matthew henry john bartlett

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:— Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Says Mike Goheen in The Biblical Story & Education [880KB PDF]:

It is a matter of which story is shaping our lives? Some story will shape our lives. When the Bible is broken up into little bits — theological, devotional, spiritual, moral bits — then these bits can be nicely absorbed into the reigning cultural story with all its idols! One can be theologically orthodox, devotionally pious, and morally upright and yet be significantly shaped by the idolatrous Western story.

In Understanding our Cultural Context [1.7MB PDF] Goheen gives two alternatives to the Apostle’s Creed to attempt to illustrate the faith commitments of Modernity:

I believe in Man. I believe in the ability of man apart from God to solve the problems of our world and build a better one.

I believe in Science Almighty. I believe in the power of human reason disciplined by the scientific method to understand, control, and change our world.

I believe in Technology and a Rational Society, its only begotten sons which have the power to redeem our world.

I believe in the spirit of Progress. I believe that a science based technology and rationally organised society will enable me to realise my ultimate human goal — freedom, happiness, justice, and the comforts of material abundance. To this I commit myself with all my resources, time and money.   Amen.

and Postmodernity:

I don’t believe there is one story of the world that is true for everyone. I don’t believe science gives us the truth. I believe that all ‘truth’ is relative to the culture and time period. I believe there are many stories none of which are true for everyone. I believe in tolerance in which no one may make an imperialistic claim for truth.

I don’t believe there is one story that gives meaning to the world. I believe that consumption will give meaning to my life. I believe that the abundance of consumer goods and experiences, and the leisure time to consume them will make me happy. To this end I commit myself with all my money, time, energy, and resources.   Amen.

book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
song Belle & Sebastian/I’m a Cuckoo, runners-up Beck/Round the Bend and Neil Finn/Into the Sunset
album Tool/Lateralus tied with Belle & Sebastian/Dear Catastrophe Waitress
movie Lost in Translation, runner-up Donnie Darko (Director’s Cut)
gig Turin Brakes @ Indigo (thanks Simon)
article Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg (thanks Kathy)

I’d love to hear yours.

Good art is filled with the spirit. So good art cannot help but inspire.

Ian G on Burma (Myanmar) & the tsunami

Some vague ideas for a vision for church:

• Church shows world what Jesus is like, therefore what God is like. Jesus is the “image of the invisible God,” perhaps most especially on the cross, in self-sacrificial suffering. I think the church can behave like that in a small way, and in doing that show God to the world. NTW has an idea that “as Jesus to Israel, so the Church to the World.”
• Church is picture of new humanity, showing the world what life could be like for them if they turned to God, away from chasing things like money & power.
• Church shows what life in true community is like, families helping each other out wherever they can, learning to look after the bit of creation they’ve been entrusted with, sharing food grown & things made (which incidentally would happily reduce dependence on supermarket system), where people get to be listened to, contribute & feel valued.
• Church is a place that welcomes broken people, specialises in helping out people who’s lives aren’t sorted out (like solo mums, stoners, lonely people), perhaps instead of specialising in assuaging the religious longings of reasonably-well-off middle-NZers.
• Particular Christians and Christian families find their own vocations within the larger vocation of the church.

In a recent emergent church ‘theological conversation’ Brian McLaren said:

One quick example about theology: I spend about half my time in main-line churches and half my time in evangelical circles and I think a lot of main-line folks have no idea how pervasive a lot of the old thinking is, until they hear about polling numbers for elections, or until one day the radio doesn’t work right and they listen to all those stations they normally avoid. But just to give an example of how much theology does matter in this: I think probably most of you are somewhat familiar with the issues of global warming. I was at a meeting recently that I discovered was a meeting that was staged in a sense to help the Southern Baptists become part of a discussion about whether global warming might be real. What I was told by scientists in England was something like this: “All of us involved with this issue know that if the United States doesn’t get involved and care about this, everybody else’s efforts are reduced by 30%. If the Republicans are in power we know that they will not change their opinion on global warning unless the Religious Right tells them to. But we also know that the Religious Right won’t go any further than the Southern Baptists will go. For scientists in many places of the world it looks like the environment of the planet belongs to the Southern Baptists and it’s being held hostage.” And I find that when I speak about environmental issues, there’re an awful lot of people who say, “Why do you worry about that? The world’s going to end within the next ten years, it’s going to burn up anyway.” And there are a lot of us who live with that theology and see it, and it’s very pervasive.

