Thinking Through the Big Picture

I’ve been thinking through the big picture of the bible and wrote down some stuff from books that I’ve been reading, and also from Adam Ellis’ summary on these blogs. Ellis’ words are in bold.

WHO ARE WE?

We are the people of God, created in his image. That image is distorted by the Fall but is still there.

“God created people in his own image.” ¹

“You made us only a little lower than God.” ²

“They will be masters over all of life.” ³

“God made human beings precisely in order to care for the earth. We were made to serve this purpose. It is built into our very being; it is our very design.” ⁴

“Humans were made to reflect God’s creative stewardship into the world.” ⁵

“To image God, then, human beings are charged not only with care for earth and animals (’subduing’ what’s already there) but also with developing certain cultural possibilities (’filling’ out what is only potentially there). ⁶

WHERE ARE WE?

We live in God’s world which he created and loves. God loves creation simply because it exists. We believe that this world was created “good” (in the “loaded with potential” sense) and not perfect (in the “complete” sense). We believe that God created us and this world to live in harmony with each other and with him.

“The first act in the world’s drama is God’s act of creating and sustaining ‘all things visible and invisible’ out of a generous desire to enlarge the realm of being, to bestow life and goodness on others, and to assist others to flourish in the realm created for them.” ⁷

“God leads a very interesting life and is full of joy. Undoubtably he is the most joyous being in the universe…We pay a lot of money to get a tank with a few tropical fish in it…but God has seas full of them, which he constantly enjoys.” ⁸

“God loves creation. God celebrates creation. God even plays with his creation.” ⁹

“It was good…it was good…it was good…it was good.” ¹⁰

WHAT IS WRONG?

Human beings make an extremely destructive choice very early on in the narrative. That choice has far reaching consequences and knocks the entire creation project off course. The shalom, or harmony that is supposed to exist between God, people and creation is shattered. The world is not what God dreams for it to be, and all creation seems bent on moving in the opposite direction.

“The glory of God’s good creation has not been obliterated by the tragedy of the fall, but it has been deeply shadowed by it. The history of our race is, in large part, the interplay of this light and shadow.” ¹¹

WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?

God does not give up on his dream for creation. He enacts a plan to bring about the “restoration of all things.” This plan involves covenanting with a cummunity of people to operate as agents of shalom in the midst of a broken world. God becomes a human being whose life, death and resurrection open the door for a renewed creation of shalom between a) God and human beings; b) human beings and other human beings; and c) human beings and creation. God calls a group of people to live in his reality now in the midst of a broken world. He calls us to partner with Him to make it more and more the place he always intended it to be. He promises that one day Jesus will return and that heaven and earth will be renewed. He insists that we will be resurrected so that we may enjoy the fulfillment of his promise and his dream for all creation.

“The Christian life is a quest to recover our humanity.” ¹²

“You have stripped away the old self, with its ways, and have put on the new self, which is continually being renewed in fuller and fuller knowledge, closer and closer to the image of its Creator.” ¹³

“The principalities and powers that kept us in exile have been defeated; they need reminding of this, and we need reminding of it too, but it is a fact – if it isn’t, the cross was a failure.” ¹⁴

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?

“Look, the home of God is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them.” ¹⁵

“The story of Scripture is the story of ‘Emmanuel’, for it describes how God progressively comes to live with us on our planet, at each appearance staying longer and in more permanent form.” ¹⁶

“Our destiny is an earthly one: a new earth, an earth redeemed and transfigured. An earth reunited with heaven, but an earth, nevertheless.” ¹⁷

“Scripture appears to teach not only that there shall be a new heaven and earth, but also that it shall be this earth, renewed. In Revelation 21 the city of God descends to us. We do not go to heaven; heaven comes to us.” ¹⁸

^__________

¹Genesis 1:27
²Psalm 8:5
³Genesis 1:26
⁴Heaven is Not My Home by Michael Wittmer pg. 18
⁵The Challenge of Jesus by NT Wright pg. 184
6 Engaging God’s World by Cornelius Plantinga pg. 33
⁷Plantinga pg. 44
⁸The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard pg. 62,63
⁹Plantinga pg. 24
¹⁰Genesis 1
¹¹Plantinga pg. 53
¹²Wittmer pg. 83
¹³Colossians 3:9-10
¹⁴Wright pg. 185
¹⁵Revelation 21:3
¹⁶Wittmer pg. 205
¹⁷Heaven is Not My Home by Paul Marshall pg. 11
¹⁸Plantinga pg. 32

