a room with Jonny, and it was through him that I first heard the album. When I bought my own copy that summer but frustratingly wasn't able to listen to it for three weeks because I was stuck in London without CD player, but that's another story. You can't just dip into this album, you have to sit down and listen to it as a seamless whole, preferably in the dark. There are no faults whatsoever on this album, right from the opening riff of Airbag to the closing 'ping' of The Tourist. You will regret not hearing this album, buy it now.

2. Unbelievable Truth - Almost Here

Debut album by an acoustic trio that featured Thom Yorke's brother Andy. Some outstanding tracks about love and loss. Once again when I bought this I was sharing a room with Jonny, only now we were in the Sixth Form and ruled the entire known universe. A-levels were a total doss so I think in the summer term I wandered round the countryside surrounding the school enjoying the sunshine and listening to Almost Here on my walkman (they were like primitive Ipods children), and definitely not doing any work.

3. Mutter - Rammstein

It was close between this album and their latest one Reise, Reise which holds memories of the greatest live performance ever in history ever. I bought Mutter in summer 2002 and it spent most of that summer on my walkman on my way to work. The other side of the tape had Toxicity by System of A Down on it, which was also pretty good. Mutter encapsulates Rammstein perfectly; it's dark, epic, loud, very tongue in cheek, and utterly utterly German.

It was the first summer I'd spent in Manchester and so I forever associate this album with moving to Longsight and adjusting to the urban squalor of the Northmoor Road estate and figuring out what to do with my life. In the end I decided to study Theology, though Rammstein had little to do with the decision.

If I was a...

2005-05-03T17:24:00.000+02:00

Johnny the Horse has a meme running on his blog in which participants choose from a list of potential careers and say what they would do. Johnny's answers here. Here's the list:

If I could be a scientist...
If I could be a farmer...
If I could be a musician...
If I could be a doctor...
If I could be a painter...
If I could be a gardener...
If I could be a missionary...
If I could be a chef...
If I could be an architect...
If I could be a linguist...
If I could be a psychologist...
If I could be a librarian...
If I could be a lawyer...
If I could be an inn-keeper...
If I could be an athlete...
If I could be a professor...
If I could be a writer...
If I could be a llama rider...
If I could be a bonnie pirate...
If I could be an astronaut...
If I could be a world famous blogger...
If I could be a justice on any one court in the world...
If I could be married to any current famous political figure...
If I could be a dog trainer...

The idea is to fill in your FIVE choices on your blog and then link back to the blog from which you got the quiz in the first place. Here are my five choices:

1. If I was a librarian I would...

Be very, very happy. I would spend the whole day wandering around my library go 'YES! I AM A LIBRARIAN!' and making sure that no one else ever came in a disturbed my reading.

2. If I could be a dog trainer, I would...

Train my dog to write essays, do some of my research, go to work for me, answer the phone and cook my dinner. I would also teach it not to poo on the pavement and not to greet me by pummeling my crotch with its snout whilst drooling.

3. If I could be a writer, I would...

Write the most amazing book in history. It would only be twenty pages long but would be so utterly fantastic that no one would dare write another book for 250 years.

4. If I could be a lawyer, I would...

Resign and become a librarian.

5. If I could be a justice on any one court in the world, I would...

Work in the Supreme Court and put Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney on trial for war crimes and profiteering. On my less vitriolic days, I would imprison lawyers who encourage people to sue for inordinate amounts of compensation over dumb things e.g."Ooh, my porridge is too hot"/ "Ooh, my porridge is too cold"/"Ooh, I stuck my wet fingers in a plug socket and electrocuted myself. My employers should do more to prevent this in the future" - yes, not hiring money grabbing sub-halfwits would be an excellent start.

So there you have it. Trackback to me or leave a link in the comment box if you fancy taking part.

Christian Carnival LXVIII

2005-05-03T17:09:00.000+02:00

That's number 68 to those of you young 'uns who don't remember the Romans.

Kentucky Packrat will be hosting the 68th Christian Carnival this week. The Christian Carnival is a weekly collection of some of the best posts of the Christian blogosphere. It's open to Christians of Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic convictions. One of the goals of this carnival is to offer our readers to a broad range of Christian thought. This is a great way to make your writing more well known and Perhaps pick up some regular readers.

To enter is simple. First, your post should be of a Christian nature, but this does not exclude posts that are about home life, politics, or current events from a Christian point of view. Second, please submit only one post dated since the last Christian Carnival (i.e. from last Wednesday through this coming Tuesday).

Then do the following:

Send your submission to ChristianCarnival ATT gmail DOTT com. [This address is to be used only for Christian Carnival submissions, never for administrative issues.] Alternatively, you could use the general carnival submission form here, but be careful to send it only to any carnival(s) you want it to go to. A post about apologetics isn't likely to go over well at the Carnival of the Capitalists.

Please submit only one post (per blog, per author) dated since the last Christian Carnival (i.e. something posted since mignight EST last Tuesday night, April 26). If you are able to do so, please submit your information in Times New Roman 12pt font, preferably in plain text. The uniformity will save time for the host. Include the following information in your submission:

1. The name of your blog and a link to your main site. (Adding the name with a hyperlink would be a nice courtesy to the host.)
2. The title of your post and the URL of the post. (Again, adding the title with a hyperlink would be helpful.)
3. If you want a trackback, include a trackback link. (Tracking back is optional. Some hosts may oblige you; others may not have the time or ability.)
4. Include a short (one or two sentence) description of the post. Your description may be edited by the host, but many hosts often use just what you give them. (So don't say anything you wouldn't want published.)

The deadline for submissions is 6am on Wednesday UK time (midnight EST, I believe). This week I'm going to submit my post on the relationship between the past and the future in Christianity.

God, the rose-tinted past, the glorious future and the present

2005-05-03T17:04:00.000+02:00

This post forms a hardly-related sequel of sorts to my last Carnival entry on the relationship between 'being' and 'doing' in Christianity. It looks at the relationship between past and future, and to live for the future without getting bogged down in the past.

Last weekend I happened to catch part of the movie Time Changer on one of the Christian TV stations. The basic plot of the movie is as follows: a conservative Bible teacher is transported forward 100 years into the future and observes with horror the decadence and moral carnage of 21^st Century life, the prayer-less schools, lying teenagers and (horror of horrors) rude waitresses. The movie is of course intended as a polemic and not as mainstream entertainment, and of course has an important point to make. The implicit message of the movie is that, for whatever reasons, life 100 years ago was godlier and of better moral quality than it is now. The critique of our present comes from the past, and although it is not stated explicitly, the implication is that by somehow returning to the past, things will be better.

This causes many problems for Christians who try to criticise their own culture by appealing to the past. We are always moving further away from the past, and we are incapable of really bringing it to bear on the present. It will always elude us, and the more we absolutise and idealise it, the more the past condemns us without liberating us. Every denomination has its own Golden Age that it seeks to recreate. The Methodists and Nazarenes look back to the good old days of Wesley – if only there were still men like him to tell it like it is! Those in the reformed tradition look back to the great Reformers – if only there was a latter day Jonathan Edwards to lead the church, or a modern Calvin, or someone with the drive and vision of Luther – they’d soon sort the church out! Or perhaps we lament the demise of the great preachers like Spurgeon, McCheyne, or Moody, and so on. If only those who shape our culture and society had the conviction of the Puritans, or had been raised on some of that old-time religion – the liberals and the godless would soon be put in their place! The Charismatic movement (of which I am a part) longs for the days of Acts, when miracles and healing were commonplace, if only we had such faith now! And so the rose-tinted view of history and lament over the present goes on.

There have of course been many great men and women of God throughout history, but the greatness of their preaching, or the rigour of their theology, or their passion for the scriptures are not the means by which we are to evaluate and transform the present. The goal of history is not to recreate the first century church, or to bring back sixteenth-century Puritanism, or to turn the country back to 1890 standards as the makers of Time Changer aspired to, it is the Kingdom of God.

God, the past, and the future

There is indeed great value to be found in understanding and remembering our past as Christians, and the whole Christian faith is established on remembered promises. God’s promises confront us in our darkness and slavery, and open up a new future for us. God meets the barren couple Abraham and Sarah, and makes a statement about the future that will radically change their lives. He promises that not only will they conceive, but that they will have an innumerable number of offspring.

Similarly, God promises the enslaved and downtrodden Hebrews in Egypt that they will be set free and have a land of their own. They cry out in their suffering and God opens up a future for them by his promise where previously they had none. In the same way in the exile, God announces to those in captivity in Babylon that he will give them a hope and a future. God’s future plans are always in radical opposition to the sin, death, and slavery of the present. His promises are not simply to cheer up a weary soul who is floundering in the realm of private piety, but they announce a new future according to God to those trapped in a present that is under the rule of darkness and sin that eventually encompasses the whole of creation. God’s promises also encourage the faith in those who hear them to transport them to where God wants them to be.

The ultimate promise of God is to be found in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For too long we have focussed on the resurrection purely in terms of that which preceded it. It is a vindication of Jesus in the face of his mistrial and rejection, or perhaps it is a sign that God accepted Jesus’ sacrifice. The resurrection is not an End however, it is a Beginning.

The resurrection is a promise and anticipation of the renewal and redemption not only of those who are in Christ, but also of a whole new creation. God’s Final Promise for history is that he will make all things new (Rev 21:5) and that “the dwelling of God [will be] with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Rev 21:3-4). This is God’s plan for history, and his guarantee for such a future has taken place in the resurrection of his Son. The New Creation will not begin at the End of space and time, but it has already begun in the raising of Jesus from the dead. By receiving the Holy Spirit, we receive a foretaste and down payment of this life to come.

Christianity is then not orientated towards the past, and it should never be. On the contrary, it is to be orientated towards the future that God has already announced for his creation. It is a vision radically opposed to a sinful present of sin, pain, and injustice and hoping for such a future does not permit daydreaming escapism, or utopianism – even Christian utopianism. The doorway to the resurrection is through the cross, and all who wish to take up their cross and follow Jesus must realise that discipleship does not mean an escape from a suffering and sinful world, but rather it means embracing it. This is where the resurrection hope has its power. We do not use the Hope of the resurrection and the Kingdom of God as an escape, but rather it is the power by which we are to transform the present. If we believe that God has promised a future Kingdom without sin and suffering, then our proclamation of such a Kingdom necessarily involves appropriate practice in the present. When we pray ‘your Kingdom come, your will be done’, we are not anticipating some great escape from history, or a return to some now-faded glorious past, but we are participating in God’s mission to transform the sinful present to make it correspond to the future that the Risen Christ has made possible.

So what of the past?

It would not do to end this article without offering some suggestions about what to do with the past. I hope I have already made clear that the Christian faith is to be orientated towards the future (and a specific future at that), and that we are not to idealise a dim and distant past, or lament the passing of the greats who have gone before us. Similarly, we cannot hope to successfully critique and transform the present by trying to reinstate the past, we are to transform the present by conforming it to the future which God has promised is coming.

In the Hebrew faith, there were generally not Bibles or promise-boxes to hand where one could look-up God’s promises to the nation, and neither did one highlight one’s Torah with fluorescent pens when one found a nice promise in the scriptures. The Israelite culture was one based on remembrance and stories. God revealed himself to Moses and to Israel as the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”, and as soon as God says something like this he is identifying himself with a particular ongoing story of faith in which he is now going to involve Moses and Israel. By identifying himself with some actions in the past, God is reminding Israel of his previous actions, and so his is proving himself trustworthy for the next generation. God called Israel to remember her past relationship with him, but not so they could lament how bad they were by comparison to their forefathers, but so that they would refocus on the mission God had called them to, and the mission he had begun with Abraham – to bless all the nations.

Likewise we do well to learn from those who have gone before us – but not for reasons of sentimentality or to condemn the present. We look and see how God worked through Luther, and realise that we are dealing with the same God who is continuing his mission to reach the world, to forgive sinners, to feed the poor, to liberate the captives and to establish his Kingdom. The God we worship and serve is the God of Calvin, of Wesley, Spurgeon, Paul, Athanasius, Moody, Edwards, Watts, Booth, Chrysostom, Augustine, Knox, Graham, Peter, Origen, and Moses, and so on. Their achievements in the past are not to condemn us, and neither are we to try and steer the course of history back in their direction as part of a futile u-turn designed to restore us to godliness. Their work should point beyond them and to the God who is not stuck in the past, but who calls us by his promises and by his Spirit towards the future that he is inaugurating.

Behold

2005-05-03T01:15:00.000+02:00

New blogging gimmick: 'My Blog Map', courtesey of Feedmap.net.

You enter your postcode and street name and voila, a map of where you live appears (handy if you get lost) and also a link telling you how many other bloggers there are in your area. It's a few miles out (I live about half an inch to the southwest of the smiley face). See the left hand sidebar for more details.

Do pop round for a cup of tea and a biscuit if you happen to be passing through Lower Saxony anytime soon. Also see this webcam of the lovely, picturesque, not-at-all Manchester-like town in which I currently live. As you can see, the still-pagan Germans are getting ready to celebrate the start of Maiwoche on Thursday, which will involve markets, beer, and sausages. I totally love living here, it's ace.

Best of all, Feedmap means another buttontastic icon to add to my ever-growing collection. I'm like some kind of online Cub Scout only without the evil Scout Master who threatened "to punch the **** out of me" if I didn't stop knocking his son's cap off his head and making him cry. I never went back after that. My only other memory of being in the Cubs was a rock painting competition (and why not?) in which I painted my rock to look like a handgrenade. I didn't win of course but I didn't care. I spent the next week playing 'armies' and throwing my handgrenade at everyone and everything and yelling 'BOOM!' when it hit them. I think it ended up being confiscated along with my bow and arrow, and for almost certainly the same reasons.

Pete

2005-05-03T01:03:00.000+02:00

There is some Bon Jovi on my hard drive. Explain yourself immediately.

Idiots

2005-05-03T00:27:00.000+02:00

"No, no - you've got it all wrong, I'm not clever at all. Watch and see!"

Finally a post worthy of Idiotwatch. I'm going to publish it on here too because no one ever reads Idiotwatch, but perhaps that's because we never update it? Highly likely.

It is very rare that I ever agree on anything that is written in the Daily Mail, but today was different. Whilst taking in my daily recommended dosage of BBC Breakfast News, I noticed that the featured headline of the Mail was 'HORROR AT THE BRIDGE OF IDIOTS'. A cracking headline if ever there was one, though sadly the online edition has a different headline.

But who are the idiots? Not, as you may expect from the Mail, Tony Blair and his cronies (ho-ho!), but the elite intelligentsia of Britain; namely the students of Oxford University. It seems that every May 1st it is tradition to jump from Magdalen Bridge into the River Cherwell, and it seems that this year was no exception. But herein lies the idiocy: the water was only three feet deep, which resulted in broken legs and ankles for those poor (stupid) people who jumped in first. You'd think that the sight of the first jumpers writhing around in three foot deep water with mangled limbs would be enough to discourage everyone else, but apparently not. A further twelve people jumped in and surprise surprise, they also received severe leg injuries.

"See, I told you. Now I have two broken legs. And I'm picking my nose."

People at Oxford are supposed to be smart. I would expect this sort of behaviour from students from the University of Derby, or people who wanted to commit suicide, but not from Oxford.

I fully expect the Daily Mail to resume its usual diet of lies, sentimental drivel, complaining about a decline in morality, or stirring up a hatred of foreigners tomorrow, so go to Mailwatch instead.

Bank Holiday complaint

2005-05-02T14:12:00.000+02:00

Dear Banks,

It seems that as well as managing my money in a very selfish and unorganised way, including now charging me £1 to withdraw my own money from cash machines, you have also decided to award yourself a day off for May Day, you bunch of Marxist heathen.

Granted that we all need the occasional holiday, but can you explain to me why bank holidays requires such brutal changes to the daytime television schedules? Over the last three months I have been accustomed to sitting down for my lunch at 12pm promptly, at which point I watch the Channel 4 news. This is followed at 12.30pm by the ITN lunchtime news, which I switch off halfway through at 1pm so that I can watch the BBC News, which is uninterrupted by adverts and gimmickry. At 1.30pm I pour myself another cup of tea and then enjoy a round-up of non-news from my part of the country. This is then followed perhaps by additional tea and/or cake, which sustains me through my 90-minute marathon of Scrubs on Sky One and Sky One Mix.

Can you then explain to me, evil capitalist bank owners, why it is necessary to replace my usual lunchtime diet of world news and politics with Star Trek V, Tweenies and other assorted non-quality television programmes that do not feature Andrew Marr, Jon Snow or Anna Ford? Furthermore, why do you feel the need to torment me even more by replacing Scrubs with more stoo-pid Star Trek Voyager on Sky One?