I’m unimpressed with Doves’ new single “Black & White Town”. It lacks imagination, features a half-hearted slow & soft segment and a really average guitar solo. I hope it’s the one filler track of a killer album. It’s about as good as Radiohead’s “Morning Bell/Amnesiac” on Amnesiac, i.e. not very.

While reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it suddenly occured to me that the process he describes of the scientific community shifting from one paradigm to another is very similar to William James’ description (Lecture IX in The Varieties of Religious Experience) of the process of religious conversion in a single person.

Goheen & Bartholomew: Story & Biblical Theology [90KB PDF]
NT Wright on the tsunami [via Kevin B]
Annie Dillard biography
Andrew Basden: IT professionals on Judgement Day
Eugene Peterson: Living into God’s story

QuickTime panorama of Amsterdam on New Year’s [via John M]
Random Wikipedia page

When I hear news reports of events in far-off lands, I never know whether or not I can trust them. I get these little bursts of infotainment and they feed my apathetic tendencies. I don’t want to be apathetic. I want to know if I can help. Regularly I get the strong impression that in topical conversations we’re all just pooling our ignorance.

Today I had an idea (not dissimilar to some suggestions from Calvin Seerveld): each of us could choose one pet region or country or people-group and learn about it as a long-term project. This way when that country comes up in the news there’ll be one person near whose opinion will be worth hearing.

I choose Siberia.

Said NT Wright in The New Testament and the ‘State’:

We are … committed to a more complex task than bringing our comfortably isolated category to the NT and asking what this book has to say about it. We are bound to re-enter the rough-and-tumble world of the Middle East … in the first century and try to see, in the writings of the early Christians, what categories emerge to handle what we think of as the relation between Christian belief and practice and political allegiance and obligation. And, since this involves unthinking a good deal of our normal ideas on the subject, we must then engage in the complex hermeneutical task: how to get from the first century back into the twentieth. We are not first-century Jews, living under the pax Romana. We live in a world where a great deal has already been done for good and ill in the name of Christ, the world of crusades and inquisitions as well as the world of William Wilberforce, Mother Theresa and St Francis. We cannot naïvely pretend that we are innocent of all that, and go back to a ‘pure’ Christian faith unsullied by social involvement, under the impression that following the NT means living as though the last 2,000 years had not happened. History, then, and hermeneutics: these are the tasks; exegesis must be the tool they use, and theology the air they breathe.

June 2004 NT Wright interview, in parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7
Bulk rename utility
George Hart’s geometric sculpture [via RDB & Adbusters #56]

Four brand new books arrived for me today, huzzah:

Muhammad Yunus’ Banker to the Poor
Derek Melser’s The Act of Thinking
Paul Marshall’s Heaven is Not My Home
Brian Walsh & Silvia Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed

Thanks, generous friends.

From Brian Walsh & Syliva Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed:

Imaginary interlocuter: When you put it that way, I can begin to see your point. Of the friends of mine who have abandoned Christian faith, very few of them stopped believing in Christ because of intellectual problems with the Bible or because they were seduced by some other worldview or belief system. Rather, they tend to abandon Christian faith because of the irrelevance, judgmentalism, internal dissension and lack of compassion they experience within the Christian community. Rather than finding the church to be the community that most deeply encouraged them in their struggles, they lost heart in their discouragement and lost their faith in the process. Rather than experiencing the church as the site of the most profound hospitality, love and acceptance, they felt excluded because of their doubts and struggles.

