Car for sale

FOXNews report a multimillionaire having bought recently died Pope's -75 Ford Escort for none less than $690,000.
In case you are interested I could consider selling mine. It's -87 Ford Sierra - newer, bigger and more beautiful and - have my word - as canonized as any other. Place your bets in email and I'll contact you.

Against the wind with Grenz

I began reading a book "Renewing the Center" by Stanley Grenz. It appears to attempt to sketch out some lines Evangelical Theology should follow in order to meet the challenges of the postmodern era. I've read just the opening pages and thus cannot comment the content but my expectations towards it got lifted by reading the introduction and - among others - his summary of the majority of the similarly aimed works.

He writes (p.22): "We are told that as evangelicals we should either batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to pass, ignore postmodernism as a passing fad that will soon give way to "post-postmodernism," launch a philosophical jihad with the goal of stamping out postmodernism and thereby make the world safe for Christian faith, or do an end run around both postmodernism and modernism by resurrecting some idyllic premodern era."

Like said, I don't know yet how he'll go about it himself, but the summary about others looks interesting. (I especially like the expression "philosophical jihad") However, he does speak of "apologetic appropriation of the philosophical sensitives of the day" of which's mastering brought about the birth of the evangelical revivals in past. This thought separates him clearly from the summarized opponents and makes the book interesting to read.

If any of you have read it and have any thoughts about it, please drop a comment below and share it with me.

It's all about the perspective

Joonatan had heard the story of Jesus calming the storm in Sunday school. (Luke 8:22-25) On the way back I asked whether he thought that to be an amazing one. He said: yes, just think there were so big waves that they flooded into the boat.

An average man sees the amazing element in the story to be the calming of the sea, which was not a big thing to Joonatan. To him that part was something to expect in the stories about Jesus, but waves so big... To an average man who doesn't share with Joonatan the knowledge about Jesus being able to all kinds of extraordinary stuff, calming of the sea exceeds the line of the probable occurence.

Gospel of Luke is written from post-easter perspective with much hindsight. The author by the time of writing understands the whole life of Jesus, and has met him dead and resurrected. To him the amazing issue overall is the fact that by the time these events took place, the fellows witnessing all this could still not see Jesus as he was, the Son of God and the promised Messiah.

Seeing a miracle is all about the perpective, isn't it.

Prepare for Christmas!

The boys and I were in the near by woods yesterday exploring what's there in the fall. On the way back we saw a man with a dog. He was a complete stranger to us, but like usual the boys didn't mind that.
-Hello, Joonatan said to him and Benjamin echoed "Hi" - with two-year-old's accent.
- Hi there, the man replied.
We were already on our way to pass by the man, but apparently Joonatan wanted to finish up the encounter with a greeting of some kind.
- Merry Christmas! he shouted.
Of all the greetings he knows he picked Merry Christmas. Silently I said to him: Well Joonatan, it's not exactly Christmas, yet. And before I noticed he fixed the mistake and shouted even louder than before: PREPARE FOR CHRISTMAS!

Child's: Paul and exegesis

I've been reading Brevard S. Childs: Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments and got thrilled at some of his thoughts.

On The Pauline Gospel (p241) he writes: "For a modern biblical critic it is axiomatic that genuine exegesis depends on recovering a text's true historical context. For Paul genuine interpretation depends on its bearing witness to its true subject matter, who is Christ."

In other words, to Paul it is the encounter at the Damascus Road and it's initial events, and the revelation of the Risen Christ within the 3 years in Arabia (as he describes in Gal 1) that formed the guiding principle to the interpretation of the Scriptures. Through meeting living resurrected Jesus he comes to understand the true meaning of the OT text.

Childs argues wrong any conclusion that judges Paul as eisegete, one that reads his own thoughts in to the text, and insists that Paul is seeking to offer a real interpretation of the biblical text that convinces his hearers and even the opponents. However, to Paul it is the encounter with living Jesus that makes him to see better what the scripture is revealing. He is thus not so much in to finding out the historical setting behind the text, but rather does all he can to biblically demonstrate the reality revealed to him.

Different to Paul who's only knowledge of Christ was the personal encounter, we have the NT included in the Scriptures. However, it s still true that it takes real and personal encounter to us too to be able to see the reality behind the text in relation to our lives. NT serves at best as a description of Jesus and paradigm cases of life application of the faith in him. Traveling the way through methodologies to see the historical setting the text describes only has value once we have made the way back home to our lives.

Rather than over-stress on historical critical bible studies, I'd love to see emphasis on evaluating the fruit that the reading of the text produces in the life of the reader.

So, lets all have one for good old time lightly based but heavy weight preachers.