I appreciate that your employees require an extra day off to do some DIY in the garden and then get drunk and shout at their kids who are whining to be taken to Alton Towers, but your savage butchery of the regular afternoon TV schedule is a crime, sir, that I for one cannot forgive.

yours,

Sven

Blogs in general #2

2005-05-02T01:51:00.000+02:00

Blogs in general #1 here.

After spending yet another illness-recovery week surfing my way through Blogexplosion, I now present a summary of the 500+ blogs I've visited so far this week.

1. The US political commentary blog (strong Republican)

President Bush has had another run-in with the United Nations, who aren't happy with us getting our own way on everything - to hell with them! Who are these so-called 'other nations' anyway? I've never heard of them, so why should my tax dollars be spent propping up millions of tiny commie-loving WMD-republics in places I've never even heard of? I say nuke them all! U-S-A! U-S-A!

2. The End of the world is nigh Christian blog

Interesting news on the global apocalypse front this week as the President of China announced plans to send a Chinese-made satellite into orbit around the earth. Could this probe contain some kind of giant space-laser that will blow up the sun, causing the Earth to plunge into darkness and bring about the Rapture? Highly likely.

Additionally, new Pope Benedict XVI is reported to have bought a new PC. Will this PC turn out to be the prophesied global supercomputer that controls everyone's thoughts and makes them worship the beast (Colin Farrell) ? It's time to "be not as foolish virgins" and get ready for the rapture! (If you're saved that is. If not then dial 1-800-NOGO-2-HELL and press option #4 "I am not an existing customer and would like to open a new account").

Today's rapture probability is 65%, with light showers in coastal areas.

3. The wine taster blog

Oh, heaven! The first thing one notices upon daintily sipping a glass of 1988 Chateau Guillotine is the way in which the mild scent of fromage frais dances magnificently on one's tongue, performing a gay do-ce-do as it waltzes across the pallet and into the Canal d'estomac. It leaves a lingering taste of France in one's mouth and is a wine suitable for drinking with Peacock Fritters or perhaps some Pois des Fromage. The 1988 Chateau Guillotine is an excellent wine, though one has to question if it is really so great as to warrant someone being paid to write this sort of claptrap for a living.

4. The bad photo blog

'Leaf'

I call this picture 'Leaf', because it is a picture of a leaf. I found it in the woods, where there are many other leaves. Some are on trees, but some are dead and on the floor. They are dead leaves. Dead leaves make me sad. Everybody dies, but I want to be a tree and live forever in the palace of the trees.*

*For an excellent photo blog, check out Hannah's page.

There's more of these to do but I have to be up early for the dentist in the morning. Night!

The Misfits tell it like it is

2005-05-02T01:22:00.000+02:00

I'm working my way through the Misfits back catalogue at the moment. Right from the classic Glenn Danzig stuff through to the last few albums. Today's recommended listening is the track Lost In Space from the album Famous Monsters:

Lost in Space

Of all the things they taught you, I'm telling you this, son
All the wars fought before won't compare to this one
Giant spiders prepare... to take over

Here comes another mutant suicide squad
You blast them out but now you're way off course
You start to shiver and shake
I'm calling you, Houston

Am I following...all of the right leads?
Or am I about to get lost in space?
When my time comes, they'll write my destiny
Will you take this ride?

All communication's lost, we crashed into the Earth
Too late to see a giant spider monster giving birth
The future is here... and here is the future

Am I following... all of the right leads?
Or am I about to get lost in space?
When my time comes, they'll write my destiny
Will you take this ride with me?

(Danger, Danger Will Robinson... Warning, Warning.)


Yes. Next up: The Misfits speak out on the effects of nuclear testing on
a race of evil ants in Them.

The weird and wonderful world of the weirdo

2005-05-01T23:40:00.000+02:00

Here's how some people have arrived at World of Sven via searching Google in the last few days:

1. 'sven god' - No. Although I do tend to write about him a lot I suppose.

2. 'on the town bum and bummers' - Hahahaha. What? Not on this blog young man.

3. 'origin of the phrase bleeding heart' - Well it didn't originate here. Try a liberal blog, they've got plenty of bleeding hearts.

4. 'nude scallies' - two separate searches for this one. No idea why this one came up with my blog. Perish the thought. Bleeeeach.

5. 'Gareth Keenan motorcycle' - I remember that episode of The Office too, but no sign of it here.

6. 'draw a face on" stomach -pumpkin -roommate' - You have too much time on your hands , and do you really need the internet to tell you how to draw a face on a pumpkin or a roomate? I confess I did touch on the subject here.

7. 'becky higg' - up and coming singer/songwriter who I am happy to say I am good friends with. I referred to her here after she began supporting France during Euro 2004, in the fourth-ever World of Sven post. I notice that as far back as June 2004 I was procrastinating over asking Bryony out. It still took me another four months to pluck up the courage but totally worth it :)

8. 'pictures of people being swallowed alive by predators' - none on this blog, but what is hilarious is the fact that someone has actively searched for such pictures. Perhaps they were referring to this?

9. 'essays against Michael Jackson' - again none here, but all I'll say is: if I was a billionaire paedophile, I would definitely have a funfair in my back garden.

10. 'pat robertson and desperate housewives' - Hahahahaha. Yes. Yes. It shall be done.

Pat Sunday Special

2005-05-01T14:53:00.000+02:00

Dear Pat,

My wife and I have recently been arguing over the amount of time she spends putting on her make up and perfume in the morning. She asks me how she looks and I tell her 'like the devil's whore'. Then for some reason she won't speak to me and we are no longer having relations. I've always tried to be as biblical as possible, but she just doesn't seem to be responsive to me. What should I do?

Tom, Nebraska

Dear Tom,

Telling the truth may hurt, the Bible never promises that it will be easy. The simple fact is that millions of women across America wear make up and perfume for one very basic reason: they are ugly and they smell. It may sound harsh and unloving, but we shouldn't let fear of rejection prevent us from telling us like it is. Several of my wives were standing too close when nature was wielding the ugly stick, and a loving reminder of the fact helps keep them humble and submissive.

I understand your desire to resume having relations with your wife - but have you considered polygamy as a way forward? There are so many young women in America without a man to tell them what to do that some of them have simply turned into lesbians, but this is nothing that a life of domestic drudgery, a couple of kids, and a biblical husband can't fix.

yours mormonally,

Pat

Dear Pat,

My wife and I have recently been reading through the works of so-called 'Christian' author C.S. Lewis and have concluded that the frequent mention of witches, elves and monsters means that he is actually some kind of pagan murderer.

We also believe that the new Pope is the Antichrist, and that President Bush's reluctance to invade Iran and North Korea may show that the liberals have finally got to him. Is anyone actually a Christian anymore?

Frank and Delilah, Texas

Dear Frank and Delilah,

Well Jesus told us that in the last days many people would fall away from their faith, and by 'many people' I think he actually meant 'literally everyone, including seemingly myself'. In these days of prayer-less schools, sexual deviancy, peace movements, and so-called 'Christian' rock and roll music, I wouldn't be surprised if I was the only true believer in the whole entire universe. We must even ask the question: was Jesus even a Christian? Let's have a look at the evidence:

*Had long hair
*Fraternised with prostitutes and the religiously unclean people
*Opposed the religious authorities
*Supported taxation!
*Renounced violence
*Didn't own a gun
*Did not support Bush's presidential campaigns in either 2000 or 2004
*Was from the Middle East

This may come as a shock to many people, but it seems as though far from being a Christian, Jesus may have in fact been some kind of un-American terrorist-type, which in my view calls for the immediate bombing of Nazareth and also possibly Bethlehem. It's a sad day when the author of your faith no longer supports the programme, but there were always going to be difficult times in these last days.

yours increasingly radically,

Pat

Hahahahaha

2005-05-01T13:44:00.000+02:00

Yes.

Go and watch this. Oh I how chuckled.

Hat tip to Lou.

I was channel hopping last night and watched this drama on one of Christian channels where a conservative Bible teacher from 1890 is transported forward in time to the present day. Obviously the makers of the TV show buy into the myth that those were the good old days and that if only we got back to 19th century values, everything would be ok. Well, unless you happen to be black (no civil rights for you, sorry), a woman (back to the kitchen to make apple pies! Go on woman! Git!) or a science teacher (well the Bible is a science textbook after all!). Anyhow the guy from 1890 laments at how depraved modern society is and how if only we 'got back' to that old-time religion everything would be ok.

I didn't watch to see how the film ended, though if I had directed it the grand finale would have been for an alien mothership to invade the earth and enslave humanity, though I expect the real ending of the movie probably involved a happy ending (why do Christian dramas always have happy endings? The essence of good drama is conflict, not picnics and lollipops. Bah.) where everyone in 21st century America realises that 1890 guy is right and humbly repents of the last 115 years of history.

Seriously though - and I'll try and make this point without upsetting anyone - I just don't get the particular strain of American Christianity that makes this kind of stuff. The assimilation of the Bible into white middle-class culture (I've learned Sixlegged, see?) has spawned an immensely powerful and vocal form of Christianity which has absolutised itself over and against every other form of Christianity, and every other philosophy of history. This has happened to such an extent that to call it into question is tantamount to apostasy.

I mean, this week the multi-millionaire Christian TV channel owners across the US were urging their viewers to 'fight' the persecution they were now facing. And what was this terrible persecution? Turns out the religious right aren't getting their way with the appointment of Supreme Court judges. Pur-leeeease.

In China, where to be a Christian means imprisonment or death, there are now 80 million Christians and China has the fastest growing church in history. I was fortunate enough to hear two of the leaders of the Chinese underground church speak during a visit to England last year. Before appearing to speak, one of them had just found out that his sister had been taken away by the secret police for belonging to a church. The other leader had recently escaped from prison and made it to England. He announced that the Chinese church had now trained 100,000 missionaries to take the Gospel across Asia. He smiled and said "we expect at least 10,000 of them to be executed." Now that is being persecuted for your faith. Whining to the authorities because the government aren't doing things your way does not mean that you're being persecuted, it means that you're spoiled and wouldn't know persecution if it came and bit you in your fat ass.

Rant over. But seriously, it really gets on my nerves.

An Alien Stole My Skateboard

2005-04-29T19:19:00.000+02:00

VJ and Thérèse have salivated so much at the prospect of seeing pictures of my, Jonny and Kieran's teenage selves that they have had to wear special bibs to work for the last day or so. Ladies, cease your drooling and behold:

Way back in 1996, Jonny, Kieran, and I starred in the Lower School Play at our posh school. The play was called An Alien Stole My Skateboard and whilst I can't remember all the plot, it basically involved two parallel universes that somehow overlapped. In one I was an ordinary schoolboy, while in the other I was the heroic Prince Erfa. Kieran played my best friend along with Andrew 'The Shozzatollah' Shorey and Jonny played my hippie dad.

That's me in the green tights and wellies on the left (it was my superhero costume). Next to me is Jonny, who played my dad. The girl on the table was Jonny's wife, played by a girl called Vicky that everyone used to fancy. The Shozzatollah is in the white shirt and on the right you can see Kieran's head.

I was chanting something in this picture that was supposed to transport me off to a parallel universe or something. Yes I am wearing maroon speedos on top of my green tights, and yes, I regret it. Forever. Kieran (red shirt and milk bottletop necklace) seems a little confused by proceedings, but then, the play made no sense whatsoever.

The finale. The evil baddie lies dead on the floor after being slain by yours truly. He was played by a guy called Jordan Briggs who once got given a wedgie so badly that he bled and had to go to hospital haha. I believe this to be the first recorded picture of Jonny in a smart hat. He is adjusting it on the right hand side of the stage.

So that was An Alien Stole My Skateboard. It was quite fun at the time, but was completely surpassed by the speech that me and Jonny made after the end of the play in which we successfully parodied the Headmaster, who was sat on the front row hehehe. He found it hilarious, which it was of course.

This made me so happy

2005-04-29T17:43:00.000+02:00

You see all those little buttons on the right-hand side of this blog? See how they dazzle and excite? Well now you can make your own by going to the lovely, lovely people over at Kalsey.com.

Click here to make all your buttonal dreams come true.

The Story of Jesus: part 5

2005-04-29T17:23:00.000+02:00

Mark 1:29-34

As soon as they left the synagogue, they went with James and John to the home of Simon and Andrew. Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told Jesus about her. So he went to her, took her hand and helped her up. The fever left her and she began to wait on them.

That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons, but he would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was.

Immediately after Jesus has amazed the crowds in the Capernaum synagogue with his authoritative preaching and exorcism, he and his fledging group of disciples go and find Simon’s mother-in-law, who is ill. Jesus takes hold of her hand, helps her up, and the fever leaves her. Such things are hard to keep quiet of course, and by evening huge crowds have gathered to see Jesus, and he heals more sick people and casts out demons.

Before I say what is happening here, it will be easier to begin by saying what is not happening in the story. Jesus’ healing stories (and there are many of them still to come) form a hugely significant part of the overall story of the Kingdom of God, the defeat of the satan and the coming judgment on Israel. Modern apologists have often used and taught these stories in a whole other way that has torn Jesus out of historical setting and turned him into a walking proof-text.

Since the Enlightenment, sceptic rationalism has cast doubt on the existence of God, or the possibility of any divine power intervening in history, much less God becoming incarnate and healing someone. The only thing that counts is the ‘natural’, i.e. that which is rational, and there is certainly nothing ‘supernatural’. Christianity has then often shoehorned these healing narratives into an apologetic straitjacket to ‘prove’ the existence of a supernatural realm, or to ‘prove’ that Jesus is God and that the Bible is ‘true’.

To divide reality into ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ categories is a very modern idea, and Jesus is not saying that “actually there is a supernatural realm where God lives and that what is more, I am God, and I’m going to prove it by healing some people and casting out a few demons. See – look at that dead guy I raised to life, if that doesn’t prove that I’m the Word become flesh then I don’t know what does!” This is fundamentally not what the miracle stories are about; as such a reading of the texts is a decidedly anachronistic one.

Jesus’ miracles are part of his Kingdom announcement, and this is the place where they make the most historical sense. In fact strictly speaking, to refer to them as simply ‘miracles’ reflects more on the natural v supernatural debate of over 1500 years later. The words that the Gospel writers use to describe these actions are paradoxa – unexpected things, dunameis – displays of power or authority, terata or semeia – signs or portents, and thaumasia – marvels[1]. The signs are exactly that- pointers towards the Kingdom that Jesus is inaugurating. They are the evidence that the rule of sin, Satan and evil is finally being replaced by the rule of God. Sins will be forgiven, Satan will be defeated and sickness will be cured. God is finally redeeming the world through Israel, as he had always intended to. Crucially however, this Kingdom is coming not through the Temple, or the religious authorities, it is coming through Jesus himself.

There is also something rather subversive happening here. In popular Jewish theology of the time, those who were rich, healthy and prosperous were held (by themselves at least) to be blessed by God, whilst those who were sick, poor and lame were viewed as being under God’s curse, or being punished for their sin, based on a rather naive reading of texts like Deuteronomy 28 (there are of course still some in the church who think like this and have thus made the same mistakes.) Jesus does not endorse this view, but rather he refutes it. He is establishing the Kingdom of God – but the rich and the powerful will not find it easy to enter, and God is not shutting out the sick and the poor; he is going to them first. Wealth, health, and status count for nothing in God's Kingdom.

At the end of this passage, Mark again notes that Jesus forbids the demons to say who he was. In the last study we saw that they recognised him as the Holy One of God, yet Jesus commands them to be quiet over the issue of his identity. This is the beginning of what has been called the ‘Messianic Secret’, why does Jesus repeatedly urge people and demons to keep quiet about who he is and what they have experienced? This is an important question, although I will discuss it in a later post.

Reflection

It’s time I introduced an important concept into this study in its early stages, and it’s an idea that theologians call ‘eschatology’. It comes from the Greek word eschatos, meaning ‘future’. Eschatology is to do with the future, and what God will do in the future. Regrettably, eschatology has been monopolized by the lunatic fringe of Christianity and is concerned only with a series of events that are supposed to occur at the end of time, like the rapture, the antichrist, Armageddon, and so on. In the time of the New Testament however, eschatology still spoke of the future, but not one that would come at the end of time, but rather one that would happen within history. Jewish eschatological hope was for the Kingdom of God to come and replace the rule of Satan and evil, and it offered a new future now, not one to be experienced after death, or at the end of time.

Thus Jesus’ healings are eschatological, they make part of the Future present now. God’s promise for the fulfillment of history is a Kingdom where there is no more death, mourning, crying, pain, where evil has been defeated forever and God dwells with humanity (Rev 22:3-4). When Jesus heals someone, it is an act of restoration, it is a foretaste of the Kingdom that is still to come, and it is bringing the Future into the Present.