Walsh & Keesmaat: This is our point. What makes the argument that is alternative to the gospel plausible? Is it the internal consistency of the argument? Is it its scientific verifiability? Its political and economic power? No, what makes an argument that is alternative to the gospel plausible is the implausibility of the Christian community itself.
   When the church fails to be a listening community, attentive to the cries of the poor, then the gospel is implausible and alternative social philosophies take on an air of plausibility. When the church becomes a site of bitter enmity while the world is spinning ever more quickly into war and violence, then the gospel is not only implausible, it is an embarrassment. In the face of such failures to be a community that embodies the truth that came to save the world, it is no wonder that alternative visions become more plausible to us.

Walsh & Keesmaat in Colossians Remixed told me the Greek word blasphemia means ‘hurt the reputation of someone’ which interested me because that provides a link between the third and ninth commandments: Don’t slander God or his representatives.

Pictures from Huygens on Titan [via /.]

Today I read the Families’ Commission Statement of Intent [1MB PDF]. Up till this point I had heard only bad things about the Commission. Mostly that their definition of a family includes non-nuclear families. I was really impressed with the document. I particularly liked their set of expectations for families:

In the Commission’s view, all families should be able to exercise a capacity to:

• love, protect and nurture children to help them reach their full potential
• protect and care for elderly, disabled and sick family members
• share resources, wisdom, knowledge, and time
• participate in education, society, and the economy
• plan for today and tomorrow, for retirement, and for future generations
• protect family wealth, land, taonga, and history
• transmit values, lifestyles, ethics, and culture

I read in the same document that around 7500 children were assessed as abused or neglected during 2003 in New Zealand.

Lyrics: Kayne West/Jesus Walks
Teen Girl Squad #8

I’ve just finished Walsh & Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed. It’s explosive and life-changing stuff. If I’d looked through the bibliography before I started, I could have guaranteed I’d love it. They reference Wendell Berry, John Caputo, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Kalle Lasn (Adbusters editor), Neil Postman, Calvin Seerveld, NT Wright & Annie Dillard. All the goodies, in other words. Now, if I can figure out some way of getting you all to read it …

Richard asked, “Why should a gospel substantially founded on the concept of humans being sinful be rendered “implausible” by evidence that human beings are sinful?”

I think it is something to do with what comes next, that is, now that we know everyone is sinful & flawed & broken etc., how does that affect how we’ll operate as a community? One possibility: Christian community could be a place where in a sense it’s OK to be a bad person, we don’t have to pretend to be perfect and happy and having-it-all-together all the time, because we know none of us are. Andrew Basden has good things to say on this topic.

The way things are now, I think we all have our masks on pretty securely most of the time, and aren’t very well equipped to deal with messiness & brokenness. I don’t know how we can change this, I’m the worst offender.

In Heaven is not my home, Paul Marshall quotes John Calvin:

The law of God given through Moses is not dishonored when it is abrogated and new laws are preferred to it … for the Lord … did not give that law to be proclaimed among all nations and to be in force everywhere. Rather we must make our laws with regard to the condition of times, place and nation. … How malicious and hateful toward public welfare would be a man who is offended by such diversity.

In his article Christ and Nothing — an epic, panoptic and magisterial survey of the West before, during and after Christianity — David B Hart writes:

It is worth asking ourselves what this tableau, viewed from the vantage of pagan antiquity, would have meant. A man of noble birth, representing the power of Rome, endowed with authority over life and death, confronted by a barbarous colonial of no name or estate, a slave of the empire, beaten, robed in purple, crowned with thorns, insanely invoking an otherworldly kingdom and some esoteric truth, unaware of either his absurdity or his judge’s eminence. Who could have doubted where, between these two, the truth of things was to be found? But the Gospel is written in the light of the resurrection, which reverses the meaning of this scene entirely. If God’s truth is in fact to be found where Christ stands, the mockery visited on him redounds instead upon the emperor, all of whose regal finery, when set beside the majesty of the servile shape in which God reveals Himself, shows itself to be just so many rags and briars.

