Question 5: Has the western church forgotten Irenaeus?

Apologies for the emphasis on Steve Chalke lately, but this will be the last question from his book; though once I've finished the book I may have something to say about his comments on the atonement...I just haven't gotten there yet.
Chalk claims that the Western church has become engrossed with the doctrine of Original Sin; while it seems to have forgotten the Original Goodness of humanity. He says it was Augustine who led the way for the West. Meanwhile, in the East, Irenaeus was much more influential with his teaching that humans bore the image of God and were "coaxed into full bloom by God's love."
In some ways, I think Chalke is not saying anything all that radical, he's just trying to stir things up by saying it in a controversial way - he basically says Jesus didn't believe in original sin, he believed in original goodness. I guess my question is Has the church in the West really forgotten Irenaeus?
There are two issues embeded in the question. First, is Chalke correct in his reading of Augustine and Irenaeus, and their influence on the West and East, respectively? Second, do we in the West need to rediscover the image of God in people?
In some ways, reformed theology (my heritage) is very good at remembering that people are made in the image of God. However, this understanding is usually used to draw conclusions about the nature of work and creativity, or else applied to discussions of apologetics/evangelism in the sense that people cannot run from the knowledge of God because they are made in his image. Rarely do we hear talk about being enamored with people because as people, they are beautiful. Blue Like Jazz really challenged me to see the image of God in people...to love them because of who they are. I think we could use that reminder a little more often in the reformed Western church.

Welcome Somer!

Somer has entered the blogosphere with Daily Offerings. Her cooking is world-famous (well, people on at least two continents know how good it is anyway), and now she is welcoming anyone who cares to stop by to sample the fare from our table. You'll also find the occasional glimpse into other parts of our life in London. I'm pretty sure her blog looks better than mine (as is the case with our persons as well), and she may have me beat for vulnurability as well. In any case, go check it out.

Question 4: Does God suffer?

Again, this one comes from The Lost Message of Jesus. See Question 3 for the first question Chalke's book raised. Chalke is fairly critical of the Westminster Confession of Faith and other Western Church creeds that claim that God is impassible, or without passions.
I guess I'm really wondering if Chalke is right in claiming that the major creeds assert the impassibility (and by implication the inability to suffer) of God. If he is, I suppose my issue is not so much with Chalke as it is with the creeds. I can see why they would want to shield God from suffering - in general, suffering is seen as a deficiency - if God is perfect and full of goodness and joy within himself, how could he suffer?
On the other side, though, there is the sense that suffering is often brought about not by a deficiency in the person who suffers, but by wrong committed against them by another. My understanding of forgiveness is that it involves acknowledging the cost of what was done to us and the pain it causes, and committing to absorb that cost ourselves rather than demand payment from the offending party. If this is so, God's commitment to forgive us would involve a significant amount of pain...rather than exacting vengeance on us, he absorbs the cost of the wrong we've done. Correct me if I'm wrong (seriously, someone please correct me), but isn't it generally regarded as orthodox to believe that God did not separate himself from the person of Jesus on the cross, but that it was in fact God himself who suffered for us on the cross? (My appologies to my systematics professors at WTS if I have just put forth a grave heresy. It's not their fault.)

Election Results

Seems like Tony Blair has won a third term as Prime Minister (though there's speculation that he may be asked to hand power over to Gordon Brown sometime during that third term...something I don't really understand). Labour lost 47 seats - mostly to the Conservatives. Margaret Hodge, the local MP from the area around Bethel Christian Centre won reelection. The scary thing is that the BNP came in third, with over 16% of the vote.
It's been interesting the different perspectives that people in the church here have on the candidates. Different people support the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, or one of the smaller parties. There is much less of an association between Christians and a specific party here than in the States.
So, congratulations to Blair and the rest of Labour for holding onto control of Parliament, and congratulations also to Michael Howard and the Conservatives for their strong showing and gain in seats.