Christians are also called to this task as part of our mission of proclaiming the Kingdom of God. Indeed the healing of the sick is not as a ‘proof’ of the existence of a supernatural realm, or a replacement for conventional medicine, but as a ‘sign of the Kingdom’. Healings are always to point beyond themselves to the coming age which they anticipate. It is the same with combating evil (see previous study), as this too is a conflict not just between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, but between the present evil age and the age to come. To experience a healing is to experience a down-payment of something that we still hope for.

Do ‘miracles’ still happen? Yes, I believe they do. I have experienced them first hand, and have myself been miraculously healed on one occasion. Too often though, healings are simply sought as an end in themselves, and devoid of any connection to the Kingdom of God and to the future they lose much of their impact and meaning. Right at the end of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus declares that those who follow him will lay their hands on sick people and they will get well – but this is as a part of the whole Kingdom proclamation, not as some latter-day alternative medicine.

There is also the health and prosperity v poverty and suffering element in the passage as well. In popular ‘health and wealth’ preaching, many Christians have made the same incorrect assumptions that sickness means you’re sinful and that being healthy and rich means God is blessing you. As the rich young man will find out in Mark 10, this is simply not the case. As for the sick, Jesus affirms their worth first of all by associating with them and then by healing them. By healing the sick, the ‘us v them’ division in which the ‘favoured’ exist over and against the ‘unfavoured’ is abolished and the whole community is restored, not just the individual. What is more, the healed community is re-formed around the person of Jesus Christ, not around those who are ‘blessed’ and those who aren’t.

There are of course many other aspects to Jesus’ healings, but I’ll save those for some later posts.

Prayer

Heavenly Father,

We praise you and thank you for your redemptive purposes, that you embrace sickness and suffering not with condemnation or accusation, but with grace and healing.

We ask that you strengthen us with the grace and hope to look towards the Kingdom of God, and we pray that your Kingdom done and that your will be done. Help us not to judge those who are weak, sick and excluded, but we pray that they may be restored along with us. We pray for the faith and confidence in you to lay our hands on the sick and heal them.

We forgive everyone who has sinned against us, and ask that you also forgive us. We also ask that you fill us afresh with your Holy Spirit, who is the power of the age to come, and we thank you that you give to us generously without finding fault.

We pray this in the name of Jesus,

Amen

Previously: Jesus amazes the people with his authority
Next: Jesus encounters a leper.

Follow the whole study here at The Minor Prophet.

[1] See N T Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, p188

Favourite Music

2005-04-28T20:20:00.000+02:00

People have posted their favourite musical memories on their blogs in response to Col's idea which I mentioned in this post. Here are the links:

Beaky
Swan
Lou
Jon
Liam
Col
Sven
Johnny the Horse

I'll just keep on adding names to this post the more links I get sent.

The question on everyone's lips is...

2005-04-28T19:14:00.000+02:00

Will Jupiter explode?

Jupiter "to be prophetically destroyed by the Antichrist". Crumbs.

Well apparently the Bible has a lot to say on the matter - but don't take my word for it - discover the fascinating answer to this age old question here.

I also have a burning question on the matter, but as a finite being, I lack the appropriate incredulity to ask it.

Must...resist....discussion on penal...substitution...nngh

2005-04-28T18:47:00.000+02:00

But then again, I could get stuck right on back into it. This time with the people over at Emergentno. Their blog is a bastion of resistance against the 'emergent' church and makes some good points, although generally speaking it tends to assume (perhaps not intentionally) their own objectivity as the yardstick for dealing with theological deviants, which is generally a very bad way to make your point.

Once more unto the fray....

Previous thoughts here and here, amongst other places.

Updates

2005-04-28T16:36:00.000+02:00

1. Pete and Cadfael are lookalikes of the week.

2. New book: 'Liquid Church' by Pete Ward. Apparently he's a liberal without realising it, but this is supposed to be the handbook for postmodern church-types, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

3. I'm listening to Apocalpytica.

4. Snap are the early 1990s artists of the week.

5. Astrid is still blog trump of the week until I can figure out who to feature next.

Theology Joke

2005-04-28T15:59:00.000+02:00

Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Kung and Leonardo Boff arrive together at the pearly gates. Modestly, Ratzinger ushers Kung through the door first. An hour later he emerges weeping. “I never thought I could have been so wrong!” wails Kung. Next, Leonardo Boff makes his entrance. An hour later, he returns with a puzzled look and shaking his head. “I never thought I could have been so wrong!”
Finally, Ratzinger is ushered in. Raised voices are heard, and after a while St Peter is amazed to see Jesus emerge and mumbling, “I never thought I could have been so wrong!”

Hat-tip to Richard at Connexions.

Congratulations Finland

2005-04-28T14:56:00.000+02:00

On producing the most bland and tasteless-yet-addictive food in history. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Finn Crisp:

Finn Crisp are wafer-thin slices of mediocrity that come in three flavours: Grey, Plasterboard, and Sandpaper. Their nutritional purpose is to serve solely as a placebo for people who think that eating this stuff will help them lose weight. When bitten, the Finn Crisps shatter into millions of razor-sharp fragments that are hazardous to life and limb.

I would only recommend this food to people who need something to rub their corns with.

Get out and vote

2005-04-28T01:01:00.000+02:00

Don't wake up with the Tories on May 6th because Michael Howard is vampire and wants to eat all your children. True fact.

Taxi for Trofimencoff

2005-04-27T16:28:00.000+02:00

Wannabe Prime Minister of the World Thérèse made a schoolboy error earlier today when a combination of human ignorance and a 'computer thingy' led to the URL of her blog being irreversibly changed.

Fortunately, she isn't really in charge of the world ("Sorry People's Republic of China, I didn't mean to launch all those nuclear weapons at you, it was a 'computer thingy'") because I am, though in my kindness I let her play her little imaginary power games.

Thérèse can no longer be found at http://therese_t.blogspot.com so update your bookmarks to:
http://shoeism.blogspot.com.

A musical idea

2005-04-27T16:19:00.000+02:00

I got an e-mail from Col a while ago that discussed people's favourite music and so on and she hit upon a good idea. In the movie Almost Famous one of the characters has a note for each of her favourite albums that explains why she really liked that album, and what memories it evoked etc.

Thus I put it to you, dear readers, to list your favourite 2-3 albums of all time on your blogs, say why you like them so much and what particular memories they bring back. Pop a link in the comment section and I'll set up some links to everyone's posts on the matter.

My three albums will be:

OK Computer - Radiohead
Almost Here - Unbelievable Truth
Mutter- Rammstein

I should hopefully get round to writing some thoughts on them later on tonight...

Blogs

2005-04-27T14:55:00.000+02:00

I have absolutely no inspiration to write anything whatsoever of quality today, which is probably the closest I will ever get to being a real Daily Mail journalist. This being the case, here is what's happening everywhere else. I have a very short attention span so sorry if my impulse to ditch the PC and go and watch Scrubs takes over.

Pete has moved back to Bristol, where he hopes to start a career in the slave trade. Now who I am going to go and watch movies in town at 2.30am with? Or sit in the pub after lectures on a Friday and smoke cigars and drink whisky with at Gentlemen's Club? Hm? Applications for the position of Sven's official film and pub buddy to this blog. Pete's fellow Bristolian Lozza has had an bit of an up-and-down week rounded off by watching Team America with her mum. Now if there was ever a film not to watch with your mum, Team America is it.

Jonny has a new webpage, containing lists of precious things, and VJ also has a new page. Thérèse has been doing some kind of mud-based experiment, while Krystle has been escaping the drunken love-attentions of her landlord. Hobbit has discovered that he is in fact mostly female, and Lou is plotting her next move after graduation. My other college blog buddies Richard and Derek have been quite quiet which I assume means that all their essays are due in this week hehehe, oh how I don't miss essay deadlines.

Sixlegged has recovered from his drunken weekend blogathon and has got back to laying down the smack on what's what in the world of assimilation. Monkey Boy Matt has finished his project and has made some of his recent mixes available for download. Blogger of the week Astrid does some kung-fu and has a quiz over on her blog. Liam has a funky new webpage and John has a rather good post on Original Sin and has also been grilling his local MP on the issue of asylum and immigration.

On the sister front, Becky has adopted an imaginary duck for the second time in her life, and Gemma has a class full of children who think that on the 8th day God made McDonalds. No really.

And then I suddenly remembered that I still have to watch the last hour of Platoon that I started watching yesterday. I LOVE war movies.

Christian Carnival

2005-04-26T22:07:00.000+02:00

This week's Christian Carnival will be held at Wittenberg Gate You can send your submissions here.

The deadline for submissions is Tuesday (tonight) at midnight Eastern Standard Time. Include this information in your email:

The name of your blog.
A link to your blog's home page
The title of your post.
The URL to your post.
A short description of your post.

For more info on the carnival, go here. This week I'm submitting this post on Being v Doing.

Is Christianity about 'Being' or 'Doing'?

2005-04-26T22:03:00.000+02:00

“God creating human beings not human doings!”…

And so went many of the sermons I heard during my teenage years as a Christian. We didn’t please God more by ‘doing’ things for him; we were simply to ‘be’. Confusion would arise however, when a few weeks later another (or sometimes the same) preacher would try and motivate us with a sermon that chastised ‘some of you’ in the church (meaning all of us) for “talking the talk but not walking the walk”. Being a Christian, we were told, means living radically: giving more, praying more, witnessing more, and so on and so on. After all, Jesus said that not everyone who said to him ‘Lord, Lord’ would enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only those who do the will of God. The service would close with dozens going forward for prayer, to make re-commitments and tearfully repenting of not having done enough.

Fortunately for those sincere but distraught souls, sure as anything there would be another sermon a few weeks later that encouraged everyone to get back to a simple faith of simply ‘being’, whether it was simply ‘being’ in our prayer time, or just ‘being’ Jesus to people – we weren’t to burn ourselves out doing things for God, he had already done everything for us. Suffice to say another sermon urging us to ‘do’ would follow again a short time later.

But how are we to balance 'being' and 'doing'? Or choose between meditation and activism? What does a proper relationship between prayer and practice look like? In the post that follows I hope to shed some light on these questions.

An age of pragmatism

The age we live in only esteems that which is of practical value. Theories are only useful insofar as they can be turned into something concrete and practical, and truth is only that which can be practised. There is little or no time in the modern world for that which does not lead to action and practicality is all-conquering at the expense of contemplation and theory. People are ‘doers’ of one form or another, whether as producers, consumers or workers; and activity is esteemed over and against contemplation, adoration, meditation and reflection.

This same mentality exists in the church too. Sermons must be packed-full of application, but devoid of any theoretical or contemplative content they quickly become a Christian ‘to do’ list. Give more, help the poor more, witness more, serve more and so on and so forth. “Skip the theology, just give us the application” is the cry, “who cares about the theory, will it work in practice?” It isn’t my intention to list the many and severe problems this causes for Christians, but one thing it does do is turn Christianity purely into a religion of action and practice. As liberation theologian Gutierrez remarked: “The first thing is the obligation to love and serve. Theology only comes after this.” This is commendable, because it seeks to love first and then reflect on it afterwards, but will ultimately prove problematic.

Time for reflection?

Practice-over-theory is an inadequate viewpoint however, because following Jesus and exhibiting Christian love are not simply motivations to spur us into action, whether personal, social or political. Christians are also to be characterised by prayer, thanksgiving, joy, adoration and wonder. Our lives in Christ involve meditation and prayer as well as concrete practice.

Without the contemplative Christian life, Christian practice soon degenerates into a Christ-less activism and is no different to any other activist group in this society of ours that judges according to performance. Without the contemplation of Christ, we soon lose our saltiness and over time our practice and action loses any particularly Christian aspects that it may have had.

When we engage in action and practice, we stand with God behind us and face out onto the world, but before we can do this we must first turn around and face God with our hearts and minds wide open to him. Yet when Christians talk about ‘God’ they are not talking in generalities about some anonymous transcendent being, Christian prayer and meditation deals with the particularity of Jesus Christ, and as we meditate and pray through his word, we are inevitably drawn towards his cross and resurrection. In this knowing of God, we begin to experience in ourselves the conflict and freedom between the crucifixion of our old self and our new life in the Risen Christ. It is only in this Spirit-filled new life that we are able to mediate to the world the new life of the Kingdom that Christ’s own resurrection anticipates and establishes. Then having faced God in this way, we are equipped to impart his life, hope and forgiveness to a world crushed beneath the weight of sin, despair and death.

By the ‘knowing of God’, I do not mean ‘knowing’ in the modernist Enlightenment sense of dominating and possessing the object we seek to know. Pragmatic thinking says that ‘knowledge is power’ – but this always means dominating something and acquiring power over and possessing the thing known. When we understand something we exclaim “I’ve got it!” - but this is not the way in which we know God. We know God through wonder, adoration and above all by participation. We hear his voice through his Spirit and his Word, we know ourselves to be loved by him and having first been loved, we love him in return. We do not attempt to use or master God, and neither does he purpose to ‘use’ us. In him we have our being, and only in this mutual relationship with him are we then ready to turn from God and face out onto the world, from the place of meditation to the place of mission.

What sort of action?

Our mediation on and knowledge of God does not free us from practice, rather it free us for practice, and the nature of Christian practice is defined by nothing else but the person of Jesus Christ. Following his death and resurrection, the risen Jesus became the firstfruits and guarantor of an age to come, an age that when consummated will mean no more mourning, suffering, pain, sin, or death. As we turn from God and stand with him facing a broken world, the cross stands over the horizon and indicates the direction in which we are to proceed with our practice as we become disciples of Christ, while at the same time it promises the glorious Future to come, which all our thanksgiving, suffering, prayer and action should anticipate.

Christianity is not simply ‘being’, and cannot be solely a life of prayer and contemplation, but neither can it be simply a matter of ‘doing’, of activity and action. First of all it is knowing God as we dwell on him and his word, but this itself gives birth to the great invitation to proclaim and celebrate his Kingdom out in the world. Theology is not a theory of a practice, but it is both theory and practice that unite themselves completely in the discipleship of Jesus.

Ever since Augustine, when Christians have prayed they have bowed their heads, closed their eyes and folded their hands together. The body language of this kind of prayer is focussed on the inner life, and on the realm of the soul, and looks inward. Yet this is not how the earliest Christians prayed. Mosaics of praying Christians found in the Roman catacombs show people praying standing upright, with their arms raised and outstretched and their eyes open. This is the body language of someone who prays expectantly, who stands and faces the world at the same time as seeking the face of God, and it is the stance of someone for whom knowing the crucified and risen Jesus does invites neither withdrawal from the world into serene meditation or a frantic programme of action, but recognises that discipleship is a harmonious relationship between theory and practice, between knowing and action, and between being and doing - it is in both these aspects that Christian discipleship is to be worked out.

I'll get me coat

2005-04-26T20:17:00.000+02:00

Réne Descartes walks into a bar and runs into one of his friends.

"Time for a pint Réne?" his friend asks.

"I think not.", said Descartes, who immediately disappeared in an explosion of logic.

New e-mail address

2005-04-26T01:54:00.000+02:00

I have a new e-mail address:

steven.harris.uk@gmail.com

I'm locked out of my old Orange one because they SUCK like some huge swamp full of vacuum cleaners on the planet Suck, which is being sucked into a black hole. Conversely, they also blow.

The rules:

1. NEVER send spam to me.

2. Don't send me 'evangelistic' e-mails that end with "Jesus went to the cross for you, the least you can do is forward this piece of pseudo-Christian claptrap to at least 50 of your friends. Remember Jesus said if you deny him, he'll deny you etc etc", together with a picture of a smiling cartoon kitten saying 'God loves me-ow' (geddit?) The senders of such e-mails will have their guilt-tripping, manipulative, condemnation-inducing theology mercilessly destroyed live on the internet.

Neither send me the secular equivalent: "So-and-so has a terminal illness, forwarding this e-mail to at least 500 people will help pay for his/her treatment. If you don't you are a heartless orphan-kicker." People who send such things will be publicly named and shamed on this very blog. Really.

3. Likewise the senders of e-mails that purport to be offering me a share in a huge cash windfall that has miraculously become avaliable if only I will hand over my bank details will be hunted down and slapped until they cry and apologise, even for things they haven't done. They will also have the words 'I am a greedy fool' tatooed on their foreheads. If I have time, I will draw a face on their upper bodies using the nipples for eyes and the belly button as a mouth, causing their torso to have a permanent look of surprise.

4. All other e-mails accepted, though I apologise in advance for being slow to reply.

Compliment of the Week

2005-04-25T19:31:00.000+02:00

I haven't been doing this as often as I would have liked so I'm going to compliment more than one person. Last time around Krystle was the complimentee, see here. So here we go:

Compliment #1

Rebecca of Everyday Musings. Rebecca lives up near the Arctic somewhere and always writes a cheery devotional-type blog with some wise and learned thoughts on hymns, the puritan Christians and the Bible too of course. Rebecca strikes me as someone who is very sincere and deep in her faith, and her love for God seems to shine through even when things have not been so good for her, which is both an encouragement and example to people like me.

