#139 In all things, Christ preeminent?

In all things, Christ preeminent. This is the motto of the Christian college where I graduated from and it is taken from the Biblical passage Colossians 1:18. But is it possible to take this verse to far? At first I would think obviously not, but then a couple of things this week conspired to make me think otherwise.

First, I received a brochure in the mail this week from the college as part of their regular campaigning to solicit alumni giving. The brochure highlighted one alumni who had started a bread-baking company after graduation. Here is a quote of his from the brochure:

'We love to knead. We knead to love. This has been our organization's motto from the beginning,' says [the alumni]. 'I am called to be a baker, and that means bread is God's chosen vehicle for loving through me. With that in mind, [the bakery] is the medium through which I engage, and love, the world: God, neighbors, family, customers, coworkers, vendors. We strive for excellence in our business. This begins and ends with bread.'

But [the alumni's] passion for breadmaking isn’t just about bread. It’s about redemption.

'One of the reasons that baking has continued to captivate me over the years is that breadmaking is very similar to our human process,' says [the alumni]. 'Dough being created though the mixing of ingredients; individual loaves being weighed out, hand shaped and shaped again; these loaves being let to develop and rise in the proper environment; the surface of each loaf being cut with the blade in perfect patterns just before baking, that they may properly blossom in the oven; and the transformation by fire that happens on the surface of the hearth: loaves dying as dough and being reborn as bread, fulfilling the Baker's vision for what they ought to become. It's a beautiful process: living and life-giving.'

As I opened the mail and glanced at this, without reading the entire article, I muttered under my breath, "You've got to be kidding me!" But I knew they weren't kidding. After spending four years at the school, I knew well that ability to serve God in all callings of life is something they strongly preach as evidenced by their motto. To them, everything is a calling. If someone digs ditches for a living, and feels called to do that, it is their calling. If someone sits in a cubicle to get a paycheck, as I do, they are fulfilling their calling from God. And here we have an example of someone who says he is called to be a baker and that bread, yes, bread is God's vehicle for loving through him.

After I tossed the brochure in the trash right there at the apartment mailbox having no real deep thoughts about the content other than the exclamation above, I went on with my work week. I read on the train on the way to work and this week I am reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship. This reading was the second thing that made me rethink the concept of the college's application of Colossians 1:18.

On page 46, Bonhoeffer tells us the story of what he thinks happened to the original meaning of the original Christian call to discipleship. He says that as Christianity spread, the Church became more secularized, reaching its legitimization with the legalization of Christianity under Constantine. At this point, Bonhoeffer says, grace came to be had at a low cost. It became a common property of the citizens of the empire and the members of the church. He calls this cheap grace.

But he points out that the Church astutely allowed monasticism, where individuals sacrificed greatly to follow the call of Christ, to flourish. But "monasticism was represented as an individual achievement which the mass of the laity could not be expected to emulate" and thus the church succeeded in justifying "the secularization of its own life". Thus we have at least one theory for how the secularization of Christianity, defined as a capitulation to culture, came about.

On page 81, Bonhoeffer tells us how this capitulation occurs in our minds even to this day when he says, "... if [Jesus] were to say to us: 'Be not anxious,' we should take him to mean: 'Of course it is not wrong for us to be anxious: we must work and provide for ourselves and our dependents. If we did not we should be shirking our responsibilities. But all the time we ought to be inwardly free from all anxiety...' All along the line we are trying to evade the obligation of single-minded obedience."

The Roman Church wasn't the only group to fall prey to this secularization of calling. The mindset of relativizing the commands of Jesus is epitomized in the idea of the Protestant work ethic over a thousand years after Constantine. Hear what Bonhoeffer thinks of this idea. Discussing the call of Jesus to love our enemies on page 152, he says,

"When we love those who love us, our brethren, our nation, our friends, yes, and even our own congregation, we are no better than the heathen and the publicans. Such love is ordinary and natural, and not distinctively Christian. We can love our kith and kin, our fellow countrymen and our friends, whether we are Christians or not, and there is no need for Jesus to teach us that. But he takes that kind of love for granted, and in contrast asserts that we must love our enemies. Thus he shows us what he means by love, and the attitude we must display towards it. How then do disciples differ from the heathen? What does it really mean to be a Christian? Here we meet the word which controls the whole chapter, and sums up all we have heard so far. What makes the Christian different from other men is the 'peculiar,' the 'extraordinary,' the 'unusual,' that which is not 'a matter of course.' This is the quality whereby the better righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees... the distinctive quality of the Christian life begins with the 'peculiar.' It is this quality which first enables us to see the natural in its true light. Where it is lacking, the peculiar graces of Christianity are absent. It cannot occur within the sphere of natural possibilities, but only when they are transcended... That was the fatal mistake of the Protestant work ethic which diluted Christian love into patriotism, loyalty to friends and industriousness, which in short, perverted the better righteousness in justitia civilis."