Election UK

So I had a fun day. Our center was used as a polling place in the UK general election. It was really cool to be involved (even in a very small way) in the election process.
We basically sat outside the center and talked to people we knew as they left from voting. Saw a couple guys from the Hub and a number of the pensioners we know on the estate. The Labour party candidate for our district stopped by to say hello and greet a few people who were walking down the street. Margaret Hodge is her name, and she's also the Children's Minister in the current government under Blair. Another Labour worker was taking voting numbers from people, so he could cross them off the list as having voted. At 5 PM, they were going to start knocking on doors of people who said they were going to vote Labour but hadn't voted yet. Quite a system.
There was also a guy from the BNP (British National Party - quite racist in their campaign advertising). He had gotten permission to sit inside the polling place and check to make sure the poll workers were doing their job correctly. Quite intimidating if you ask me. At 9:30 PM I arrived back at the center to help close things down. The polls were due to close at 10 PM. There was a steady trickle of voters right up to 10. Then a flurry of activity to get all the ballot boxes sealed, packed up, and shipped off to the counting location. And now we await the results.

Question 3: Does God exact violent vengeance?

First, a confession: I'm currently reading The Lost Message of Jesus by Steve Chalke. Don't know if that's a problem for my American readers, but for some over here in the UK Steve's a controversial guy. I've been really encouraged, challenged, and moved by the book so far. Admittedly I haven't come to the most controversial part.
In Chapter 3, Chalke argues that John's definition of God - "God is love" - was the point of Jesus' message, and should control how we read everything else in the Bible. He says that in the Old Testament "Yahweh's association with vengeance and violence wasn't so much an expression of who he was but the result of his determination to be involved with his world. His unwillingness to distance himself from the people of Israel and their actions meant that at times he was implicated in the excessive acts of war..." But this asssociation was born out of love - God's love for his people. Basically, God was willing to get his hands dirty because of his love for his people.
So there's my question: Does God exact violent vengeance? or is violent vengeance the necessary result of his involvement with this world, but not really part of his character?
The only thing I'd add is that this morning I was reading in Numbers, where fire comes out from the Lord and consumes some of the camp of Israel because of their grumbling. Doesn't so much sound like the violence of the Israelites getting projected onto God as it does his vengeance lashing out at them. But I'll stop there, 'cuz I'm still wrestling with this one and more wanted to just pose the question and see where the discussion goes.

Question 2: What does "growth" look like?

This one was inspired by Ivy Beckwith's account of her conversion in Postmodern Children's Ministry. She grew up in the church, and made an outward commitment to follow Jesus at the age of 7. She makes a passing comment that there wasn't a whole lot in the life of a seven-year-old that needed cleaning up...and it got me thinking.
I was raised in the church, and don't remember a time when I didn't love Jesus and believe on him. So what does it mean for me to grow up in the way of following Jesus? See, my behavior when I was seven was a whole lot better than it is now. And let's face it, the church's doctrine of Sanctification is usually defined as growth in holiness - i.e. once a person decides to follow Jesus, their behavior, attitudes, etc. progress (however slowly and imperfectly) from bad to good.
But how does this explain my experience? By almost any standard, my behavior and attitudes have deteriorated since I was seven. As I matured, so did my ability to "invent ways of doing evil" (as one of Jesus' early followers says in the Biblical book of Romans).
I think we in the church need to wrestle with our understanding of what it means to grow in maturity as a follower of Jesus so that our understanding encompasses more than a change in moral behavior and attitudes. The understanding we come to needs to incorporate the reality that many people literally grow up knowing Jesus - and their "Sanctification" doesn't begin at a point in their lives when they've sufficiently matured to be able to sin like an adult. It begins from the very beginning of their lives.

Question 1: Who am I?

Thanks, Doug, for your comment. These questions are significant for various reasons...some are more life-long quests, others are important only for the small part they play in the larger story of my life. But here they are, in order according to when they first arose in my mind during our holiday.
Who am I? Hopefully not being asked in the sense that I need to be committed to a home, but in the sense that I was revisiting my sense of self-understanding.
My first thought about how to answer this question was: I'll read the Bible and make a list of every passage that says something about who I am. So the answer to "Who am I?" would look something like: I'm a child of God, an heir of the king, a sinner, a saint, deeply loved by God, etc. Then I wondered - Am I just a list? Isn't there something more to how I understand myself? I realize that many of those things in the list are profound truths and contain important elements about my relationship with God and other people, but in the end, it's still a list without any reference to my specific life. I mean, those things are true of every person who follows Jesus.
So I started thinking about the pomo preference for story/narrative. The idea that story communicates truth better than generic lists. I like this, though it means the answer to "Who am I?" is currently 26.4 years long, and getting longer every hour. I wonder if there's a way to condence the story of my life into a manageable format - like give little snippets that accurately reflect who I am, though without ever completely answering the question. Kinda like what John did with Jesus, where he says that many more things could be written, though they would fill many volumes, and that what he did write was written so that his readers would follow Jesus.
I guess maybe that's partly what this blog is all about - sharing glimpses of my life. So thank you, for reading and so helping to answer the question "Who am I?" I'll try to tell more stories in the future.