Compliment #2

Thérèse of The Origin of Shoeism. We may have our political differences (I rule the world, she refuses to accept it) but for almost the whole time I have been blogging Thérèse has been around, and is one of my very best e-buddies (there, I'm a nerd see.) Thérèse is a wise, smart and considerate person, but most of all she is very funny and always manages to make me laugh either on her blog or on MSN. 'Nuff respect T-rez.

Compliment #3

Richard of The Destruction of Gog. Richard goes to my church and also to my college, and very kindly let me stay at his house in January when I was going insane and getting very ill. Richard is a fellow theology-boffin, and his intelligent insights, both off and online, are always stimulating and encouraging. I think he'll have a big future in both the Church and in the Academy. Muchos Kudos.

Note to self.

2005-04-25T01:30:00.000+02:00

In the future, write shorter blog posts.

N T Wright, Romans 9-11, and Christian Zionism

2005-04-25T01:19:00.000+02:00

Many moons ago, Jared over at the Thinklings Weblog wrote an article in which he criticised the theology of people such as Kay Arthur for their uncritical political and financial support for the nation of Israel. There is a prevalent theology (mostly in the US, but also here in Europe) known as two-covenant theology, where it is held that the Old Testament covenants made with Israel are still in operation in parallel with the New Covenant of Jesus Christ. Apart from having very little (if any) biblical basis (more to come soon), the idea that the modern nation of Israel is especially privileged by God often leads certain Christian groups to have a rather peculiar tolerance for some of the injustice perpetrated by the current Israeli government against the Palestinians. Combined with a somewhat wacky view of eschatology that eagerly anticipates a huge Middle Eastern conflict centred on Israel that will lead to the mass conversion to Christianity of thousands of ethnic Jews, followed immediately by the Second Coming of Jesus to Jerusalem.

It’s not hard to see how holding to this theology can easily legitimise not only a dangerously irresponsible foreign policy, but also how it makes the Church reticent to criticise anything that Israel does. I’ve said before that I see absolutely no problem with Christian criticism of Israeli policy (note, this is not the same as being anti-semitic or racist), quite simply because this is precisely what Jesus and the prophets did.

In the Christianity in which I’ve grown up the two-covenant theology is prominent, and yet I don’t see how it’s biblical. Neither do I think it is correct to embrace a form of dispensational theology that sees all God’s promises and blessings to Israel as simply having being transferred to the Church. It is possible to think sensibly and in a mature manner through these things and avoiding the extremes of both Christian Zionism on one side and anti-semitism on the other. To this end, I’ve started reading The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology by N T Wright, which examines several of Paul’s key teachings that deal with the relationship between the Law, the Covenant and the people of God in the light of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Wright and the New Perspective on Paul

Mark over at Word and Spirit has a post which examines the ‘New Perspective’ on Paul’s theology, a school of thought to which Wright subscribes. The movement seeks to address Pauline thought more in its historical context, and in my view takes more seriously the Jewishness of Paul’s thought and his understanding of Israel and Messiahship. Both E.P Sanders and Wright lament the fact that all too often exegesis of Paul’s letters (and indeed the Gospels) has been a case of simply reading Reformation theology back into the texts, and thus missing the point of what Paul is trying to say to his churches. Thus some tend to see Romans “as a treatise simply on individual salvation from sin” (p232) in which case Romans 9-11 is only treated as an aside or an appendix, or perhaps some kind of interpolation.

Similarly, both Sanders and Wright refute the popular notion that in Paul’s day people believed that they could ‘earn’ salvation by good works whereas Jesus came to save people by ‘grace’. Sanders argues that rather than a form of self-righteousness, the Jews held to a ‘covenantal nomism’ where one entered by grace, but stayed in the covenant by obeying the law. The categories of ‘law’ versus ‘grace’ reflect Lutheran theology, not first century Jewish thought, and as such are rather more alien to Pauline theology then one might suppose. Sanders shows that on the whole, the Jews of Paul’s day did not believe in a self-righteousness that would make them acceptable to God, and that Jesus’ and Paul’s conflicts with Pharisaic thought were not matters of ‘Law’ against ‘Grace’, but rather over who precisely constituted God’s true people Israel, and how God’s people were to define themselves. This of course is likely to get many pairs of evangelical knickers in a twist, as Romans has always been held to be some kind of systematic theology that deals with justification by faith, wrath, grace and salvation, which then leads to the conclusion that Romans 9-11 is a treatise about election and predestination, followed by several chapters of ‘application’.

In the introduction to his Romans commentary John Stott critiques the New Perspective (see Mark’s excellent summary here) by suggesting that it may have been likely that in popular Judaism at least, salvation by works may have been widely held to. In my view though, there is evidence neither for against Stott’s rather speculative case from what ‘might’ have happened in popular Judaism, which weakens his critique of Sanders somewhat. Wright’s viewpoint is rather closer to that of Sanders than traditional evangelical ones.

Wright on the purpose of Romans

Wright denies that Romans was written simply to sum up Paul’s theology at the end of his life, or to deal with a problem in the Roman church, but that the purpose contains both of these elements. Paul plans to use Rome as a base for his mission to the western Mediterranean, as he has done in Antioch. Paul writes to Rome so that they will be clear about the theology behind his missionary purpose, so that they will not ‘stab him in the back’ as the church at Antioch had done (p234). At Antioch there had been an inner-circle of Jewish Christians who wanted Gentiles to be circumcised if they became Christians. Paul anticipates a reverse of the situation in Rome, where the church is dominated by Gentiles, and he “foresees the church so relishing its status as the people of God that it will write off ethnic Jews entirely as being…second class citizens within the church.” (p234) Paul wants Jew-Gentile equality within the church, and also a mission that reaches to both Jews and Gentiles alike.

Paul then writes Romans as an exposition of the righteousness of God: “the covenant faithfulness, the covenant justice, of the God who made promises to Abraham, promises of a worldwide family characterized by faith, in and through whom the evil of the world would be undone.” (p234) Romans 9-11 then functions as the climax of Paul’s argument, and brings his practical aim into focus. Romans 9:6 begins with Abraham, then moves to the prophets, before moving on to Jesus (10:4) and then the mission of the church (10:9ff), and thus it is on the basis of all of Romans 1-11 that the warning to gentile Christians is given in 11:13. Chapters 12-16 then result from this theology and 1-11 form the basis of the appeal for unity in the Roman church that the strong must bear with the weak.

Romans 9-11

Wright begins by noting that traditionally this passage has been read as being ‘about’ predestination or election, or offering Paul’s philosophy of history. Both of these are approaches are misguided and make for an anachronistic reading of the text. Rather, in line with most modern scholarship, Wright believes that 9-11 is about the failure of the Jews to believe the Gospel, which then raises the question of God’s righteousness, his covenant faithfulness and his ability to keep his promises. Chapter 9 focuses on the character of God and his unfailing word (9:6), whether or not he is righteous (9:14), why he still finds fault (9:19), and how God, as the potter, still has rights over the clay of Israel (9:19-23). After chapter 10, chapter 11 remains focussed on God (11:22, 29 and 32, followed by worship of him in 11:33-6).

Thus the main subject matter is the covenant faithfulness of God and the question of his righteousness, and argues that Israel’s rejection of Jesus is the outworking of God’s faithfulness. It is only by Israel’s rejection of Christ and the concurrent offering of salvation to the Jews and now the Gentiles that the promise to Abraham can be fulfilled for him to have both a global family and his own seed sharing in the blessing.

Yet Paul rejects the notion of special privilege for Jews in chapters 9 and 10, and yet reinstates it in chapter 11, but it is to be understood not as patriotic sentiment (Dodd) or as apocalyptic fantasy (Bultmann). The real crux of the issue is 11:25-27, which does not speak of a last-minute mass conversion of Jews, but rather the salvation of all Israel, which is fundamentally not the same thing.

9:1-5

Paul is grieved that the Jews have rejected the Messiah, and teaches that all their privileges are not arbitrary, but that they have been transferred to the Messiah, and through the Messiah, to all who are ‘in him’ (p237). The greatest privilege of the Jews is that the Messiah came from them ‘according to the flesh’ (1:3-4, 9:5), but he is not merely ‘theirs’, he is God over all. The Messiah “encapsulates [Israel’s] destiny in himself”, and is not only the saviour of Israel, but of the whole world. Yet the Messiah’s death is still an acting out of the sin of Adam, and as long as Israel clings to her ancestral privilege, she will miss out on God’s intended universal salvation. God is God of the whole world, not merely of Israel, and if Israel insists otherwise she denies the very character of God.

9:6-29

How then is God faithful to the covenant? Does he have two plans, or has he changed his mind in the middle of history? No, Paul says, God has done what he has always done. Paul discusses Abraham’s offspring in 9:6-13, but God did not promise that all Abraham’s physical offspring would be within the covenant. Paul introduces the concept of ‘double Israel’ in 9:6b – an Israel according to the flesh and an Israel according to the spirit. As in 3:21-4:25 or Galatians 3-3, it is not race that counts, but grace. In Rom 4:16 Abraham’s family is already global, as it is in 9:7 – it is not simply a “subset of ethnic Israel”.

“Is God then unjust in narrowing down Abraham’s seed?” Paul discusses this in 9:14-18, and having already pointed out that Israel – even though they are God’s people – are still a people according to the flesh, and as such will not escape God’s judgement for their sin. God will judge to reserve a people for himself (9:19-29), though currently he is relenting in order that more may be saved. God has certainly not been unfaithful, and it is not him who has failed, it is Israel, yet in spite of what may seem to be a disaster, God has actually fulfilled his promises.

The ‘vessels of wrath’ passage in 9:19-24 is not about an arbitrary choice to save some and to condemn others, but rather to deal with evil and sin God must create a people through whom he will save the world. The means of dealing with sin and evil is to concentrate it in one place and then put it to death. This does not fall on the people in general, but on the Messiah, their representative. Israel has become the place where sin is focused; Israel becomes a vessel of wrath. Israel is misusing the Torah and her ancestral privilege and refusing to recognise Jesus, and so will remain bound in her condition.

9:30-10:21

This is not a passage about “human responsibility” as such, but about how through the Messiah and the preaching that heralds him, Israel is being transformed from an ethnic people into a worldwide family. The Gentiles are entering in, while the Jews are missing out because they are still misguidedly pursuing the Torah in the wrong manner. The Torah is really the nomos dikaisunes – the boundary marker of the people of God, but I can only be fulfilled by faith, not by the works of the law i.e. dietary regulations, circumcision, Sabbath etc which distinguished Jew from Gentile.

Israel’s rejection of Jesus is the natural consequence of pursuing the Torah in the wrong fashion. The Torah itself is not bad, but by breaking it, human sin became concentrated in Israel. The Messiah has borne Israel’s sin on her behalf, but by refusing to recognise him Israel clings to the terrible destiny of remaining under wrath and sin...

Israel is not only ignorant of her sin, is also ignorant of the righteousness of God (dikaisunes too Theo) – his covenant faithfulness, and so did not recognise that the Messiah was the tellos nomou - the goal of the Torah - all along. Instead Israel has opted to pursue ten idian dikaiosunen – works of the law that would ensure that salvation was for Jews and Jews only. The Torah is not abolished, but neither is it fulfilled in the way the Jews think it is. It is fulfilled by Christ and sharing in the covenant is by faith in him.

God has not changed his mind in the middle of history, but the cross and the resurrection were always a part of that plan. The Messiah was always God’s intended plan. “He is the climax of the Covenant.” (p241) Thus Christ brings an end to Jewish national privilege (see Gal 2:21), and this is the scandal that causes Israel to reject Jesus.

Wright then makes two important points:

The covenant was made with Israel that through Israel the creator might give life back to the world which it had lost through Adam. Israel was to be the means of that life, the means of Adam’s restoration – and Jesus fulfils this national calling. The Torah condemns Israel and the Messiah (cf. Gal 3:13), but in doing so it fulfils the purpose of bringing salvation to the world.

The Torah did affirm the special status of the people Israel, but as a people ‘in Adam’ they were still bound to disobey and abuse the Torah and turn it into a nationalistic privilege. The problem of Israel is not self-righteousness, or trying to ‘earn’ salvation – it is that they have created a nationalist righteousness, and in doing so have concentrated the sin of Adam in themselves. This is a curious part of God’s saving plan, it has brought condemnation to Israel and the Messiah, but for precisely this reason God will be able to save the rest of humanity. Thus both God and the Torah are vindicated.

10:5-8 then goes on to say that the Torah is fulfilled whenever anyone hears the gospel of Christ and accepts it. This is how the new covenant with a new heart will be given, and how the Torah will be ‘done’. Paul has then established a solid theological basis for the mission to the Gentiles, and that the casting away of Israel paradoxically leads to the coming of the Gentiles to God.

Paul has also established here (along with 1 Thess 2, 2 Cor 3, Phil 3 and Rom 1-8) that there is no covenant membership for Israel on the basis of race, ethnic identity or ancestral privilege. Israel’s mission has already been fulfilled in becoming the place where sin was concentrated, so that God might deal with it through the Messiah.

Romans 11

This chapter is not about a great ingathering of ethnic Jews into the Kingdom after the Gentiles have been saved, either immediately before the Coming of Christ or indeed at any other time. This should be obvious when Paul has made it clear in Romans 1-10 that there is no salvation based on ethnic identity or by resting on ancestral privilege. So what does Paul mean in 11:25-27 when he says that all Israel will be saved? Wright insists that it would require a very awkward reading of the rest of 1-11 to insist that ‘all Israel will be saved’ means that all ethnic Israel will be saved once the Gentiles have been.

In 11:1-10 Paul then asks how indeed can any Jews be saved? He himself is proof that God has chosen some by grace – not by the works of the law. The rest have refused God’s grace and so have been hardened, and this is the prelude to a final judgement in which God will again be vindicated.

Following on in 11:11-24 Paul asks how any other Jews will be saved. Although the Roman church is predominantly Gentile, Paul’s motto is still “to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (p247). Rome’s Jewish population had recently been persecuted, and it may have been tempting for the Roman church to effectively declare itself to be a Gentile organisation in order to “clear itself of local suspicion in relation to the capital’s Jewish population” (p247) but Paul will insist that the weak bear with the strong (14-15), and not repeat the mistakes of Antioch. So in 11:11-16, Paul reiterates the fact that it is through Israel’s disobedience that the world has been saved, and that just because Israel has fallen, there is no reason that she should not be saved now and in the future.

Israel was cut off because of her disobedience, and the Gentiles were grafted in, but this by no means give an excuse for Gentile believers to gloat over the Jews, for to do so would simply to repeat the sectarianism that had caused Israel’s problems in the first place. Ethnic Israel can only be grafted in by faith – there is no separate covenant in operation for them, and Paul always maintains this salvation-by-faith of his fellow Jews as a hopeful possibility.

11:25-27 is again not saying that all ethnic Israel will be saved after the Gentiles have been, but that during the period of hardening following their rejection the Gentiles are able to enter the Kingdom, and that is how God is saving ‘all Israel’. A common mistranslation of outos often makes the verse read as Gentiles then ethnic Israel, but Wright argues that the meaning of outos actually means ‘thus’ or ‘in this manner’, and so 11:25 should read ‘Israel has experienced a hardening in part, and in this way the full number of the Gentiles will come in’, and is not describing a temporal sequence where ethnic Israel is saved after the Gentiles. In any case ‘all Israel’ being saved does not mean ‘all Jews’ being saved, but the Israel being saved is the True Israel being saved through faith, as Abraham had been promised. Wright argues that it is entirely accurate to suggest that ‘Israel’ has two different meanings, and Paul has already begun this section of thought with this distinction (see 9:6).

God has hardened part of ethnic Israel but has not judged her so that the mission to the Gentiles can take place. The coming to faith of the Gentiles will arouse ethnic Israel to jealousy, and will cause greater numbers of them to come to faith, and so God will save ‘all Israel’ – i.e. Jews and Gentiles who have faith in Christ.

This will not take place immediately prior to the Parousia, as popular misreading of 11:26-27 may suggest. The quote is a combination of Isa 2:3, 27:9, 59:20f and Jer 31:34, and all speak of the renewal of the covenant, the end of exile and the blessing of the nations through Israel, which is already happening through the Messiah and the preaching of the Gospel. In any case, 11:27 is only an explanation of what Paul has already said in 11:26. There is, says Wright: “no justification for taking Romans 11, as a whole or in its parts, as predictions of a large-scale, last-minute salvation of Jews” and that rather Romans 9-11 brings together the themes of “the righteousness of God, revealed in Jesus the Messiah, not in Torah (though the Torah bears witness to this revelation), and the discovery of the definition of the people of God with the paradoxical promises to Abraham.” (p251)

Conclusion

I’ve given a fairly lengthy outline of Wright’s view of Romans in general and Romans 9-11 in particular, and it seems to me that he thoroughly demolishes any suggestions that the OT covenants are still participated in by the modern nation of Israel, and so perhaps by insisting that the covenants are still with ethnic Israel, Gentile Christian Zionism is sawing off the very branch it is sitting on. This certainly does not permit anti-semitism, because Gentile Christians owe their very salvation to the falling away of Israel, and so should not boast over them, but rather bear with them and continue to proclaim the Messiah.