To me, this assessment sounds eerily familiar to the theology of vocation I find in the college that the baker and I attended. So here are my questions: Have we cheapened the Biblical meaning of call and obedience? Is our theology of vocation just a secularization of our calling? Is our category of general revelation a baptizing of the world which actually has the effect of watering down Word? Or are all these concepts just a claiming of rightful territory by the agents of a sovereign God?

John Howard Yoder gives you a hint of how I would answer these questions when he says on page 99 of The Politics of Jesus that "incarnation does not originally mean... that God took all of human nature as it was, put his stamp of approval on it, and thereby ratified nature as revelation."

But let me be clear about what I am not saying. I'm not suggesting the ditch digger, me, or the baker quit our jobs but I am saying that to call that work your calling in an overtly biblical sense as the brochure mentioned above undeniably does is to trivialize the idea of calling. As Bonhoeffer says on page 260, "It would be... wrong to suppose that St. Paul imagines that the fulfillment of our secular calling is itself the living of the Christian life." The concept of calling in the Bible is specifically reserved for the call of God to obedience in faith. The disciples were fishermen by trade but were called by Jesus to follow him. Paul was a tentmaker but was called to be an apostle.

There's probably a lot more that could be said about this in and to a tradition where calling has lost its Biblical meaning. But for now, allow Bonhoeffer to sum up with a warning.

"If our Christianity has ceased to be serious about discipleship, if we have watered down the gospel into emotional uplift which makes no costly demands and which fails to distinguish between natural and Christian existence, then we cannot help regarding the cross as an ordinary everyday calamity, as one of the trials and tribulations of life... But this notion has ceased to be intelligible to a Christianity which can no longer see any difference between an ordinary human life and a life committed to Christ."

So is it possible to take the phrase "In all things, Christ preeminent to far?" Not necessarily. It's just that I think it's possible to greatly misunderstand its meaning. See what Paul had to say about our stations at the time of our calling. The quote is from I Corinthians 7:18-24.

Was anyone called after he had been circumcised? He should not try to undo his circumcision. Was anyone called who is uncircumcised? He should not get circumcised. Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Instead, keeping God’s commandments is what counts. Let each one remain in that situation in life in which he was called. Were you called as a slave? Do not worry about it. But if indeed you are able to be free, make the most of the opportunity. For the one who was called in the Lord as a slave is the Lord’s freedman. In the same way, the one who was called as a free person is Christ’s slave. You were bought with a price. Do not become slaves of men. In whatever situation someone was called, brothers and sisters, let him remain in it with God.

There is nothing wrong with our secular careers. In fact, Paul says, stay as you are. But do not confuse this with calling. In fact, now that I look back, the baker seems to have the right idea based on his nuanced statement. But I know from experience, that the college tends to take it a bit too far. They use it to recruit applicants, they teach it as a theme in their core curriculum to students, and now they are using it to solicit donations from alumni. That's why I laughed and threw the brochure in the trash.

#138 Risk Management During the Credit Crunch

There’s a good article in The New York Times about the success of Goldman Sachs in the midst of the credit woes of late. Here’s a great quote from the article:

“But the differentiator that has become clearest recently is the firm’s ability to manage its risks, a tricky task for any bank. Checks and balances must be in place to turn off a business spigot even as it is still making a lot of money for a lot of people. In a world where power gravitates to the rainmakers, that means only management can empower the party crashers.

At Goldman, the controller’s office — the group responsible for valuing the firm’s huge positions — has 1,100 people, including 20 Ph.D.’s. If there is a dispute, the controller is always deemed right unless the trading desk can make a convincing case for an alternate valuation. The bank says risk managers swap jobs with traders and bankers over a career and can be paid the same multimillion-dollar salaries as investment bankers.

‘The risk controllers are taken very seriously,’ Mr. Moszkowski said. ‘They have a level of authority and power that is, on balance, equivalent to the people running the cash registers. It’s not as clear that that happens everywhere.’"

As an accountant and thus a member of the “party crasher” group referenced in the above quote, it is good to know that, not only due to Sarbanes-Oxley, but also this credit crunch, risk managers are becoming more valuable than ever. For myself or anyone like me who doesn’t have the salesman/rainmaker mentality, this might be a good direction to take a career in.