Back Home

I forgot to mention in my last post that the reason for the 1-week hiatus from TV and the internet was because we were going on holiday to Spain. So I didn't have internet access, but a TV was in the room - which we did not watch. So it was partially a forced break, but still a cleansing one.
We stayed at an apartment in Mijas on the Costa del Sol, and true to its name, it was SUNNY!! Seven straight days of bright sun and mid-70s. There was a pool ten steps from our front door, including a separate kiddy pool that the girls loved. We were often the first people on the beach in the mornings, and were joined by at most ten people by mid-afternoon, except on the weekend when it was more crowded. A very relaxing, refreshing week. The girls were semi-independent, which allowed Somer and me to do lots of reading. I finished The Name of the Rose, caught up from two weeks behind on my Bible reading plan, finished Postmodern Children's Ministry, and read half of The Lost Message of Jesus...more on some of those in a little bit. I also came back with about five significant questions...again, I'll share more later.
For now, it's good to be back.

Self Control

So I love my wife. She's right, a lot. We've been doing this read the bible in a year thing. The other day she says to me: "I thought about you today while I was doing the reading. It said 'We haven't been given a spirit of timidity, but one of self-control.' I thought about you and your addiction to television and the computer. You have a spirit of self-control...so use it."
Wow.
So, for the next week, I'll be watching no television, and using no computer. Kind of a cleansing.
See you in a week!

Doing good to enemies

The sermon went well yesterday. See the previous post for a link to the full text of what I said. One of the things that made it good was the discussion afterwards. It was quite a lively time of interaction, and not everyone was in full agreement with each other or with me, which is the whole point. In particular, I had said something about "turn the other cheek" not meaning that people should quietly submit to domestic violence. A woman pointed out that many of the Chrisitans in Eastern Europe during the cold war were willing to submit quietly to the tortures of the totalitarian governments, because they believed they were responding the way Jesus would want them to in light of this passage. I didn't disagree that it was right for them to respond that way, but I did say that just because it was good and right for them to do so, it doesn't mean that every person who encounters violence must quietly submit to it on an ongoing basis. Jesus' words are more in the "wisdom" genre than the "commandment" genre. That is, they are totally authoritative and binding, but that authority will demand different actions in different situations. Make sense? She didn't really agree with me, and I guess that's the point of a discussion. Also the point of this blog...so disagree away!

Rose quote

I've decided to continue providing short quotes from The Name of the Rose as they strike me along the way. I'm about half way through the book, and really loving it.
Adso the narrator writes:
"I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon, and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed. Further...I had become aware...that logic could be especially useful when you entered it but then left it."

Tomorrow's Sermon

Well, you (whoever you are) have kept me honest, and forced me to finish my sermon before the day I'm giving it. Sorry it's so late, but hopefully some of you will still have time to view and comment beforehand. Here it is, again, as a PDF that will download automatically. I welcome your thoughts, whether before or after the fact.

Eco Quotes

Two quotes from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.

"But as you see, heresy in many cases is wed to the revolt against overlords, and this is why the heretic begins by preaching Madonna Poverty and then falls prey to all the temptations of power, war, violence."

"...the order of things must not be transformed, even if we must fervently hope for its transformation."

two good warnings to us who are working for change in the church.