Rob Bell Shares Gospel at Seeds of Compassion Event

At an event titled Seeds of Compassion on April 15 in Seattle there was a panel discussion involving representatives from different religions. Rob Bell, one of the Christian representatives, had this to say when asked how spirituality can be used for compassion rather than destruction:

“When somebody wrongs you, when they commit an injustice, when they do evil, whether it’s something petty or whether it’s the oppression of millions of people, it’s as if they have handed you this injustice, or evil. And so you can hand it back - that’s called revenge, that’s when you take the wrong, the evil, the injustice, the hurt, the betrayal, and you simply respond in kind. There is, next to revenge, another option, which is not to hand back the pain, which means that you’re going to have to bear that pain.

And when you choose not to respond with revenge or retaliation, but you choose to respond with forgiveness—and you choose to take it and bear that pain—it is going to be heavy, but it is going to lead to your freedom. It is going to feel like a death, but it is going to lead to a resurrection. It’s gonna feel like a Friday, but a Sunday is going to come.”

According to some, this was not a fitting response for a Christian because “there is nothing distinctly Christian about what Bell says.” The problem some will have with this opinion is that it assumes Christianity is tied to a certain language, and more specifically, to a few choice words rather than a way of life. The religion that says we must proclaim the name of Jesus continually, or to announce a certain sequence of words like “Jesus saves” or “Accept the Lord Jesus” is not based on the Scriptures but on a worldview that has little to do with the Jesus who walked along 1st century Israel’s dusty roads, and actually has more in common with witchcraft than with historic Christianity.

John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church and founder of Desiring God Ministries, has this to say about preaching the gospel:

“It does no good to tell these people to believe in the Lord Jesus. The phrase is empty. My responsibility as a preacher of the gospel and a teacher in the church is not to preserve and repeat cherished biblical sentences, but to pierce the heart with biblical truth.”
(Desiring God pg. 55)

And on February 25, 2003, John Piper spoke these words at Northwestern College:

“We must imagine ways to say truth for what it really is, and it is not boring…The imagination calls up new words, new images, new analogies, new metaphors, new illustrations, new connections to say old, glorious truth.”
(source)

So when Rob Bell paraphrases 1 Peter 2:23-24 at an interfaith discussion panel, is he denying Christ, or is he taking John Piper’s advice and calling up new connections to say old truth?

Are There More Universes?

“Go outside at night in the country, where the sky is very clear. Then look up. Each one of those tiny points in the sky is a flaming sun. We’re a tiny part of an enormous universe, which may be one of many universes. No one really knows for sure what’s out there. So we use our imagination. Imagination allows us to ask big questions — questions that scare us, and for which we don’t have easy answers.”
–Madeleine L’Engle

I just read a blog post titled “Civilization Has Barely Begun” at the Desiring God blog. Randy Alcorn is quoted as saying,

“We should expect the social dynamics from Earth to carry over to the New Earth, except when they’re a product of our fallenness or when God reveals otherwise.”

I really enjoy hearing about the new earth, especially since it appears as if it’s going to be a carry-over from this earth. Just now as I was walking around the neighborhood thinking about the ramifications of civilization having only just begun, as I approached an apartment complex with the still-lit April sky behind and a lone budding tree on the side, a quick happy feeling surged through me. Like I said, pondering the infinite possibilities of a new earth gets me really excited.

This is pure speculation, but what if, after thousands of years on the new earth, the pocket-full-of-surprises Overlord reveals yet another mystery — the individual work that each of us started doing on earth and continued to do in the new earth was preparation for something even greater, which after being revealed to us we all tap our foreheads and say, “Of course! It had to be this way — it’s characteristic of His endlessly-giving and explosive creativity.” Our new job, He joyfully announces to the billions and billions of new earth inhabitants during the monthly whole-earth assembly over a speaker system designed by a team of engineers and sound professionals from 40 countries, is to be sent out to a new universe and help the creatures that He’s freshly made begin life in their worlds.