#137 Wright on Carson, Piper, and Moo

Here's an interesting quote from an interview with N.T. Wright by Trevin Wax on the various Reformed responses to his theology of justification:

"I think Carson has misunderstood it. The big book, the first volume that he edited, Justification and Variegated Nomism, a collection of fine essays by fine scholars. But I have to say, in the bit at the end, where Carson sums it up, he actually goes way beyond what those essays actually say. And it’s interesting… he takes a few swipes at me there without even footnoting. It’s as though I’m sort of hovering in the background as a big boogeyman who’s going to come and pounce on people and so, he’s got to ward him off.

And I know Don quite well. We were graduate students together, he in Cambridge and I at Oxford in the 1970’s. We’ve been friends on and off for many years. And I just don’t understand why this is eating him the way it is.

Piper is in a different category. He graciously sent me an advance manuscript of his book which is critiquing me and invited my comments on it. I sent him a lengthy set of comments. I’ve only just got on email about two days ago the book in the revised form and I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. So I cannot say whether he’s being fair or not at this stage.

But I do know that he has done his darndest to be fair and I honor that and I respect that. People have asked me if I’m going to write a response, and the answer is that I don’t know. I’m kind of busy right now. But I maybe should, sooner or later.

Moo is in a different category again. Doug Moo, I would say, is a much greater Pauline scholar than either of the two I just mentioned. One of the things I really respect about Doug Moo is that he is constantly grappling with the text. Where he hears the text saying something which is not what his tradition would have said, he will go with the text. I won’t always agree with his exegesis, but there is a relentless scholarly honesty about him which I really tip my hat off to."

As a bonus quote, though we already knew his next book would be on Paul, what we didn't know was the basic structure and themes he was going to use. It looks like the basic theme will be that Paul's message was a product of and a reaction to three forces: his Jewish theology, the Roman political situation of his time, and the Greek philosophy of his day. Now we have an idea, although it's going to be a long while before we get to see the finished product:

"...the next book in the big series has not been started yet. It’s been started in my head and on notebooks, but I haven’t done any serious writing for it. That’s supposed to be on Paul. What I want to do is the big book of which that little book Paul: In Fresh Perspective was just a kind of little foretaste.

In other words, what I’m hoping and praying that I’ll be able to do is to do a run-through of Paul’s theology in a reasonably traditional way, but simultaneously show the political side of all that and show how that integrates. Then, I would love at the same time to do, showing how Paul is working with and subverting the philosophical climate of his time, the Stoics and Epicureans and so on. Nobody is basically pulling those three together.

But Paul lived in those three worlds. The Jewish world of the worship of the one true God and figuring out what that meant, the Roman world where he was a citizen, but a very subversive one and then the Hellenistic world, which he knew perfectly well (the Areopagus address, and so on). And I would love to be able to show, not only how those three strands play out, but how they work together. Different bits of the Pauline Studies Guild are doing those different bits. I don’t think anybody’s doing the integration. And that’s a very exciting task.

I may have a sabbatical in 2009. That hasn’t been negotiated yet. But what I need (and if anyone out there is listening and wants to come and apply), I need a research assistant who will actually help me line up the key things I need to work with, because otherwise I could spend all four months of the sabbatical, simply sitting in the library reading the stuff I haven’t yet caught up with, and then the sabbatical will be over just when I was ready to start writing. I can’t afford that time, otherwise, it will be another six years. So that’s where I am at the moment."

#136 Translation of John 1:1-5

After teaching myself nearly a semester's worth of Greek using William Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek, I am finally to the point where I feel like I can attempt to translate something. I'm guessing everybody starts with John 1:1-5 and it seems relatively easy. My basic method is to read through the pericope one clause at a time, attempting to translate, first in my head, using what I know. As I come across words I don't know, I write them down instead of looking them up immediately. This way, I don't get bogged down flipping back and forth between the lexicon and the text. Once I reach the end and after translating in my head and writing down the words I don't know, I look up the all possible meanings of the words I wrote down. Then I go back through the pericope and actually write down the translation.