Neither can I see any justification for two-covenant theology. To hold to this is to suggest that not only did Christ not completely fulfil the Torah (contra 10:4), but that it is perfectly possible to be in a covenant relationship with God apart from faith in Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, Christian mission must be more sensitive to Jewish sensibilities then perhaps it has been previously in this post-holocaust age, but to preach Christ to the Jews is not anti-Jewish, it is, albeit paradoxically, pro-Jewish.

As for the New Perspective, the jury is still out for me. I need to get a lot more familiar with the issues, but from what I’ve seen so far, it makes a lot more sense from a historical perspective than simply to read Reformation theology back into the texts and to turn them into systematic theologies about ‘grace’, ‘law’, ‘atonement’, ‘election’ and so on (I’m aware I’ve oversimplified the case here). I wasn’t especially convinced by Stott’s arguments against Sanders, Dunn and Wright, though I need to read a great deal more on the matter first.

All quotes are from Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology by N T Wright (London: T&T Clark, 1991). If I've breached any copyright by quoting it on here in the public domain without permission, please let me know and I'll remove the post. I've got no money, so there's no point in sueing me.

New Pope installed

2005-04-24T13:08:00.000+02:00

Many of the world's zillions of conservative evangelicals were celebrating the installation of new pope John Calvin I this morning. Although Pope John has not been seen alive for approximately 450 years, this has not dampened the spirits of his millions of followers. A Calvinist spokesman said: "Pope John's inauguration is good news for the church, but of course bad news for those who have not been chosen by God since before eternity, as they have nothing really to look forward to except being consciously tormented in a lake of burning fire for ever and ever."

Critics of the Calvinist Church have pointed out that perhaps Calvin's followers have misapplied his teachings slightly, a viewpoint described as "just the sort of liberal theological horsedung we would usually expect to hear from the unregenerate media." Contemporary reformers and leading theologians have suggested that Calvinists should modernise their thinking slightly, and try and interract with those who have different interpretations of the Bible, a move considered anathema by many traditional Calvinists: "We don't need anyone else to tell us how to interpret scripture, we have Pope John to do it for us!" was the reply of Pope John's leading spokesman, Ian Paisley. After it was pointed out that this was in actual fact very close in theological terms to Roman Catholic belief, Mr Paisley threw a wobbly and excommunicated everyone in sight.

Leader of the League of Young Calvinists, James Tuliplove, yesterday told a press conference that Calvinism still had a strong support amongst young people, and he declared that 'there is a whole new generation of youngsters rising up who are commited to turning the Good News of the forgiveness of sins, peace to all mankind and God's plan to reconcile everything with himself into Bad News that in fact almost everyone is going to burn in hell forever, especially Liberals and Catholics.'

Pope John Calvin is 496 years old, and was unavailable for comment.

Nooo.

2005-04-24T00:56:00.000+02:00

The new blog template has worked fine all day without me tinkering with it, yet this evening the centre column is back down at the bottom of the page when viewed through IE.

Why? Why? Why? I don't want to fix it so much as I want to just know why the machines are conspiring to drive me into the abyss of Eternal Annoyment.

Next week: Sven publishes his blog with pen and paper.

UPDATE: I've banished all traces of Bravenet from the blog, never to return. This means the end of the poll (sorry Thérèse), but also hopefully the end of loading problems.

Why I want Labour to win the election

2005-04-23T23:08:00.000+02:00

Ok, so really I want the Liberal Democrats to win, but I just don't see them making up a 15-point deficit in the polls between now and May 5th. This being the case, I want Labour to stay in power, if for no other reason than the wonderful fact that we are guaranteed up to 5 more years of John Prescott as Deputy Prime Minister. He may not be everybody's cup of tea, but he was responsible for the greatest moment in the history of politics during the 2001 campaign:

He punched this protesting Welsh farmer in the face, not because of the fact that the farmer threw an egg at him, but because the heckler was sporting a disgraceful mullet. It is only natural to respond to mullets in this manner, so JP could hardly be held responsible for his actions.

This time around he's managed to upset the Welsh again. The following conversation took place with reporter Mark Choueke asked JP what he thought about the recent resignation of a Labour MP:

John Prescott: It didn't even register with us. The voters just have one choice, vote Labour otherwise they'll end up with a Tory government. It's unfortunate that some of our decisions upset some people.

Mark Choueke: But this isn't about upsetting Peter Law, it's about upsetting the many thousands of Labour voters in Blaenau Gwent who helped you form a strong government - they feel alienated.

JP: Why are you asking me about this, I don't care, it's a Welsh situation, I'm a national politician.

MC: Are you too big to care about the Labour voters in Blaenau Gwent? Do you think there may be something in your party's methods of working that require a rethink when a politician chooses to stand against you after 35 years service to Labour?

JP: (walking away) Where do they get these amateurs from? You're an amateur mate, go get on your bus, go home.

MC: Are you too big for the regional press now John?

JP: Bugger off - get on your bus, you amateur.

MC: (following Mr Prescott) Is my interview over John? Because if that's all you've got to say, that's what will go in the paper.

JP: (turns back to reporter) - Ooohh, I'm scared, go ahead, put it in your paper.

LOL. "I don't care...bugger off." You have to give it to JP, at least he's honest.

The Story of Jesus: part 4

2005-04-23T22:30:00.000+02:00

Mark 1:21-28

Jesus Drives out an Evil Spirit

They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an evil spirit cried out, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are–the Holy One of God!”

“Be quiet!” said Jesus sternly. “Come out of him!” The evil spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek.

The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, “What is this? A new teaching–and with authority! He even gives orders to evil spirits and they obey him.” News about him spread quickly over the whole region of Galilee.

In part three we saw how, having been baptised by John and having received the Holy Spirit, Jesus had begun to travel around Galilee and announce to Israel that the long-awaited Kingdom of God was now here, and that all other schemes, agendas and ideas of the Kingdom were to be left behind as people were to respond to Jesus in faithfulness by following him, which some of his hearers do.

Israel had of course been intended as the vessel through which God would reconcile the world to himself, but this privilege has been turned into a justification for nationalist feeling against the Romans. They hoped for the Kingdom of God to come, with the Messiah at its head. God’s Anointed One would destroy the Romans and all Israel’s enemies would be crushed, and God’s people would finally be vindicated. This was, speaking in the broadest terms possible, the hope and expectation of Israel in Jesus’ day.

This story throws many of these cherished expectations into question, as Jesus radically redefines not only who God’s enemies really are, but he also amazes people by the authority that he himself possesses, quite apart from any of the rabbinic schools or even the Temple itself. As we shall see over the coming weeks, Jesus calls into question the established Jewish beliefs as regards what it means to be one of God’s people, what Messiahship is like, and the nature of the Kingdom by redefining all these things – not around the Temple and the Torah – but around himself.

Jesus goes to Capernaum and begins to teach in the synagogue, as it was permissible for Jewish men to do. There is however a great difference to how he teaches. He teaches as one who has authority, not as the teachers of the law do (1:22). Mark doesn’t say what Jesus said, but the way in which he said it. There were dozens of religious groups and sub-groups in the Judaism at the time, and zealous pupils would follow and then spread the teaching of their particular Rabbi. Teaching would be made authoritative by appealing to Rabbi So-and-so, or to a particular Pharisee (and so on) to give weight to one’s own argument and teaching.

Jesus however subverts and bypasses this whole way of thinking. He does not appeal to a particular person or tradition to give him an air of authority; he himself possesses an authority that his hearers have never previously encountered. Something important is happening here: Jesus is announcing the Kingdom of God with an authority that is outside all the usual channels, bypassing all the traditions and structures of his contemporaries and making himself and his own teaching stand on his own authority, and no one else’s. This will of course inevitably bring conflict with the authorities, as will become clear in due course.

Jesus and Satan

As will also become clear, it is not the Romans who are the real enemies of Israel, it is the Satan, the one who enslaves and accuses God’s people and who has usurped the throne that rightfully belongs to God. Ever since Eden, there has been a conflict between God and the forces of evil, but now that Jesus is finally inaugurating God’s Kingdom he will finally take back that which Satan has taken. As Jesus will later say after another exorcism:

“…if I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Matthew 12:28)

The cosmic conflict between God and the forces of evil now has a singular focus in and around the preaching and work of Jesus, and as soon as it becomes clear in the Capernaum synagogue, a demon-possessed man cries out:

“What do you want with us Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy is? I know who you are – the Holy One of God!” (1:24)

Immediately after Jesus’ authority is seen to be evident in his preaching, the demon acknowledges Jesus to be the Holy One of God. The forces of evil recognise who Jesus is, and Jesus demonstrates that not only does he teach with authority, but that he has authority over Satan himself by casting out the demon. At the very beginning of his ministry (see part 2) Jesus has already faced Satan and defeated him, choosing instead to obey God, and is now putting the Kingdom into effect by taking back the territory that is under the control of God’s enemy.

It is worth pointing out here that it is in fact not among the hated Romans that Satan is found, it is in the midst of Israel, God’s own people. We have already seen that Jesus is bringing in God’s Kingdom independently of the Temple and the religious authorities, because they too have become corrupt and enslaved by Satan. They have not returned to God and although back in the land, they are still in exile, their sins are not forgiven and they remain stiff-necked and enslaved to sinfulness, this being evident in their nationalistic stance against the might of Rome. They want to live by the sword, but they will die by the sword. They want to fight the pagans with violent nationalism, but in doing so they themselves become pagan. They think of themselves as the sons of God, but really Jesus says, they are sons of the devil (John 8:44).

Jesus’ ministry then has two thrusts to it. Firstly, he is urging Israel to repent – to turn away from the path of destruction they are traveling and to be as God’s people should before it is too late and to embrace the Kingdom of God. Secondly, Jesus must establish God’s Kingdom outside of the current religious system, because it is every bit as godless and corrupt as the pagan nations around Israel, and he does so around his own person. Jesus calls people to follow him, he teaches with his own authority and does not lean on anyone else’s, and furthermore as the Holy One of God the defeat and overthrow of Satan will come through him.

Reflection

How are we to relate this exorcism story to contemporary Christianity? I will say first of all that I do believe that demons exist, and the forces of evil are still active in the world around us. What I will not affirm however is the demonocentric paranoia that permeates certain sections of Christianity, where everything from a headache to liberal theology is explained as some kind of demonic attack (I was once told that I had a ‘spirit of theology’ that needed to be cast out). In any case, this story does not invite speculative witch-hunts to seek out the local demoniac, the story is about Jesus, and we are able to view Satan and his forces in their true perspective.

The Kingdom of God does bring us into conflict with the forces of evil though. In this text, the conflict happens at a personal level, but it is part of a battle of cosmic proportions. The demonic forces that fill individuals with self-loathing and despair are part of the same evil that drives entire nations to genocide, the same evil chaos of the uncontrollable forces that govern the selfish and godless economies which cause poverty and crush millions by starvation and war, and the same evil forces who deceive and cause humanity to become enslaved to lust, money and all kinds destructive practices.

The conflict between Jesus and Satan is both decisive and liberating. It is not a tug of war between two opponents of equal weight, but the rescue and freeing by God of that which he has made – namely humankind. Here Jesus overthrows Satan at a personal level, but in going to the cross he will finally overthrow Satan at a cosmic level. Fighting the demonic principalities and powers is not a matter of yelling ‘OUT! OUT! IN THE NAME OF JESUS!’ every time we witness the manifestation of evil power, but we have nevertheless been entrusted with the same authority that Jesus had. It is not an authority to demonize and accuse, rather it is a liberating authority that replaces the rule of Satan with the Kingdom of God. Sometimes the demons come out through a direct command, sometimes through prayer, but always evil is overcome with good.

When we pray ‘your Kingdom come’ and ‘deliver us from evil’ we are acknowledging and anticipating our own task and calling in the fight against evil, both at the personal, corporate, national and cosmic levels. Satan enslaves people in self-hate, despair, bitterness and sin, God’s Kingdom brings freedom to the captives, the forgiveness of sins and liberation of human beings from the destructive and chaotic powers that enslave them. As with the demon-possessed Legion (coming soon!) who is exorcised by Jesus, God transforms those gripped by torment and darkness and puts them in their ‘right mind’ (Mark 5:15).

All this can only be done by the authority of Jesus Christ, which does not rely or depend on any affirmation or acknowledgement on our part. His authority exists independently of us, but is graciously given to us – first to rescue us from evil, and then to bring his Kingdom to others who are lost, bound and without hope.

Prayer

Heavenly Father,

We praise your Holy Name, which is far above every power, every demonic force, every evil regime and even the power of death itself. We thank you that you came with your authority not to crush us, but to liberate us from evil so that we may share in your kingdom, which endures forever and ever.

We ask for the gifts of discernment and wisdom as the weapons of our warfare against that which Satan holds under his dominion, at every level of life, and ask that you fill us with an undying love and compassion for those who are in darkness.

We forgive everyone who has sinned against us, and we also ask that forgive us our sins, and refresh us and restore us so that we do not become weary in the fight. We love you Father, and we entrust ourselves to you because “you rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in your hands, and no one can withstand you.” (2 Chron 20:6)

In the name of your Son, Jesus Christ

Amen.

Tom Smail on theology v spirituality

2005-04-23T16:18:00.000+02:00

Richard linked to a great interview with charismatic Anglican theologian Tom Smail last week. I've spent most of my Christian life in the charismatic church but increasingly I get really fed up when people see 'theology' as something dangerously evil and sinister that is opposed to the 'spirit'. It is of course a stupid and false dichotomy to offer to people, and Christianity with no theology (if that's even possible) eventually descends into directionless enthusiasm, or worse, directionless unenthusiasm.

Other annoying dichotomies include 'head-knowledge' versus 'heart-knowledge' which is often rather inappropriately hurled around as a justification to believe anything that gives you 'a peace' (and is thus from God) is sound and correct, however unbiblical, unwise or unchristlike it may be.

These are also extremely modern categories for dividing up knowledge. Since the Enlightenment, something cannot be 'known' without being dominated, apprehended and dissected; and these are the scientific methods of knowing which the Enlightenment produced and in which we are still immersed. To know something is to possess and control it.

Older and more biblical ways of knowing involve participation, contemplation and interrelation between the Knower and the Known, not the domination of the object by the subject of the modern age. Knowing God then is not a question of 'head knowledge', where we know about God, nor of 'heart knowledge' where through some inner spiritual experience we gain a more intimate, purer knowledge of God. Rather we know God by participating in him and relating to Christ, God incarnate. We participate in a relationship with God through his word, through prayer, through liturgy and through fellowship, all in the power of the Holy Spirit, and it is in this beholding of God and responding to him that we know him, and our knowing of him results in a love for God that is expressed in love for our neighbour also.

Thus by using relationship, wonder and communion as a means of knowing of God, the foolish and short-sighted dichotomy between 'head' knowledge and 'heart' knowledge of the holy is overcome, and theology and spirituality are reconciled, together with the Church and the Academy.

Here's Tom Smail:

"There is no religious experience that doesn’t have a theological component. The only question is is it a good or a bad theology. There is no non-theology.

One of the great difficulties in the last 20 to 30 years has been the divorce of theology and spirituality. Deprived of spirituality, theology becomes academic and scholastic and very cerebral. Deprived of theology, spirituality goes into a fog of vagueness. Pitting spirituality against theology is very dangerous on both sides.

Theology is the bone structure of all Christian believing. You don’t dangle people’s skeletons in front of them. But if there isn’t a bone structure, the body collapses. When preaching on Ezekiel 37, I always say that you need the breath, but you also need the bones. The bones may be very dry, but thank goodness they’re there. Remember, there is an assembly of the bones before there is a descent of the breath. "

He says it infinitely better than I can. Read the full interview here, and if you like that kind of thing then read this book, it help clear up a lot of the mess in the penal substitution debate.

More on The Crucified God

2005-04-23T16:08:00.000+02:00

Earlier in the week I posted an outline and some quotes from The Crucified God by Jürgen Moltmann (here). I didn't manage to finis because I was falling asleep, but here's some more. Enjoy!