[via Toby]

Lyrics: Radiohead/The Amazing Sounds of Orgy
How to fold a shirt [flash, via RDB]

Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the Church
Church as ghetto or power network
The man who planted trees [via dd]

I’m trying to figure out the Gospel of Matthew at the moment. One thing I’m doing is trying to understand how St Matthew uses the quotations from Moses & the prophets. Here is what I have for the ‘as it was written’ quotations in the first four chapters:

1. “Behold, a virgin shall be with child …” — the child was a sign that Israel’s enemies were about to be defeated, though no thanks to Israel itself (Isaiah 7)
2. “And thou Bethlehem … art not the least … for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel” — enemies surround what’s left of Israel, but this one will come and the scattered of Israel will return. He will bring peace. (Micah 5)
3. “Out of Egypt have I called my son” — Jesus is equated with Israel (Hosea 11)
4. “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted …” — who knows? (Jeremiah 31)
5. “He shall be called a Nazarene” — who knows? I can’t even find the reference.
6. “The voice of one crying in the wilderness …” — peace & pardon are coming, God the shepherd & creator, is returning. (Isaiah 40)
7. “Man shall not live by bread alone …” — Jesus is being Israel in the wilderness. (Deuteronomy 8)
8. “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” — Israel demanded water at Massah, rather than trusting that God would provide. Jesus passes the test Israel failed. (Deuteronomy 6)
9. “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” — when Israel gets rich, it must remember where it came from, and not turn away from God. (Deuteronomy 6)
10. “The people which sat in darkness saw great light …” — a child comes to bring peace & justice, break the back of oppression. (Isaiah 9)

I think paying attention to the background texts like this pins down the interpretation of the book, like putting rocks on the corners of a tarpaulin to stop it blowing away.

Europe vs. America [via Deb]
James Howard Kunstler: Cargo Karma
Stuart M: God and dreary evenings
Otago University Professor RH Sibson on the oil production peak
Peace, justice & Christian historians
Poetry and the Sacrament
Art and instinctive response

I’m a bit sad because Simon & Richard Steenhof, two of my very best friends, are moving to Perth in three days.

Ben Folds has a new album out on April 26 called Songs for Silverman.

I have a friend whose work for the Kingdom would be greatly expedited if he had a laptop. Email me if you can assist.

There are some songs that have taken over my life for a month or a year, or had a life of their own and forced me to listen to them over and over again. As I remember them, I jot them down. Here are the ones I’ve recollected so far, listed in reverse chronological order, 2004 to ~1989.

Muttonbirds/A Thing Well Made
Bill Withers/Grandma’s hands
Neil Finn/Into the Sunset — In the middle it falls asleep and breaks in two like Cam’s poem.
Doves/Sulphur Man
Weta/Calling On
Avril Lavigne/I’m With You
Turin Brakes/Painkiller
Tool/Schism
Belle & Sebastian/There’s Too Much Love…
Grant Lee Buffalo/It’s the Life
Beth Orton/Couldn’t Cause Me Harm
Dodgy/One of Those Rivers
Leonard Cohen/Ballad of the Absent Mare
Incubus/The Warmth
Ride/Rolling Thunder
Blur/This is a Low
Supergrass/It’s Not Me
Seven Mary Three/Cumbersome
Soundgarden/Black Hole Sun
Live/All Over You
Live/Lightning Crashes
The Police/Don’t Stand So Close to Me
Coolio/Gansta’s Paradise
Genesis/Fading lights
REM/Find the River
Toad the Wet Sprocket/Walk on the Water
Scorpions/Wind of Change
Australian Crawl/Reckless
Boston/More Than a Feeling
Dire Straits/Brothers in Arms
Sting/Russians
Phil Collins/Who Said I Would?

Andrew Basden
Jeremy Begbie
Wendell Berry
W Rance Darity
James Jordan
Hundertwasser
Brian McLaren
John Patrick
Eugene Peterson
Kim Stanley Robinson
Read Mercer Schuchardt
E F Schumacher
Neil Vaney
Brian J Walsh
N T Wright

Crystal drowning, dead-eye Dick
save us from thy hammerthwick.
Lighter on and lighter’s vee
join me slowly
grote a-bromely
handsome rool and heartily.

Worthing forth o frostie dreams
teat unfaithful under-screams.
Go before your pips are cried:
“Drearly sloughing,
mildew-coughing
hanker ween but thunderspied!”

(Try it, it’s fun.)