In this particular passage, there were 12 words that I didn't know (I'm having trouble figuring out how to type the accents so I'm just leaving them out here)...
1. ουτος - this
2. δι - ablaut with genitive means through
3. εγενετο - produce, beget, given birth
4. χωρις - with genitive means without, apart from
5. ουδε - and not, not even, neither, nor
6. εν - one
7. γεγονεν - produced, begat, given birth
8. σκοτια - darkness
9. φαινει - shine, appeared
10. ου - not
11. κατελαβεν - attain, grasp
12. παντα - each, every, all

Now here's the passage...
1. en arch hn o logoV, kai o logoV hn proV ton qeon, kai qeoV hn o logoV.
2. outoV hn en arch proV ton qeon.
3. panta di autou egeneto, kai cwriV autou egeneto oude en. o gegonen
4. en autw zwh hn, kai h zwh hn to fwV twn anqrwpwn:
5. kai to fwV en th skotia fainei, kai h skotia auto ou katelaben.

Now here's my translation...
1. The word was in the beginning and the word was with God and God was the word.
2. This was in the beginning with God.
3. Through him all was given birth and without him nothing was given birth to that was given birth to, not even one thing.
4. Life was in him and the life was the light of men.
5. And the light in darkness appeared and the darkness itself did not secure it.

Now anyone who knows Greek can see my obvious weak areas so if you see anywhere that would be a helpful critique, let me know. Also, if you know of a better way to copy and paste the Greek text with accents, let me know. I haven't found one that doesn't mess up the text in some way or copy it in a weird format that causes the fonts in blogger to get all wacky.

#135 How to Type in Unicode on a Mac

After hours of scouring the internet, I have finally figured out how to type in Unicode on a Mac. I found plenty of web sites that would tell me what Unicode is, why it's important and even what programs will accept it. And while that was all helpful to give me an introduction, I could never find a single website that would clearly explain how I can type in it, which is the whole point of what I have been trying to do.

I'm learning Greek (for New Testament reading) and I want to be able to type while I'm learning. One option would be to just download Greek fonts and use type in those. But there are two problems with this. First, if the person reading your typing does not have the same font installed on their computer, then your typing will show up as gibberish. Second, and most frustrating for me is that blogger only gives you about 8 font options anyway and there is no way to select one of the Greek fonts.

The solution to the first problem is, as you probably already know, Unicode. If you don't understand the problem and the reason Unicode is important, go look it up and come back. The solution to the second problem is what I'm going to try to explain step by step. So through a conglomeration of websites I looked at and trial and error, here's the surprisingly simple method to typing in Unicode.

1. From the Apple menu, click System Preferences.
2. Click on the International menu option.
3. Click the Input Menu tab.
4. Select the Show Input Menu In Menu Bar check box.

• You will now see a flag (mine is a U.S. flag) appear in the upper right hand corner of your screen. If you click on this flag you will see that U.S. is selected, meaning that when you type on your keyboard, U.S. characters are being input. What we need to do is other types of characters to this list so you can easily switch between them
  

4. Back on the International Input Menu, scroll down the list and select the Greek Polytonic check box.

• Now if you click on the flag in the upper right hand corner of you screen, you will see the Greek Polytonic flag as an option.
  

5. Toggle the flag in the upper right hand corner to Greek Polytonic.
6. Now try typing in any progam such as Blogger, Word, Excel, or your email program.

• Greek symbols should be showing up. If you want to alternate between Greek and U.S. in the same document, it's as simple as toggling the flag back and forth as you go.
  

7. In order to see which keys will produce which characters, click on the flag in the upper right hand corner and select show keyboard viewer.

• A keyboard will pop up displaying which keys represent which characters.

For me, it was as simple as that. Hopefully the same is true for you.

#134 The Presidential Candidates

After watching at least 2 debates so far on each side of the aisle, reading hundreds of articles, following the news, and listening to plenty of commentary I'm putting together this post which ranks the candidates according to how I feel about them as a potential president and the case for or against them depending on my opinion. I've put them in four categories and I'm still looking for links for some of them. Hopefully this is useful to someone. For what it's worth...

The candidate I'm voting for...

The case for Ron Paul with article after article after article or 3 videos below... but to find out more click on "About Ron Paul" on his website at www.ronpaul2008.com








The candidates that would be a reasonable second choice if Ron Paul wasn't around...

The case for Mike Huckabee and the case against Mike Huckabee

The case for Barak Obama and another case for Barack Obama

The case for John McCain

The candidates that I strongly dislike...

The case against Mitt Romney

The case against John Edwards

The candidates that terrify the living piss out of me and must defeated...

The case against Hillary Clinton

The case against Rudy Giuliani in article after article after article or in a picture below which is really worth a thousand words.

#133 What is Orthodoxy?