"Man is no longer in himself, but in practice is outside himself. He is in practice a sinner, although he is created in the image of God. Thus de-humanised man, who must exalt himself, for he cannot ensure himself as he is, uses religious insights only in the interest of his self-deification. As a result, they do not help him to achieve humanity, but only give greater force to his inhumanity. The knowledge of the cross...does not confirm what he is but destroys him. It destroys the god, miserable in his pride, which we would like to be, and restores us to our abandoned and despised humanity. The knowledge of the cross brings a conflict of interest between God who has become man and man who wishes to become man. It destroys the destruction of man."

"Theologia crucis is not a single chapter in theology, but the key signature for all Christian theology. It is the point from which all theological statements which seek to be Christian are to be viewed. And yet it only remains theologia crucis in the context of critical and liberating practice in preaching and in life...It does not state what exists, but sets out to liberate men from their inhuman definitions and their idolised assertions, in which they have become set, and in which society has ensnared them."

"There cannot be any other Christian answer to the question of this torment. To speak here of a God who could not suffer would make God a demon. To speak here of an absolute God would make God an annihilating nothingness. To speak here of an indifferent God would condemn men to indifference." (on the Holocaust)

“A radical theology of the cross cannot give any theistic answer to the question of the dying Christ. Were it to do so it would evacuate the cross of deity. Nor can it give an atheistic answer. Were it to do it would no longer be taking Jesus’ dying cry to God seriously. The God of theism cannot have abandoned him, and in his forsakenness he cannot have cried out to a non-existent God.”

"A God who is only omnipotent is in himself an incomplete being, for he cannot experience helplessness and powerlessness. Omnipotence can indeed be longed for and worshipped by helpless men, but omnipotence is never loved; it is only feared...Cosmological theism answers the quesiton of injustice and suffering of this world with a justification of this world as God's world. In so doing it passes over the history of suffering of this world. Either it must be tolerated, or it will be compensated for by the second world in heaven. This answer is idolatry."

"Crude atheism for which this world is everything is as superficial as the theism which claims to prove the existence of God from the reality of this world. Protest atheism points beyond both God and suffering, suffering and God, sets them one against the other and becomes an atheistic protest against injustice 'for God's sake'. In the context of the question which sets God and suffering over against each other, a God who sits enthroned in heavenly glory that no one can share is unacceptable even for theology...in this case must not Christian theology take up once again the old theopaschite question 'Did God himself suffer?', in order to be able to think of God not in absolute terms, in the usual way, but in particular terms as in Christ? Before it can talk of the significance of the history of Christ's suffering for the history of the world's suffering, Christian theology must have faced the instrinsic problem of the history of Christ's suffering and have understood God's being in the godforsakenness of Christ. Only when it has recognised what took place between Jesus and his Father on the cross can it speak of the significance of this God for those who suffer and protest at the history of the world."

Agh part 2

2005-04-23T12:04:00.000+02:00

Hmmm.

The Tagboard script seems to be stalling the load up of the new page for some reason, but I don't really want to get rid of it.

More annoyingly, the centre column doesn't seem to want to keep its size whenever the browser window is resized, and some people are seeing the actual blog posts pushed way down the page leaving a big gap at the top. I've no clue as to how to make it work, so here's the CSS script dealing with the layout. If anyone has any ideas then shout out, I'm very far out of my depth.

/*-------------------------------- Layout ------------------------------------*/
div {padding: 0;margin: 0;}
body {background-color: #669933;margin:0;padding: 0px;font-family: Georgia,Trebuchet MS,Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font:x-small;text-align:left;color:#000000;font-size/* */:/**/small;font-size: /**/small;}
#oldbrowser {text-align: left;}
div#oldbrowser {display: none;}
#pageFrame {border: solid 1px black;background-color: #669933;color: 003333;min-width: 500px;}

/*#innerContentColumn {height: auto; /* fix Opera which breaks with the above IE fix */}

#innercontentcolumn {height: 100%; /* fix IE 5.0 which parse the Opera fix, note the selector is all lower case */}

/*------------------------------ header --------------------------------------*/
#header {padding: 10px;border: solid 0px black;border-bottom-width: 1px;background-color: #003300;}
#blog-title {margin:5px 5px 0;padding:20px 20px .25em;font-size:200%;line-height:1.2em;font-weight:normal;color:#FFFFCC;letter-spacing:.2emtext-align: left;}
#description {margin:0 5px 5px;padding:0 20px 20px;max-width:100%;font:78%/1.4em;letter-spacing:.2em;color:#FFFFCC;text-align: left;}
/*-------------------------- left-sidebar ------------------------------------*/
#leftcolumn {margin-right: -225px; /* IE 4 fix */}
#leftColumn {float: left;width: 226px;/*/*/ /*/margin: 0 0 0 2px; /* Silly Netscape hack to get the borders to line up */}
#innerLeftColumn {padding: 10px;border: solid 0px #669933;border-right-width: 1px;text-align: center;}
#innerLeftColumn img {display: block;margin: 0 auto;text-align: center; /* IE 5 centering hack */}
/*------------------------------- right-sidebar ------------------------------*/
#rightColumn {float: right;width: 215px;}
#innerRightColumn {padding: 10px;border-left: solid 1px #669933;margin-left: -1px;text-align: center;}

/*----------------------------- center-column --------------------------------*/

#contentColumn {width: auto;margin-left: 225px;border: solid 0px #000000;border-left-width: 0px;text-align:center;text-color:black;}
#innerContentColumn {padding: 4px;margin-right: 225px;height: 100%; /* fix the Win32 IE float bug *//*/*/ /*/margin: 0 0 0 2px; /* Silly Netscape hack to get the borders to line up */border: solid 1px #99CC66;
border-right-width: 1px;
text-align: left;
text-color: #000000;background-color: #99CC66;}

#contentColumn>#innerContentColumn {height: auto; /* fix Opera which breaks with the above IE fix */}

#innercontentcolumn {height: 100%; /* fix IE 5.0 which parse the Opera fix, note the selector is all lower case */}

/* Headings----------------------------------------------- */

#masthead h1 {display: inline;text-align: center;}

h2 {margin:1.5em 0 .75em;font:120%/1.4em;letter-spacing:.2em;color:black;}

/* Posts----------------------------------------------- */
.date-header {margin:1.5em 0 .5em;}
.post {margin:.5em 0 1.5em;border-bottom: 1px solid black;padding-bottom:1.5em;}
.post-title {margin:.25em 0 0;padding:0 0 4px;font-size:140%;font-weight:normal;line-height:1.4em;color:red;}
.post-title a, .post-title a:visited, .post-title strong {display:block;text-decoration:none;color:#c60;font-weight:normal;}
.post-title strong, .post-title a:hover {color:#333;}
.post p {margin:0 0 .75em;line-height:1.6em;}
p.post-footer {margin:-.25em 0 0;color:#ccc;}
.post-footer em, .comment-link {font:78%/1.4em;letter-spacing:.1em;}
.post-footer em {font-style:normal;color:black;margin-right:.6em;}
.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}
.post img {padding:4px;border:1px solid black;}
.post blockquote {margin:1em 20px;}
.post blockquote p {margin:.75em 0;}

/*------------------- Comments----------------------------------------------- */
#comments h4 {margin:1em 0;font:bold 78%/1.6em;letter-spacing:.2em;color:black;}
#comments h4 strong {font-size:130%;}
#comments-block {margin:1em 0 1.5em;line-height:1.6em;}
#comments-block dt {margin:.5em 0;}
#comments-block dd {margin:.25em 0 0;}
#comments-block dd.comment-timestamp {margin:-.25em 0 2em;font:78%/1.4em;letter-spacing:.1em;}
#comments-block dd p {margin:0 0 .75em;}
.deleted-comment {font-style:italic;color:gray;text-decoration:line-through;}

/*------------ Sidebar Content----------------------------------------------- */
#sidebar ul {margin:0 0 1.5em;padding:0 0 1.5em;border-bottom:1px solid black;list-style:none;}
#sidebar li {margin:0;padding:0 0 .25em 15px;text-indent:-15px;line-height:1.5em;}
#sidebar p {color:#666;line-height:1.5em;}

/*-------------------- Profile----------------------------------------------- */
#profile-container {margin:0 0 1.5em;border-bottom:1px solid black;padding-bottom:1.5em;}
.profile-datablock {margin:.5em 0 .5em;}
.profile-img {display:inline;}
.profile-img img {float:left;padding:4px;border:1px solid black;margin:0 8px 3px 0;}
.profile-data {margin:0;font:bold 78%/1.6em;letter-spacing:.1em;}
.profile-data strong {display:none;}
.profile-textblock {margin:0 0 .5em;}
.profile-link {margin:0;font:78%/1.4em;letter-spacing:.1em;}

/*------------------------------- footer -------------------------------------*/
#footer {clear: both;border: solid 0px black;border-top-width: 1px;background-color: 006600;}
#innerFooter {padding: 10px;text-align: center;font:78%/1.6em;letter-spacing:.1em;color: white;}

/*--------------------------- Visual Elements --------------------------------*/
a:link {color:#FFFFCC;text-decoration:underline;}
a:visited {color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;}
a:hover {color:#CCFFCC;text-decoration:underline;}
a img {border-width:0;}
.vnav {margin-bottom: 1em;}
.vnav ul {margin: 0;padding: 0;list-style-type: none;display: block;border: solid 1px black;border-bottom-width: 0;}
.vnav ul li {margin: 0;padding: 0;list-style-type: none;display: block;border-bottom: solid 1px black;}
.vnav ul li a {display: block;text-decoration: none;padding: 2px 10px;background-color: white;color: black;}
.vnav ul li a:hover {background-color: black;color: white;}
/*>>>*/

</head><br /><body>

I can only assume that the delay with the Tagboard script is due to a slow connection to their servers, so there's not much I can do about it except perhaps find another tagboard provider.

Poetry Corner

2005-04-23T02:24:00.000+02:00

Oh Germany

Why must your elderly citizens
all wear shellsuits shamelessy?

A once great nation is now
full
Of aryan scousers.

And no amount of bumbag-wearing
will cover your unforgiveable
Shame.

Note to North American readers: 'shellsuits ' are a horrible type of tracksuits that were popular in the late 80s and early 90s, and are still popular with old people for some reason. 'Bumbags' are fanny-packs (ha) and for some reason they are popular as a shellsuit accessory among the elderly.

Agh.

2005-04-22T18:07:00.000+02:00

For some reason, this page takes about 2 seconds to load with Mozilla, and about 30 seconds with Internet Explorer, despite saying 'done' almost straight away. Can anyone in the know give me some pointers? I'm out of ideas.

Mouth of Sven

2005-04-22T17:17:00.000+02:00

I've been suffering with my problematic wisdom tooth lately so last ThursdayI went to see the dentist, who was cock-a-hoop at the prospect of yanking it out and so today I had to go to the hospital for a preliminary x-ray. With the system they have here, it was left for me to take my x-ray to my dentist myself, but not before it had been through my scanner. Thus I proudly present to you an x-ray view of my mouth, I've highlighted the problematic tooth as 'Pure Evil', which it is.

Finally

2005-04-22T16:55:00.000+02:00

You know how sometimes on the news you hear about office workers who inexplicably flip out and shoot everyone in their office? I now understand those people, and I almost guarantee that they are computer programmers because (although I'm entirely self-taught) programming is singlehandedly the MOST stressful thing in the world ever.

I mean, why does a blog look and work fine in Mozilla, yet with Internet Explorer it plays silly buggers all day and won't work? Grrr. Lots of trial and lots of error later, the blog should look and work well on both IE and Mozilla, but really you should all just use Mozilla, it's so much better. I'm still not 100% sure about some of the colours, so I might change them later on but happily Jonny is alive again, which in some way pacifies the nosebleed-inducing rage that programming this blog has given me in the last two days.

I've also tweaked the poll a little bit, but don't even get me started on Bravenet.

Helen, Swan and Liam, thanks lots for the G-mail invites, and thank you John for the tips.

Coming soon: the inside of my mouth and a possible breach of medical law.

A green blog

2005-04-21T20:58:00.000+02:00

I've widened the sidebars a little so the blog should look better in other resolutions. Not sure if I love or hate the green, we'll see. Apparently the site looks weird with Internet Explorer, I created it with Mozilla and it looks fine but I've no idea how to make it work with IE. Maybe everyone should just use Mozilla? Hmm.

Matt, you were right about the republishing thingy - thanks!

Richard, cheers for the Gmail invite, I will catch you online soon, oh yes.

And now I'm going to bed, for I am ill.

Also check out Hannah's blog, she's a rather good photographer.

Illness

2005-04-21T10:04:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow is April 22nd and is a significant date. Why you ask? Because it is the day that I had originally hoped to be well enough to go back to England and get on with my life. As it is, I still have glandular fever and despite having felt slightly better overall recently, the last two weeks I've just felt dreadful and the last two days I've been just as ill as when this whole thing first started. I feel like I've gone round in circles and am no closer to getting better, and there's nothing I can do except, well, do nothing.

Yes I'm grumpy, because I have a terrible headache, sore glands all over my body, and have a high pulse, so I'm going to take a break from the PC for the rest of the day and try and do something more restful, but I'm very easily bored and as you can tell, rather downhearted.

It's now over 3 months siince I first started being ill. According to this post, I expected to be better in 48 hours. Oops.

Also, I redesigned my blog template yesterday, but can some clever computer person tell me why my archives are still in the old format, and what I have to do to change them? Ta.

And my final moan of the morning: my stupid e-mail provider Orange isn't working AGAIN. They break down and deprive me of e-mail for 24 hours about every two months. I sent them a very narky customer compaint letter, and they sent a very narky one back, which I respect them for because most companies are just disgustingly sychophantic. Nevertheless, I need a new e-mail provider - can someone e-mail me some Gmail invites pleeeeeeease?

(I am aware that I can only get them by e-mail, which isn't working, but when it is I'll make the switch.)

Who should I vote for?

2005-04-21T09:52:00.000+02:00

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour -34
Conservative -6
	Liberal Democrat 34
	UK Independence Party 30
	Green 41

You should vote: Green

The Green Party, which is of course strong on environmental issues, takes a strong position on welfare issues, but was firmly against the war in Iraq. Other key concerns are cannabis, where the party takes a liberal line, and foxhunting, which unsurprisingly the Greens are firmly against.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

I was fairly surprised by this, I didn't think I was so much of a leftie liberal hippy. I came out so strongly against Labour because they supported the stupid war, and was slightly more biased to them than the Tories because I think I have slightly stronger views on the EU and the Euro. That said, my Tory support was only at -6%

In the 2001 election I voted Lib Dem, largely because of their opposition to tuition fees. I'd vote for them again if I had managed to sort out a proxy vote in time (well I didn't know I was going to be ill and in Germany for so long did I?) I wouldn't vote Labour because of their support for the war, and I'd rather poke both my eyes out than vote Tory - but fortunately Michael Howard has more chance of being the new Pope than he has of being Prime Minister (shudder at the thought.)

Thanks to John for the tip on the quiz.

My my Sven, you have been busy

2005-04-21T00:53:00.000+02:00

After 12 hours of puzzlement, frustration, prayer, raw hatred of technology, tea, coffee, and much chin-scratching, I now proudly present the new-look World of Sven for your blogging pleasure.

Here's what's what:

Instead of the usual 2 columns, I managed to find a template that had three, so I didn't have to stuff everything into one column. I am greatly indebted to the wonderful, wonderful people of ruthsarianlayouts for most of the code.

On the left is the link to my Mark's Gospel study and a poll to canvass opinions on the new look. All the links to my favourite blogs are on the Blogroll (homies and theology people) and in the drop-down menus (courtesy of Flooble) I've archived some Dear Pats (they seem to be more popular than most stuff), some of my essays, a selection of other posts I've written since I started blogging and links to some other websites I visit.

I've reintroduced the not-at-all-missed Tag Board, just where the conversation left off 4 months ago. I've also added a search engine for the new ESV Bible, a list of who-came-from-where, a link to review my site and some code for the TTLB ecosystem to remind me how tiny my blog is compared to people who get trillions of hits a day.

On the right are my collection of little buttons. I like having them because I feel like I'm in the Scouts and that I've achieved something, plus they're colourful. I've replaced my profile picture but everything is pretty much the same as it was, although with much bigger text and thus somehow more eye-hurty.

Thérèse I promised you I'd write you a song today, I haven't managed to yet so content yourself with this one from last year in the meantime.

Night!

Ooops.

2005-04-20T21:51:00.000+02:00

As you can see, I'm redesigning World of Sven almost from scratch. I uploaded a half-done version (the one you're looking at) which has waaaay more to be done to it and also comments and trackback etc aren't working.

It should be working in the next 2-3 hours or so, but if the html messes me up one more time I may just burst into tears and hurl this PC out of the window.

Be excited...

2005-04-20T19:57:00.000+02:00

For soon there shall be changes.