To each universe are dispatched a multi-cultural team of storytellers, engineers, accountants, politicians, teachers, garbage men, police, weather men, architects, comedians, streetsweepers, doctors, even lawyers, to help launch the beginnings of a fresh planet. Each individual joyfully offers their expertise. And who knows whether or not they’ll be able to travel back and forth from New-Earth to their respective planets and share stories over campfires, laughing and marveling at these strange and wonderful new creatures from other universes. Each night the New-Earth inhabitants dream mind-boggling dreams of new inventions and ideas to share with their friends and students many light-years away but somehow near enough to travel to in the morning.

And it all began (or did it?) on a small planet called Earth in the Milky Way galaxy in a small corner of one of the many universes the Overlord began to create.

Of course this is all speculation, but a guy can dream, right?

“Hints that ours is just one of many universes keep cropping up in all sorts of different theories–and in ways that can seem far stranger than fiction.

The first credible suggestion that alternate universes might exist came in the early 1950s when a young physics graduate student named Hugh Everett was toying with some of the more bizarre implications of quantum mechanics. That theory, accepted by all serious physicists, says that the motions of atoms and subatomic particles can never be predicted with certainty; you can tell only where, say, an electron will probably be a millisecond from now. It could quite possibly end up somewhere else.”
–TIME Magazine article Will We Discover Another Universe?, April 10, 2000

Maybe one of these orphans from Mpumalanga, South Africa will be on your team:

photo courtesy desiringgod.org

Re-Judaizing Jesus: Idea That’s Changing the World (TIME)

TIME Magazine’s 10 Ideas That Are Changing The World

#10 - Re-Judaizing Jesus

Rob Bell is quoted as saying,

“Once in, you’re in deep. You’re hooked. ‘Cause you can’t ever read it the same way again.”

Christians Wrong About Heaven says NT Wright in TIME

“Much of “traditional” Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won’t be going up there to him, he’ll be coming down here.”  
        –NT Wright, TIME Magazine (source)

G.K. Chesterton’s Preface

“It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he has personally come to believe it.”

–G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Mariah Carey on Prayer

Many nights we prayed
With no proof anyone could hear
In our hearts a hopeful song
We barely understood
In this time of fear
When prayer so often proves in vain
Hope seems like the summer bird
Too swiftly flown away
Yet now I’m standing here
My heart’s so full, I can’t explain
Seeking faith and speaking words
I never thought I’d say

 –Mariah Carey, When You Believe

Claudia Discovers God’s Variety

Claudia’s father came into her room early one Saturday morning.  “Wake up, sweetie,” he said softly, and only after standing by her bed for a few minutes, just watching his daughter sleep peacefully.  “I have a surprise for you.”

“Oh daddy, you ruined it.”

“I ruined what?”  He looked around the room, puzzled.  “What, what did I ruin?”

Claudia sat up and rubbed one eye with one hand and stretched the other arm up towards the ceiling.  She’s not used to getting up this early.  “You ruined my dream.  I was performing a beautiful ballet in front of a big room of people.  I was just about to do my final chasse and you woke me up.”  Claudia didn’t even seem to be talking to anyone in particular; she was sitting cross-legged on her bed now, staring off into the distance as she recounted her dream, apparently still lost in the whole thing.

A teasing smile came across her father’s face.  “I guess we’ll have to wait until tonight to find out if they liked it or not,” he said.  He always knew how to make his only daughter smile.

“Oh daddy,” she said.

“Get dressed.  I’ll meet you in the car in three minutes,” he said quickly, and left the room.

The drive was long - almost an hour - but they played “I Spy” on the way to their destination, which made the time pass quite quickly.

Claudia’s eyes lit up when the car entered a huge, tree-lined field.  Could it be?  It was!  “An orchard!” she exclaimed, beaming from ear to ear, leaning forward in her seat so she could get a better view.

“An orchard,” Claudia’s father said affirmingly.

Ever since Claudia heard her father tell the story of the giving tree, she has wanted so badly to visit an apple orchard.

They exited the car and stood for a moment at the beginning of a seemingly endless row of apple trees.  “I want to tell you a little about apples, Claudia.”