Shockingly Generous

So i'm preaching on Sunday. it's wednesday, and I decided it was probably time to look at the passage they want me to preach on. i open the bible to Luke 6:27-36, feeling very depressed because of another hard night at the Hub. and what does Jesus have to say? "love your enemies. do good to those who hate you...lend without expecting any return...God is generous to the stingy and the wicked, and you must be merciful, just as your heavenly Father is merciful."
I don't know what I'm gonna do...this thing's been bugging me all day. who cares what i'm supposed to say to the church, i feel like this is Jesus speaking right to me. when i read it, the first thought that came to mind was "i should take the guy who slapped me in the Hub out for a meal." i read the passage to Emma (co-worker at Bethel) - just because it was bugging me, and without any prompting from me, she said what I'd been thinking. I'm excited and freaked out at the same time. Tom Wright says this passage is all about which God you know: is it the God of astonishing, scandalous mercy or is it someone else?

The random order

Tonight I cut my wife's hair. I do it about once a month or so. I'm a terrible hair stylist. tonight i managed not to cut any fingers for the first time in four attempts. her hair comes out looking chunky and a bit like it's been hacked with a hedge cutter. it also looks very cool. she makes me do it because she's unwilling to pay money to have a professional do it. I can't stand the thought of paying money to have my hair cut either, so I just haven't had it cut since last year. tomorrow Somer will go buy a $4 cup of coffee at starbucks, then use $12 worth of hair coloring to turn parts of her head pink. i will put a bit of $15 gel in my hair, mostly to keep it from looking like a 'fro, but also because it smells good.
yesterday we went to an 800 year old church, and loved it. It was church of England, and between the Apostles' Creed, the Prayers of the People, and other items from the book of common prayer liturgy, we sang Matt Redman songs and watched a projection from the vicar's Mac.
Eclectic? A bid random? Exactly.

Unity in the church

At LCM's divisional day on Wednesday, John Nicholls spoke about unity in the church. He said when you look at the New Testament, there's very little instruction focused on the individual. Almost everything addresses the church as a community, giving instruction on life together. The splintering of the church in Western world is one of the great impediments to its having a significant impact on society.
John lamented the fact that every Sunday, there are many churches that meet withing blocks of each other (for example, in Ilford, a Baptist, a Catholic, and an Anglican church are all right next to each other on the main road). Other times, churches with only a handful of people continue to meet separately, meaning that several pastors are spending most of their time planning Sunday services, when all the people could easily fit into one Sunday service, freeing up the other pastors to pursue evangelism. He challenged us to think about ways we can be agents of unity - how we can begin to get churches to work together in our communities.
One of my initial thoughts is that maybe the problem of disunity runs even deeper than redundant Sunday services. Sitting together in a building and falling asleep together during a sermon doesn't make for much unity. Having a common vision, a common purpose in the community, and common passion for God and love for one another - these are the things that unite the church. I suggested it at New Life last year, and I'll say it again now: Maybe one of the healthiest things a church can do is call off its Sunday morning services for a month and provide other ways for people to stay connected to each other and pursue worship and evangelism together, so that people learn to focus their lives on worship of God and service to one another, rather than focussing on Sunday.

Lectio Divina # 2

So, I couldn't bring myself to write a monologue (i.e. a sermon) for the Wednesday afternoon meeting. Instead, we did Lectio Divina. If you don't know how it goes, see my previous post on the subject here. It was beautiful. Julian was skeptical of how it would go over with the group (everyone is over 60). But it was beautiful. God met us in a powerful, worship-inspiring, healing way.
We meditated on Psalm 46.

Thank You

I don't even know most of you, but you sent an entire suitcase of gifts with my parents last week. Three packs of Oreos (down to two packs plus four cookies at the time of this writing), five tubs of American peanut butter, several movies (we've already watched three of them), stuffed animals that the girls have named "Boris" in honor of Joe's rubber ducky from Blue's Clues, lots of crafts for the girls, sidewalk chalk (see picture) and so many other things that I can't type them all out. Jesus' love shines through you...Thank You!! May God return your generosity on you many times over.

I'm back...refreshed

We had a wonderful week with my family. The weather was great for the easter weekend, and we spent several days out in the city. Monday we went to Greenwich, as in - Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian. Here we are at the top of the observatory hill with Canary Warf business district behind us. After a little exhaustion from all the activity, we've had a couple days of minimal time at the centers to recover (Friday is usually finished after moms & tots, and yesterday there was nothing to do at Ley Street because kids are on easter holiday here). I've enjoyed the break from the internet...kind of a cleansing of sorts. But I'm back, with lots of thoughts brewing.