A good book

2005-04-20T00:33:00.000+02:00

I think most people have a book that they like to come back to and read over and over again, so I'll share mine with you. Actually I have two - when I was a kid I really loved The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall. It was about a kid in the war who discovers a crashed German plane and steals a gun from it and then him and his friends build themselves a secret fort to keep the gun in. I loved guns and fort-building at the time so I must have read a gazillion times.

Anyhow, my post-childhood favourite book by some way is The Crucified God by German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. He was a prisoner of war during WW2 and in the misery and depression of defeat and the subsequent many years of imprisonment in England, he picked up a copy of the Bible and read Jesus' dying words from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Finally, Moltmann thought - here is someone who understands what it is like to be completely crushed and in despair, a God who knows what it is like to be afflicted and without hope.

This conversion experience essentially underpins Moltmann's whole theology - that in the face of suffering and injustice, God can only identify with us if he too knows what it is like to suffer. God has a human face, and it is the face of the Crucified Christ. In The Crucified God, Moltmann laments that centuries of theology have created a God who is static, unmoved, detached and invulnerable. This, Moltmann argues, is not compatible with the worship of the crucified Jesus. Jesus was fully-man and fully-God according to Christian tradition, and so when Jesus dies, God the Son also dies. If he did not really die, then one must concede that the Docetics (who believed that Jesus was God and only appeared to be human) are right, or that if only the human nature died and not Jesus' divine nature, then he is no longer one person, and one must become a Nestorian.

In the face of the evils and suffering of Auschwitz and all the other horrors of history, the unmovable God of classical theism must be responded to not with faith, but with protest atheism. One must choose, Moltmann says, between protest atheism or a crucified God. He chooses the Crucified God of course, and since Jesus is the companion of the forsaken, oppressed and the condemned in his life and death, so too must the Church be. The religion of the cross can never, ever, be the religion of the powerful and the oppressor, because refutes them completely - and it also calls the church to celebrate the Kingdom of God with the suffering and the outcasts, not by excluding the sinful and the despised.

I could blog on and on about this book, but I'll close with some key quotes for reflection:

"The cross is not and cannot be loved. Yet only the crucified Christ can bring the freedom that changes the world because it is no longer afraid of death."

"There is an inner criterion of all theology, and of every church which claims to be Christian, and this criterion goes far beyond all political, ideological and psychological criticism from outside. It is the crucified Christ himself...for only by Christ is it possible to tell what is a Christian church and what is not."

"In Christianity the cross is the test of everything which deserves to be called Christian. One may add that the cross alone, and nothing else, is its test, since the cross refutes everything, and excludes the syncretistic elements in Christianity. This is a hard saying."

"Fundamentalism fossilises the Bible into an unquestionable authority. Dogmatism freezes living Christian tradition solid, and Christian morality...becomes a deadening legalism. The attention of many was drawn by the gospel...to the sufferings of the oppressed and abandoned in the world; and they began to have a passionate social and political commitment. When they followed this course, they found in their institutions no possibility of realising this commitment, and indeed often had to commit themselves in opposition to the church as a society."

"If anyone wants to become a Christian, don't send him into the churches, but into the slums. There he will find Christ."

"When a Christian community feels obliged to empty itself in certain social and political actions, it must take care that its traditional religious and political identity is not exchanged for a new religious and political identity. Otherwise a church, which seeking for an identity and not preserving its distinctiveness...once again becomes the 'religion of society.'"

And finally one of my favourites, and why I don't have a future in fundamentalist escapism...

"Faith is fearful and defensive when it begins to die inwardly, struggling to maintain itself and reaching out for security and guarantees. In so doing, it removes itself from the hand of one who has promised to maintain it, and its own manipulations bring it to ruin. This...usually occurs in the form of an orthodoxy which feels threatened and is therefore more rigid than ever. It occurs wherever, in the present age, the gospel of creative love for the abandoned is replaced by the law of what is supposed to be Christian morality, and by penal law... Such a faith tries to protect its 'most sacred things', God, Christ, doctrine and morality, because it clearly no longer believes that these are sufficiently powerful to maintain themselves. When the 'religion of fear' finds its way into the Christian church, those who regard themselves as the most vigilant guardians of the faith do violence to faith and smother it...

Then they build a defensive wall round their own little group, and in apocalyptic terms call themselves the 'little flock' or the 'faithful remnant', and abandon the world outside to the godlessness and immorality which they themselves lament. They lament the assimilation of Christianity to the secularised society which has declined since the 'good old days', and bewail the loss of identity of those who in theology and in practice involved themselves in the conflicts of this society and work with others to resolve them...They accept the increasing isolation of the church as an insignificant sect on the margin of society, and encourage it by their sectarian withdrawal. The symptoms of this mentality at the present day include the preservation of tradition without the attempt to found new tradition; biblicism without liberating preaching; increasing unwillingness to undergo new experience with the gospel and faith, and the language of zealotry and militant behaviour in disputes within the church...Friends and enemies are clearly distinguished. The missionary situation of 'the open church' is left behind in a retreat into the apocalyptic situation of the 'closed church.' People grow tired of maintaining the open situation of dialogue and co-operation with others, in which the boundaries are always fluid, and look for the final hour.

Nowhere in the New Testament does the 'end of the world' bring about the Second Coming of Christ. The New Testament looks forward to the very reverse, that the Second Coming of Christ will bring the end of destruction and persecution in the world...the 'signs of the times'...can be read by Christians only with the eyes of hope in the future of Christ. Otherwise the apocalyptic interpretations of the age will be like the nihilistic attempt of the 'devils' of Dostoevsky, who want to destroy the world in order to force God to intervene...

But this no longer has anything to do with the cross as the horizon of the world, for this cross is a sign of the unity of love for God and the love with which, according to the Gospel of John (3:16), God 'so loved the world, that he gave his only Son.'

Amen.

I totally love this book.

Christian Carnival and site plug

2005-04-19T22:31:00.000+02:00

This week's Christian Carnival is hosted over at Pseudo-Polymath, and all entries are welcome. The Carnival is for Christians of all backgrounds to submit articles on any faith-related matter to a wider audience. For entry instructions, go here.

I'm submitting my third study in Mark's Gospel to this week's Carnival. Thanks to Chad at The Minor Prophet I'm hosting the study on his site, which functions as a web resource for Bible studies and commentaries. My page can be found here, and I've added a link to it in the sidebar of my blog. Enjoy!

Why my A-level Politics class was the best class EVER

2005-04-19T16:32:00.000+02:00

A few weeks ago, Kieran posted about our old A-level politics class, which was the best thing ever to happen in history ever. You see, not only were myself, Jonny, Kieran and Ross all in the same class for two years but we were taught by Mr J F Clay. There are not enough superlatives to describe how great Mr Clay was (is), so I shall not pointlessly exhaust myself, but suffice to say he was the cleverest, funniest and most-electable teacher ever in history, or any other subject for that matter.

Our class ran from September 1998 until June 2000, and every Thursday we had QUADRUPLE politics which meant we had a teabreak part way through. So fast was the rate at which Mr Clay dictated notes (I still have 2 full lever-arch files of politics notes that he dictated from memory) that there was plenty of time to discuss everything from train timetables (which again Mr Clay knew EVERYTHING about) to Margaret Thatcher (his, and thus our, pet hate.) Our class were a fairly mixed bunch but somehow when we were being taught by Mr Clay we somehow managed to be giggly and immature for 4 hours every Thursday as Mr Clay turned us from raw recruits into political machines.

For me the highlight was our trip to the Houses of Parliament, not so much for the history but because Mr Clay was on first name terms with so many people there ('Hi there JC' etc...) I have some photos of the trip that I'll post on here when I find them. Also we had a mock election, where me, Jonny and Kieran formed the Socialist Communist United Movement (SCUM), and our policies included the immediate abolition of the monarchy, an end to private schools (ironic given that we attended a private school) and the re-nationalisation of everything. We were never going to win of course, but it was worth it to see the looks of horror on all the rich parents faces when they saw our posters hahaha. Our rivals were the Conservatives (fronted by Moeller, Jimmy and Duncan) who attempted to win votes by posing shirtless. The election was eventually cancelled because 'no one took it seriously'.

Here's a guide to who was who in our class:

Me: See this blog for more info

Jonny: As I recall, wouldn't say all that much in class but giggled contentedly whilst Jimmy and Duncan bullied Binnsy and Moeller. He also kept a tally chart of how many times Mr Clay made a negative comment about Margaret Thatcher (every 2 minutes or so.)

Kieran: Not always a regular attender, and rather than having a file for his notes, he used to shove them all on the nearest shelf, which nearly always resulted in them being taken away by the cleaners.

Ross: Ross left to pursue greatness elsewhere quite early on, though he was fairly quiet too I remember.

Duncan: Hilarious, famed for banter with Moeller and Jimmy. Once interrupted Mr Clay to ask to following question:

Duncan: Sir?
Mr Clay: Yes Duncan?
Duncan: Can I do a GCSE in World Airports Sir?
Mr Clay: No.
Duncan: Aw, but Sir. Pulls out a book on 'World Airports' from his bag. I just spent my last three free periods reading this, I want to do an exam on it.
Mr Clay: No Duncan, I'm afraid you can't, there is no exam in World Airports.
Duncan: Aw but Sir - look at this Airport Terminal in Rio de Janeiro. Points to picture in book.
Mr Clay: Yes I know, it's a cantilever design, quite original. Now back to your notes.

Jimmy: Sidekick to Duncan and similarly hilarious. Devoted most of his energy to abusing Moeller and Binnsy e.g:

Jimmy: Sir?
Mr Clay: Yes James?
Jimmy: Sir, make Moeller apologise for what the Germans did in the war sir, he's making me sick.
Mr Clay: I'm not sure it was all Richard's fault James.
Jimmy: But sir, what about the death camps? Are you just going to let him sit there and get away with it?
Mr Clay: Back to your work please James.
Jimmy: (To Moeller) You Nazi bastard.

Binnsy: Real name Katie Binns. Poor Binnsy was almost constantly teased by Jimmy, Duncan and Moeller for two whole years for reasons (if there were any) I can't remember. Binnsy also famously made Mr Clay's 100th Term Celebration Cake which was rather yummy as I recall. She also famously said: "Sir, I don't understand - if the economy is bad, why don't they just print more money?" Actually perhaps that's why she was teased.

Moeller: His German surname proved to be the source of trouble as Jimmy and Duncan tried to force him to apologise for everything from the Holocaust to Michael Schumacher winning the Grand Prix.

Nicola: Very, very quiet. I can't remember much about her in our politics class, although when we were 13/14 we went out and I dumped her by passing her a note during an English lesson which made her cry. Hehehe.

Happy, happy days. As far as I'm aware, I was the only one who continued Politics onto University level, though I soon discovered that when you weren't taught by Mr Clay and that you didn't have these people in your class Politics was altogether more dull and not at all exciting. I quit my degree after a year and hope to finish my Theology degree sometime before 2012.

Notices

2005-04-19T14:31:00.000+02:00

This week's blogger of the week is Astrid. Astrid must be one of the happiest and cheeriest people on the entire internet, and on her blog you can read all about her adventures, including how she escaped from a Chinese stalker and how she avoided being destroyed by a Hurricane in Florida. She also has another website here.

Lookalikes of the week are my sister Becky (as a baby) and former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Becky I have plenty more embarassing pictures of you I can display at random like when you were dressed as a spoon in the kindergarten play or when you were crying because you'd wedged yourself under the cupboard hehehe. So best behaviour.

Sven of the Week is Sven Hannawald, who is some kind of skiing champion who is popular here in Germany. I've never heard of him, but Google is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Chaka Demus and Pliers are forgotten 1990s artists of the week and I've also updated my reading and listening lists.

New blogs to mention include: Casey's musical blog, Minkwe's thoughts on the atonement, Mudjosh's views on The Great Coming and fellow British-person-living-in-Germany Sam.

Sixlegged, Culture Zap and Dear Pat

2005-04-18T11:23:00.000+02:00

About a month ago, I promised Sixlegged that I'd write a parody of his blog Culture Zap. Before I get on to that, let me give a little background to Sixlegged's blog. Sixlegged lives in the USA and is married to a Mexican lady. His blog charts some of the issues and difficulties that arise when two US and Mexican cultire collide, and the often uneasy assimilation of the two cultures into one another. I don't always understand everything, but it's always an informative and interesting read.

Anyhow, a while back I parodied Thérèse and Valancy Jane's blogs, and I said I'd do Culture Zap as well. Culture Zap proved slightly tricky, as I know almost zilch about cultural assimilation and almost 100% of my knowledge of Mexico comes from a project I did on the Aztecs when I was 10 and watching the movie 'Traffic', which I slept through most of anyway. Despite the likelihood of sending tumbleweeds blowing across the internet, World of Sven proudly presents a Culture Zap parody:

Latest from Ground Zero Borracho

Sultan Assimiliation and his harem of cultural subprocessing biatches have been causing all kinds of trouble for me and Mrs Sixlegged recently. She works late at her job as a guinea pig for the US Government's alien colonisation programme so I have the afternoons free to myself. I generally like to hang out with a few friends and have a few beers before Mrs Sixlegged comes home but it seems that these days are finito.

Usually my wife and I like to spend our leisure time doing relaxing stuff. We'll pop out for some genuine Mexican tortillas - none of that greasy US mass-produced crap - and then take a wander to a flea market and maybe buy a couple of fleas. I try and be sensitive to her chicano sensibilities and keep her from being sucked into a Walmart or McDonalds by Uncle Sam's massive jet-powered cultural hoover, but it seems that perhaps white american culture has gotten her at last.

When she came home today she seemed slightly different. At first I couldn't figure out what it was - she was kind of quiet, perhaps another day being ground in the cogs of the assimilation machine had quenched her hispanic fire? I noticed she had some kind of barcode stamped on her forehead. She began to speak in a slightly robotic tine of voice:

"I...have been...ass-i-mi-lated my darling."
"What?"
"Mexico baaaad. America goooood."

It seemed that the forces of cultural assimilation had weaved their sub-processing tentacles around my wife and planted a conformity microchip in her brain. She staggered towards me like a culturally-confused zombie:

"Joooiiin meeeeee. Take meeee tooo Waaaalmaaaart."
"But honey, you used to love flea markets, I -"
"Joooiinn meeee orrr diiiiieeeeeeeee!"
"Never!"
"Then I keel you! I keel you!"

And so we argued more. She keeps on chasing me around the wasteland and trying to assimilate me by sticking a probe in my ear while I refuse to expose her to the cultural enema of Starbucks, Walmart and Taco Bell. It will be a long weekend of tequila and fireworks at Ground Zero Boracho.

...

So there we have it. Not the best thing I ever wrote, but not as unfunny as this, the worst and least funny World of Sven post ever. But I'm not done yet, oh no. Sixlegged is a big fan of Dear Pat, and so here's a few to make up for the ridiculous amount of time it took me to parody his blog.

Dear Pat returns

Dear Pat,

As a proud gun-owning member of the National Christian Racist Alliance, it is with great anxiety and sadness that I read in today's newspaper that it is now legal for some foreigners to settle in this country.

I find it sad that after so many brave US soldiers gave their lives fighting against Mexico and Canada in World War Six, we are now expected to allow these godless heathen to live in our great and perfect and lovely nation.

What does God want me to do, and how does this affect the coming End of the world?

Jebadiah, Arizona

Dear Jebadiah,

I am pleased to hear that you own a gun - the times are perilous, and in these last few weeks before we are raptured aboard the mothership it is high time we stopped loving our neighbours and got on with shooting them instead, as the Bible clearly teaches:

"And hark he spaketh unto them thus and saith "bring ye together the sheaves of the field and place them in mine cupboard, for unto some sheaves are pestilence and unto others are fire, but unto the remnant of sheaves shall be clouds, lollipops, and rainbows." But they understood him not and many cried "hark at the idiot." One of those present hurled a pitchfork at his head, and he knew they were trying to kill him, so he fled to the hills, screeching like a baboon and flapping his arms."

(Book of Bush 23:19-21)

The sheaves represent people, so obviously most of the human race are destined for 'fire and pestilence,' which means that very soon there will be a massive atomic and biological war and only we chosen few 'sheaves' will escape into heaven, so in many ways when you shoot your neighbour you are actually sparing them a worse fate. Many will disagree with me and say "I thought the Bible teaches that we are to love other people more than we love ourselves?" to which I reply: "It may say that somewhere, near the back possibly, but I haven't read it - if it's there at all that is." But it is definitely ok for you all to have as many guns as you want, because the only people who get killed by them tend to be from demographics who tend to vote for the Antichrist.