Claudia put her small hand inside her father’s much larger one and looked up at him.

“Take a look at all these trees.  On these trees, Claudia, there are not just red apples but green and yellow apples, and different shades of each.  And there are not just big apples but small apples, too, and not just sweet apples but tart apples as well, and some even have a combination of both.  And there are differing textures, too - some are really crispy while others are softer.  Do you know how many different kinds of apples there are, Claudia?”

“Well my favorite is Red Delicious.  That’s the kind mommy always gets.  She says they’re better than the sour yellow ones.”

“Red Delicious is one kind.  There are also Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, Breakey, Braeburn, Winesap, Rome Beauty, Norland, McIntosh, Jonathan, Vista Bella, Bolero, Fuji, Gala, Goodland, Honey Crisp, and that’s just the beginning.  There are hundreds.”

“Hundreds?”

“Hundreds.  And that’s just the variety of apples!  Think about bananas and pears, grapes, kiwis, oranges, papayas, grapefruit, pineapples, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, tayberries, cranberries, cherries, mangoes, tangerines, watermelon, muskmelon, cantaloupe, peaches, plums, and nectarines, for starters.  And this is just fruit!  Think about all the different kinds of vegetables, as well!  And these are just foods, and foods are just one of the many things God has made.”

Claudia was just staring at her father, smiling.  She likes it when he talks about the physical world.  He gets lost in a world of his own, she often tells her mother.

“Why did he do it, daddy?  Why did God make all the different kinds of apples and oranges?”

“Y’know, I’m not exactly sure why, baby.  But he seems to be pretty enthusiastic about it all.  He said ‘It is good!’ and was satisfied with it, so when we taste and touch and smell it all, we can agree with him and say ‘It is good!’  It’s a beautiful thing to live in God’s world and imitate his own enthusiasm for it.”  He looked down at Claudia, who was just smiling up at him.

“Let’s go get some apples,” he said.

“Yay!” Claudia responded.  And they spent the whole day wandering through the orchard, picking apples.

Dear Ocho, Thanks For Everything. –Your Former Resident, Bob

Recently I’ve been questioning a lot of things.  I’ve begun to wonder way beyond the assumed point of view that I and the community I’ve come from see things from.  Even the basic questions I’m questioning; who says those are the right questions to begin with?

_____

A boy named Bob is born.  Bob is raised in a town called Ocho; he goes to school in Ocho, learns all the ways of the other Ochons, and goes to Ocho University.  Then he gets a job in the neighboring town called Chi.

The children in Chi are raised in a different way than the Ocho children, but Bob is able to get along fairly well.

Bob moves again, this time to a town nearby called Negen.  Bob finds out that this town is even more weird and he has a hard time getting along.

Because of these experiences Bob gets curious about other places - if these nearby towns are different than his hometown of Ocho, what else is out there?  So Bob dives into books for several years and learns as much as he can about the surrounding world.  His findings intrigue him.  Bob learns that his town Ocho means “eight” in another language.  The neighboring town of Chi means “seven”, and the town on the other side means “nine.”  Bob learns of hundreds of thousands of towns that stretch in each direction.  Every town is so different from the others that in a town like Eighteen they have no word for “food;” the idea does not exist.  Bob comes to realize that everything he has grown up believing about the world is only believed by fellow Ochons, with some basic ideas overlapping with the nearby communities.

They don’t know what a flower is in Fourteen, and in Thirty-Five there is no such thing as a question.  In Forty-Two their language is neither spoken or written.  As relatively close as Sixty-One is to Ocho, their bodies are drastically different, resembling something more like a puddle than an upright figure.  Once we get past One Hundred and Fifty there aren’t any more words in our vocabulary to describe them.

_____

Someone might ask Bob, “So do you still believe in our deity?”  He doesn’t think it’s a yes or no question.  He would like to tell his ignorant inquirer that she lives in a very small view of the world if that is the question she is stuck on, anyway.  But by now he’s used to dealing with people from Ocho so he might say “Yes” just to get her off his back.

There may be no such thing as a stupid question but there are an awful lot of robots who can’t see beyond Ocho’s town limits.  Odds are Bob’s inquisitor will have a series of questions about Ocho’s deities and then interpret his answer in light of her Ocho education.