A few days ago, Michael Patton over at Parchment and Pen posted a survey which listed about 25 doctrinal issues and asked for commenters to rate them on a sliding scale of 1-6. Here's a summary.

1. Absolutely essential for salvation
2. Essential for orthodoxy.
3. Important, but not essential.
4. Not important, people can have different opinions.
5. We can only speculate.
6. The doctrine is wrong.

I took the survey and just yesterday the results were posted in graphical form with 66 people, including myself, participating. Out of the different questions that were asked a lot of the results were as I expected them to be. There were two, however, that particularly stood out to me so I'm just going to discuss those two, but go check out the post to see the full results for all the issues.

The first set of results that stood out to me were the results for inerrancy. In other words where did readers rate inerrancy on the scale of 1-6 above? I think I rated it a 4. But what shocked me can be seen in the results below.


What shocked me was that nearly 50% believe I must believe in inerrancy to be at least orthodox. Wow! That is discouraging to me as I consider myself orthodox but do not subscribe to inerrancy. I've explored a decent bit of the issue of inerrancy but what I haven't explored is the history of the belief. Does it qualify historically to be considered a doctrine that defines the boundaries of orthodoxy? The first thing I think of, historically, when it comes to defining where orthodoxy begins and ends is whether the doctrine was mentioned in one of the historic ecumenical councils. Not that these are the be all and end all of anything, but I think they do give us a snapshot of what was orthodox (lower case "o") at a given point in time. I bring that up to say that I don't think that inerrancy was part of any of these councils, but I could be totally wrong. My guess is that inerrancy is a relatively new idea to Christianity. Who knows. If anyone does, enlighten me.

The second surprising result can be seen below.


You can see here that fully 85% of those who responded think that I must believe in a physical resurrection to be saved. This was actually really encouraging to me because I personally believe that without a physical resurrection, Jesus being Lord let alone alive in any sense and saving us, just doesn't any make sense. But I was totally not expecting the number to be this high for a couple reasons. One, I had read a couple comments in the previous post where some individuals just didn't think see the significance in the same way I do. Second, I was never educated in the church or in Christian schools growing up on the significance of the resurrection and the nature of it. I sure heard plenty about the rapture, but not much about the resurrection. Sad, but true. So at least for the 66 people who took the survey, I feel like the vast majority were educated better than me and that is encouraging, but I still worry about the larger church, because we certainly can't extrapolate the results of a small internet blog based voluntary poll to the larger population.

But I think it would be a really great pastoral tool to use his twenty-five question survery with the sliding six point scale with a local church. You could then tally the results and determine what the needs of your congregation are as far as Christian education is concerned. You could even be so bold as to present the results to them and discuss. So if you're any kind of leader in a church, give it a shot and let me know how it goes.

#132 A Memoir of Torture

Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost has a great post on torture. In the comments section he relates a story that is heart-wrenching and it is even more heart-wrenching that Christians are actually trying to defend the practice. In fact, it literally is making me sick to my stomach looking at many of their comments. Why, why, fucking why are Christians always the last to speak out on the great moral issues of our time?

Here's Joe:

"Rather than rely on the sanitized version done on journalists, I prefer to look at how the technique is used in the real world. Consider this case as recently recounted in WORLD magazine:

Victims of waterboarding can endure substantial lifelong anguish. In the case of Eric Lomax, a British army signalman taken prisoner during World War II, the memory left him emotionally crippled for decades. He recounts the trauma in an award-winning memoir, The Railway Man (Vintage, 1996):

'Water poured down my windpipe and throat and filled my lungs and stomach. The torrent was unimaginably choking. This is the sensation of drowning, on dry land, on a hot dry afternoon. Your humanity bursts from within you as you gag and choke. I tried very hard to will unconsciousness but no relief came.'

Years after that experience, Lomax met with one of his Japanese interrogators, Nagase Takashi, who recounted his recollection of the incident: 'With the prisoner screaming and crying 'Mother! Mother!' I muttered to myself, 'Mother, do you know what is happening to your son now?' I still cannot stop shuddering every time I recall that horrible scene.'"

Sin and evil destroys both the perpetrator and the victim. America is being destroyed right now, not from outside forces but from within. You know the famous De Tocqueville quote? He said that "America is great because America is good. When America ceases to be good..." You know the rest and it is happening right under our noses.

#131 Conservative Criticism of the Republican Party

The value of the chorus of Conservatives, including myself, who have been criticizing the Republican party lately...

"Better is open rebuke
than hidden love.

Wounds from a friend can be trusted,
but an enemy multiplies kisses."

Proverbs 27:5-6