As for the issue of immigration - and I hate to sound unloving, but I really didn't invent this whole thing, I really didn't - it is imperative that we seal our borders immediately and threaten to kill anyone who even looks at the USA. We would do well to follow Jonah's example:

"He was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel from Lebo Hamath to the Sea of the Arabah, in accordance with the word of the LORD , the God of Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher."*

Jonah was anti-immigration, which is nothing less than a full-on biblical endorsement of whatever racist nonsense happens to pop into my head. This being the case, I exhort you to use your gun to shoot as many Canadians and Mexicans as you can. Certainly you will be persecuted by the liberals who will say things like "But the economy needs immigrants" and "The Right are a bunch of deviants who don't understand the Bible" or "Maybe it would be a bad idea if we shot everyone in the world?" But pay no heed to them, for "they are liars." (Pat 12:24b)

yours,

Pat

End-time Nuclear Bunker
Middle of Nowhere
Montana

Dear Pat,

I'd always thought that everything would stay exactly the same, but now I hear people talking about 'postmodernism' and they blasphemously claim that culture is changing and that perhaps the church shouldn't think and act as though it was still 1850. This makes me feel angry and defensive, which I think means that God is telling me to hate everyone who disagrees with me.

How should I deal with the threat of postmodernism?

Worried, Chicago

Dear Worried,

By a fantastic, annointed god-incidence, I have just released a range of books and accessories to equip the church to face this wicked onslaught of deception, available at amazing prices:

Exercises for those coping with postmodernism - $49.99

The bestselling sequel to the Sweating in the Spirit exercise video**. This book will give you the body, soul and spirit workout you really need. Pictured below is one of our workers demonstrating postmodern exercise technique #16:

"Stick your fingers in your ears and hope everything will go away or at least go back to the 1950s" (20 repetitions)

One worker whose faith will not be shaken!

Pat's Cultural Holocaust Survival Bunker $45,000

As used by Pat himself, this bunker can be installed in your back garden at a minimal cost. It is fully able to support a family of up to 14 people for the duration of time that is will take this whole postmodern craze to blow over. Inside you will find tinned spam, recordings of speeches and sermons by Jerry Falwell and spare head coverings for the womenfolk. It also features Pat's patented RaptureHatch, which will cause the roof of the bunker to spring open in the event of Jesus' return, allowing believers to be taken aboard the mothership without fear of bing trapped.

'You'll Never Turn Me Into A Queer You Liberal Heathen' T-shirts $45.00

In a world of confused cultural values, these spiritual T-shirts will let everyone know exactly what the truth is. Also available are "Osama bin Lesbian," "Shoot the homeless" and "Bomb Iran - Hell yeah!" For bulk orders by churches we also offer a free washable all-over body tattoo that reads "It's USA, not US-Gay!" - why not apply it to yourself and run naked across the field during the last play of next year's Superbowl to help lead the nation to repentance?

Order now to avoid tribulation.

Pat

Dear Pat,

I'm a practising homosexual, what do you say to that?

John, Canada

Dear Abomination,

What are you practising for? Swimming freestyle across the fiery lake of burning sulphur with all the terrorists and vegans? The bad news for you is there aren't any showers to drop soap in afterwards!

I say this in love.

Pat

If you want more Pat-satire then go here. Also for more fundy-spoofing, go here to David Rattigan's article on the dangers of intellectual masturbation. His blog is fast becoming one of my favourites.
...

Notes

*This verse is actually a description of Jonah from the Jewish histories in the book of 2 Kings. He was an ardent nationalist who thought that God was every bit as Jewish as he was. The book of Jonah is then where Jonah learns a hard lesson. God tells Jonah that he is in fact not biased towards one particular nation, and that he wants to save the enemies of Israel, the Assyrians, as well. What is more, Jonah will be the one who has to go and preach the message that will save them, which it does. The moral of the story: God has no favourites, is not a nationalist, and being one of his people means reaching out to other people, not sitting in isolation and condemning everyone else - a lesson real-life Pats would do well to learn. I suppose a modern equivalent would be God telling a fundamentalist, Muslim-hating, xenophobic patriot to go and find Osama bin Laden and tell him that God loves him too. A humbling lesson.

**Sadly, this is not a joke.

All you Googlers:

2005-04-18T02:34:00.000+02:00

It amazes me a) the things people search for on Google and b) why this blog comes up as a match in their rather curious searches. Here's who arrived from Google today, and the search term they used:

1. "burp contest" - I remember blogging about that, I'll let you off.
2. "clothing that Jesus wore" - can't help you there buddy.
3. "is the word dictator, night an abstract noun" - what?
4. "Ja, das Hokey Cokey" - two people searched for this one.
5. "neo farts" - what? and, well, no.
6. "nudist blog" - admit it, you were looking for porn.
7. "world of nudist" - you as well.
8. "violet berlin sex education" - you wicked, wicked boy. Eeeeuwgh.

*End Transmission*

The story of Jesus: part 3

2005-04-18T02:08:00.000+02:00

Mark 1:14-20

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!”

As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him.

When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.

Having been baptised by John for the forgiveness of sins and tempted by Satan, Jesus now goes to Galilee and begins to proclaim the Kingdom of God. To anyone who starts the story of Jesus and Israel at this point, for Jesus to suddenly start announcing that ‘the Kingdom of God is at hand’ may seem a little out of place. To Jesus’ hearers however, there was already the expectancy that the Kingdom of God would one day come. There would be forgiveness of sins, Israel’s fortunes would be restored and God’s people would be given a new heart that would enable them to obey God fully. It was the hope and expectation of 1^st Century Jews, and Jesus was announcing that the time had no come for their hopes to be fulfilled.

But what is the substance of this Kingdom? Who is in it? What does it look like? How does one recognise it? To answer these questions we must look not only at what Jesus says but also what he does. What Jesus says and does will be covered in forthcoming posts, but for now I just want to focus on what is happening in this specific text.

When Jesus announces that ‘the Kingdom of God is at hand’ he is making and eschatological announcement. By ‘eschatological’ I simply mean to do with a new Future – God’s future. Contrary to popular perception, Jesus is not about to explain to a wayward and disobedient how to go to heaven when they die, and neither is the ‘kingdom’ he inaugurates going to be about personal moral reform. Rather, Jesus is declaring to his listeners that Israel’s long-awaited Future is now here. The exile will be over; God will forgive their sins, restore the fortunes of his people and give them a change of heart that will be set on obeying him at last.

It is significant then that Jesus begins his mission in Galilee. Galilee is in northern Israel, and historically it had always been the first part of the nation to be invaded by foreigners. Consequently, it was a hotbed of Jewish nationalism and a potential source of revolutionary violence. Israel is of course occupied by the Romans and Jesus’ announcement that ‘the Kingdom of God is at hand’ was likely to stir up enthusiasm for his cause amongst the revolutionaries in Galilee. Jesus is well aware of the violent and nationalistic tendencies of his fellow Jews, but the Kingdom of God, which he himself will bring to Israel, will not be brought about by war or violence. In fact, as Jesus goes on to make clear, if Israel continues to pursue the path of nationalism and violence rather than the way that God is offering to them, then far from being delivered and vindicated, Israel will bring destruction on herself.

By both proclaiming and bringing about the Kingdom of God, Jesus is not only in conflict with Satan, but also with his fellow Israelites. To participate in God’s kingdom, they must repent and turn away from the course they are set on.

Repent and believe the good news

So when Jesus tells his hearers to ‘repent’, what does he mean? Repentance conjures up images of tearful converts making their way to the front of a church in response to a sermon, or perhaps of a sinners’ prayer and saying sorry to God for the sins they have committed. I suggest however, that these connotations of ‘repentance’ have rather more to do with modern church evangelistic techniques and are not what Jesus’ hearers would have understood the term to mean. Jesus is not inviting individuals to a private salvation or a personal relationship with Yahweh but is urging the entire nation of Israel to turn away from their godless nationalism and to turn to Yahweh once again. More specifically, by identifying the Kingdom of God with his own person, proclamation and actions, Jesus is calling the Israelites to turn from their own agendas and schemes and to turn to him.

As we shall see in the next few weeks, this causes no end of scandal. By urging people to turn to himself, Jesus is completely bypassing the current Jewish religious set up. He is bypassing the Temple, the Priesthood – everything that (almost) every devout Jew would hold dear as points of national unity. The coming Kingdom of God is going to come through Jesus – not through a resurgent nationalist religious and political movement. The repentance is a summons to follow Jesus. ‘You really want to be Israel, to really be the people of God?’ Jesus is saying, ‘then turn away from your violence and nationalism and follow me.’

The second part of Jesus announcement of the Kingdom is his command to ‘believe the good news.’ Again, Jesus is not asking people to pray the sinners’ prayer, or to respond to his four-point Gospel presentation, and he is certainly not asking anyone to believe that he will at some point soon die for their sins and be raised to life again, but such are the anachronisms that we read into the Gospel stories. So what does Jesus mean when he commands people to believe?

In Hebrew thought (and language) to believe and have faith was the same thing as being faithful, so when Jesus asks for faith, he not asking for a mere assent to the fact that God’s Kingdom has finally come, but he is asking for faithfulness to it. To ‘believe’ (Greek pistis) is also the same thing as trusting, particularly in a crisis situation. Jesus knows the disastrous direction that Israel is headed in, and like the prophets before him, Jesus urges them to turn away before it is too late and to act like God’s people once again. For those who heed the call, they are to remain faithful to God and his Kingdom in the forthcoming crisis. Faithfulness to God is the mark of those who are truly God’s people. There are echoes of the prophet Habbukuk from centuries before, that although a time of judgment was coming, the ‘righteous will live by faith.’ That is to say, those who are God’s people, who are truly Israel, will remain faithful to God throughout the coming trials and judgment.

Unlike the prophets before him however, Jesus is not calling people back to the Torah, back to the Templeor even to a baptism for the forgiveness of sins as John had done – Jesus calls people to himself. In this text, he calls two sets of brothers Simon (later Peter) and Andrew, and James and John to follow him. In doing this, Jesus is identifying God’s saving and redeeming work not with the Temple system, or strict observance of the law – but with himself. It is Jesus himself who will fulfill the hopes of Israel and bring in the Kingdom of God and so bring salvation to the whole world. It is to him that Israel is to turn in repentance, and it is to him that God’s people are to be faithful.

Reflection

Jesus began his ministry by proclaiming the Kingdom of God, and he ended it by instructing his followers to continue to proclaim it. It is not simply a matter of talking (or blogging) about the Kingdom, but our proclamation is also to be a whole new practice, an entirely new way of living.

Living according to the Kingdom of God places us into conflict with evil, with selfish human ambitions and with corruption – both at a personal and corporate level. Israel thought God would bring his kingdom about through violence and struggle, but Jesus teaches and demonstrates that God’s Kingdom is signified by healing, restoration, and the forgiveness of sins – not just for Israel but for the whole world.

The Kingdom of God is not where-you-go-when-you-die, and neither is following Jesus simply a matter of making one’s eternal destiny secure - neither of these issues seem to feature in Jesus' message. To follow Jesus is to turn away from our own misguided and ultimately doomed attempts to control our own destinies and to pursue his insetad. Just as Israel’s eventual rejection of Jesus and its choice to pursue its own ends led to Israel’s utter destruction, so Jesus commands us to repent and turn away from futility and destruction. For those who accept his invitation to the Kingdom of God, they are to remain faithful to him, just as he is faithful to them. Simon, Andrew, James and John are the first to accept Jesus' call to follow him, as shall become clear, following Jesus means misunderstanding, rejection, conflict and suffering – but ultimately it leads to a sure and lasting hope, and a final vindication in the face of evil. History plunges the world into crisis again and again, our own lives are also absolutely vulnerable to chaos, evil and death – but God promises that through all these things, we cannot be separated from his love, and his faithful people will prevail and inherit the Kingdom he desires to share with them.

Prayer

Heavenly Father,

Help us to hear afresh the call to repent and believe the good news of your kingdom. We thank you that you have chosen to share your kingdom with us so that we might know you and love you, and love one another.

Forgive us for when we have pursued ideas, plans, and schemes that are contrary to you at all levels of our lives. We turn to you because you are fresh with mercy every day, and we thank you that you wash us clean. We also forgive those who have sinned against us, and choose not to hold anything against anyone. We also pray for our nations and governments, and we ask that your kingdom come, and your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

Amen

Next: Jesus begins his conflict with evil
Previously: Jesus is baptised and then tempted by Satan

Follow the whole study at The Minor Prophet by clicking here.

No.

2005-04-17T23:56:00.000+02:00

Apparently the answer to the question "why?" is "because someone took a bite out of a big purple handgrenade."

You know, it is possible to cringe so much that your body can actually spasm.

Yes.

2005-04-17T23:45:00.000+02:00

Is there a better band in the history of the world ever? I think not. Who else would have the foresight to write several albums that deal with such important issues as the Undead walking the streets, radioactive ants who mutate and eat people, teenagers who are secretly martians in disguise and jealous boyfriends who cut up their girlfriends and put them in boxes? Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you...THE MISFITS:

"Crawling Eye"

It's such a steep climb
Up the mountain's south side
It has a cloud that acts in such peculiar ways

Accident count rising
A young girl prophesizing
To protect their race, they'll seize her mind

At this altitude, it's freezing
Aliens control human beings
No one has lived to tell
Who has seen the crawling eye

These evil demon eyes
Under cloud cover hide
They have great tentacles to tear apart their prey

All these men are dying
Crawling eye decapitizing
Fiends without a face attack mankind

At this altitude, it's freezing
Aliens control human beings
No one has lived to tell
Who has seen the crawling eye

You can keep your poncey Leonard Cohen and your whining Bob Dylan, The Misfits are the sweetest band in the world EVER.

Final Score

2005-04-16T02:02:00.000+02:00

Results just in:

After being behind just four hours ago, the USA has finally overtaken the UK in the competition-I-just-made-up to see which country sends the most visitors to my blog. The score was:

USA 44-34 UK

Other results just in:

England 3-0 Germany

World Wars (2)
World Cup

This one goes out to...

2005-04-15T20:45:00.000+02:00

The person who came across my blog by searching for 'anti-conveyor belt' on Google, enjoy the picture.

Thanks to Good Counter, I have assembled all sorts of interesting data about people that arrive here. For instance, most of today's visitors are from the UK (23), followed by the USA (22). Other countries include: Germany(9), Australia(8), Spain(5), France(5), Netherlands(4), Norway(3), Canada (2 - only visited me twice today Thérèse?), Sweden, Belgium, Bolivia, Switzerland, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Portugal, and Romania (all 1 each).

I'm so bored. I need to play Counter-Strike.

A brief history of Sven

2005-04-15T19:50:00.000+02:00

This afternoon I spent an hour or so fixing our ancient scanner so that I might share with an unprepared world a few of my childhood snapshots. All the photos are real, though I might have been a bit creative with some of the captions.

1. In the first few minutes of September 6th 1981, strange omens are seen all over South Yorkshire: the moon turns blue, animals cry out in fear, the earth shakes and strange craft are seen over the skies of Barnsley. At 2.30am, Sven escapes his imprisonment in the womb and enters the big wide world weighing 7lbs and 3 ozs. He is wet, smelly and slimy, and after a quick bath will spend most of the next 1-2 years sleeping.

2. The infant Sven, tired of posing for the papparazzi, engages the camera man in a staring match. Taken sometime around Christmas 1981.

3. After hours of regaling the dinner party guests with hours of witty burps and gurgles, Baby Sven retires to his comfortable chair and waves his arms to indicate he is ready for his pipe and slippers. Note large jowels. Taken when I was 6 weeks old in October 1981.

4. Already tired of life on Earth as early as May 1982, Sven sets the controls of his baby rug to plot a course for the moon. Crucially, his mother steps in just in time.

5. A historic day, as Sven manages to walk on two feet. We have another photo taken immediately after this one where I fall flat on my face and my smile turns to tears very quickly indeed hehehe.

6. Sven, now aged 4, is not afraid to stick it to The Man when necessary. His campaign for free speech ends up with his being imprisoned in Scarborough in 1986.

7. By now, Sven and his family have moved to Germany. Pictured are Sarah (aged 2, in pushchair), Sven's Mum and a still-embryonic Becky, and on the tank stand Sven and Gemma. We lived in Fallingbostel, a NATO training area in northern Germany crammed full of tanks, helicopters, guns and bombs. Quite handy when you consider at the time Germany was still divided and only 50 miles away were 4 million heavily-armed Communists. For military buffs, I am stood on top of a Challenger I tank with a 120mm cannon and a 7.62mm co-axial machine gun. Despite my constant pestering of Jim'll Fix It, I was never allowed to drive one. Bah. Taken May 1987.

8. Sven aged 7, wearing Mickey Mouse pyjamas. I have nothing really to say about this.

9. Becky is born in August 1987 in Hannover, Germany, and like a good brother I spend the next ten years tormenting her day and night. Believe it or not, these are the only pictures of Becky in all her 17 years where she is not pulling a silly face. True fact.