There’s a reason Bob sleeps late on the weekends.

On Christianity and Language

“A studio president once asked me if I believed in angels and demons. (My writing partner, Paul Boardman, and I had written them into a script the studio head had just purchased.) Sensing that he was really wanting to know if I was a Christian with an agenda, I said, ‘I think what I believe is irrelevant. What’s important is that people want to believe in spiritual realities.’ He thought for a minute and seemed to decide that he didn’t really care what I believed, just so long as I wasn’t there to proselytize him or the audience. He nodded, the meeting went on and the subject never came up again. I didn’t deny my faith. I simply didn’t answer the question–a little trick I learned from Christ himself.” 
–Scott Derrickson, screenwriter, producer, director

I work at Barnes & Noble.  Sometimes in the morning my job is to shelf books that were delivered to the store the night before.  When one of my co-workers has this particular job she makes sure she gets the Christianity/Religion section done before the store opens so that she won’t be there when customers come in.  She doesn’t like the customers who come to that section.  They freak her out.

We often talk about movies and books and other things while working and I haven’t yet been asked point blank if I’m a religious person-slash-Christian-slash-freak.  I’m kind of glad I haven’t, either, because I’m not quite sure how I would respond.  Am I ashamed of being a Christian?  I don’t think so.  My hesitation comes not so much from being embarrassed for being a Christian as from having been told portions of the truth in a Christianese language that has begun not to work for myself and will most assuredly not work for my skeptical co-worker, and I can’t figure out a way to say it.  The goal is not to recycle meaningless words but to articulate this breathtaking reality in fresh language.  John Piper says it this way:

“My responsibility as a preacher of the gospel and a teacher in the church is not to preserve and repeat cherished biblical sentences, but to pierce the heart with biblical truth.”

The problem with some fringes of the tradition I’ve come from is that what lies on the uppermost shelf of importance is not the truth but the language, and as a Christian it is my duty to be for what is ultimately real, not a system of beliefs surrounded by a few choice words.

“Nothing is more easily resisted than subcultural religious language. One of our primary responsibilities as artists and Christians is to invent a new language for old ideas. It is impossible for me to successfully talk with people in Hollywood about sin and salvation. Those words are no longer alive for them. Words are socially born and they socially die, and we have killed off much of our Christian language. In popular culture, words like ’sin’ and ’salvation’ have connotations and associative meanings that are so antiquated and negative that it’s impossible to use them effectively. What artists can do is to take the truth of sin, the truth of salvation, the truth of redemption and find new ways of representing them.”  –Derrickson

Words are socially born and they socially die.  When Billy Graham preached around the United States in the 1950’s through 1980’s he used words that people understood - sin, salvation, repent, born-again, etc.  The truth behind those words was true long before Billy came around and it will be around long after he’s gone.  The truth lives.  But the words?  The language?  I think they may have died, at least to the average person in America in 2008.

So, what if my co-worker asks me if I’m a Christian and I don’t answer her directly?  Am I denying Christ?  Or would I be denying a language? 

Maybe being a Christian is more about living in the world in an excellent way than making sure I conform my words to a certain acceptable language.  Maybe my agnostic co-worker is acting more like Christ than I am by working her hardest and treating the other employees with kindness while I lazily anticipate punching out so I can go home and eat, snarling at co-workers in the process.  Maybe what’s most important is living as in-tune with reality as possible, not making sure my doctrines line up correctly, and by ”correctly” I mean the way I see things.

Nietzsche is famous for saying “God is dead.”  I agree.  ”God” is dead, but the one outside of time who made possible for the tides to come in and go out while pulling the moon in like a kite, yay, who invented the human hand which pontificates on life, philosophy, animals, sex, politics, and even God, is more alive than our language allows us to express.

If I ever do feel guilty it should not be because I failed to recite the right words, but because I’ve been shown what it looks like to live in a way that most lines up with reality and I failed to conform.  Words are secondary and only hint at the truth.

Your task is to find the symbolic ways of doing things differently, planting flags in hostile soil, setting up signposts that say there is a different way to be human. 
   –NT Wright