Fascinating stuff in the latest theologynetwork Table Talk where Mike Reeves talks with Ellis Potter, a former Zen Buddhist monk, about Zen, monism, trinity and lots more.

I think this is great stuff (from here, via Tim Chester):

Every person and culture has a storyline that includes…Creation, Fall Redemption and Restoration. They don’t all have the same stories within these movements, but they all have these movements in some form:

CREATION: Everyone has a fundamental belief about their Origin – who or what gave them their existence, made them who they are. For some this is another being, god, process, etc… for others, they believe each person is really a self-made person.

• The Key Question here is: Who or What do you credit for who you are?
  We believe God is our Creator and we are made in His Image.

FALL: There is a reason for why people, community and the world is broken. Each person has a fundamental belief about the cause of brokenness. Some blame their parents, family, friends, boss, government etc… Others blame evil forces, demons, etc…

• The Key Question here is: Why are things and people not the way they are supposed to be?
  We believe it is because of our sinful rebellion against the Creator God

REDEMPTION: Everyone has a solution they believe in, a remedy they look to or savior they believe in to redeem the brokenness in their life and world. Many are looking to a philosophy. Others look to a plan for self-improvement. Many believe some kind of reform in education or politics will change things. Everyone believes in a Redeemer.

• The Key Question is: Who or what will rescue me and redeem what is broken?
  We believe only God can rescue us from our sin and redeem our lives from brokenness. We believe Jesus is THE REDEEMER who came to save us through his life, death, resurrection and ascension.

RESTORATION: Every person has a picture of the future when everything is as it should be. Some see a utopia with humans all living at peace with one another. Others believe Mother Earth and humanity will be one. Still others see another world they will go to where they will be at the center. Some people’s future hope is to be married…have children…get a job…be rich…etc…

• The Key Question here is: What will the world or your world look like when all is as it should be AND Who or what will be the focus of this world?
  We believe Jesus will return and make all things new – a New Heaven and a New Earth – and He will be at the center of everything with us worshiping Him.

It was recently Reformation Day. Although I’m running a little late on that it’s never too late to consider and enjoy such things (indeed God forbid that it be reserved to conversation on only one day in the year!).

“Faith therefore must be purely taught: namely, that thou art so entirely joined unto Christ, that He and thou art made as it were one person: so that thou mayest boldly say, I am now one with Christ, that is to say, Christ’s righteousness, victory, and life are mine. And again, Christ may say, I am that sinner, that is, his sins and his death are Mine, because he is united and joined unto Me, and I unto him.”

- Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians (H/T: Jared)

If you haven’t already do check out Mike Reeve’s talks from the theology network website. Definitely worth putting on the ipod and giving four hours to listen to:

Justification 1: Removing the Shackles
In the first of four parts, Mike Reeves explains this great and beautiful truth.

Justification 2: Union with Christ
Part two in Mike Reeves’ exploration of this great and beautiful truth.

Justification 3: Challenges Today
Mike Reeves looks at the doctrine of justification in the context of the Reformation and the modern developments of the Catholic-Lutheran ‘Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification’ and the New Perspective on Paul.

Justification 4: Beauty for the Bruised
The final instalment. Mike Reeves looks at how the doctrine of justification by faith alone works out practically in our lives through the lenses of Richard Sibbes, John Bunyan and Martin Luther.

I don’t think I’ve ever written about this on the blog but given that this blog is supposed to be “thinking out loud about God, the Good News about Jesus and Geography (and things that don’t begin with G)” it seems high time to write about it.

Acts 17:24-27

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

Geographically (and historically and anthropologically) the implications of this are stunning. That people are where they are and when they are, is not purposeless happenstance but determined by God. We are told the reason for this determination: God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him. The rise and fall of empires, the movement of peoples and their settlement, all this that God might be known. No one may blame the time and place of their birth or the situations of their life as being distant from God. You are where you are that you might know Him – it is no accident.

For the Christian, who in their going are to make disciples (Matthew 28:19) may be bold in their witness. One’s neighbour or coursemate, work colleague or fellow-mum-at-the-schoolgate are where they are, when they are, that they might know the God who is near and made Himself known in Christ. From our perspective salvation is not certain (‘perhaps reach out for and find him’) but God’s providence and wisdom is clear.

God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”"

Below is a talk/commentary I wrote to follow the watching of an episode of House and to spark discussion. Sadly, I never had the opportunity to give it but this post reminded me of its theme of sin as sickness and Christ as the Great Physician.

The episode that forms the jumping off point is called One Day, One Room in which “House is forced into full-time clinic duty when a rape victim, who is physically healthy and should be seeing a psychiatrist, demands to talk to House instead. Meanwhile, a homeless man with terminal lung cancer refuses palliative treatment and begins playing mind games with (Dr.) Cameron”. It is a complex episode, with a significant level of depth, pathos and sparring of worldviews for which House is famous.

—

Do you know what it’s like when you have questions but no answers? Why is this happening? What’s going on? Moments when your world seems to be falling apart? Maybe you’ve not experienced moments like this or maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about and yet we instinctively know, we believe the world of House isn’t a fantasy world but terribly real.

It’s in these moments that everything gets stripped away until we see what we really believe: “everything is rational”, “nothing is rational” and so we see what we’re really trusting. You see there are many things we believe that we can’t prove. The belief that everything is rational? Could House prove it, in a test tube, by logical deduction without assuming the rationality he’s trying to prove? No the kind of claim he’s is making is one of these worldview assumptions; the basic frame for the interpretive glasses through which we see the world, that help us to try and make sense of the world we live in. Are you aware of yours?

In 2005 the “Edge Annual Question” asked 120 leading scientists and other thinkers the question, “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” There were answers about consciousness, origins, knowledge. Certainly many had reasons for their beliefs and yet they are not provable.

This was Ian McEwan, the author’s response:

“What I believe but cannot prove is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death. I exclude the fact that I will linger, fadingly, in the thoughts of others, or that aspects of my consciousness will survive in writing, or in the positioning of a planted tree or a dent in my old car. I suspect that many contributors to Edge will take this premise as a given—true but not significant. However, it divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons, by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere. That this span is brief, that consciousness is an accidental gift of blind processes, makes our existence all the more precious and our responsibilities for it all the more profound.”

Yet, when Ian McEwan and the patient Cameron was with have died and memory of them has faded, when the universe draws to a sleepy or explosive close what was really the difference between any of their actions? What does separates the precious from the mundane, the noble from the detestable when the telescope of history is collapsed. What separates being remembered in the brief span of our existence from not being remembered at all? In the final analysis of this worldview action and inaction, killing or sparing, abuse or care are no different, they are all just the rearranging of deck-chairs on a Titanic of a life, of a world that is going down.

Why do I raise these questions? Why does House? Is House right that, “If you believe in eternity, then life is irrelevant, the same way a bug is irrelevant in comparison to the universe”. Are we freaks in this universe desperately trying to make sense of a senseless world? Or, do we go with the Gladiator himself, Russell Crowe and say that, “What we do in life echoes in eternity”. How would we go about examining these things?

House with Eve

Perhaps you go with Eve who tries to decide was is, by what she feels she needs:  “Then nothing matters if there’s no ultimate consequences. I can’t live like that,” Eve says. “I need to know that it all means something. I need that comfort.” Is this meaning simply the emperor’s new clothes? Is she dressing up reality with a delusion to make it feel more comfortable? Is ignorance bliss, even if the comfort is a hollow evasion of reality?

Do we try and diagnose God, life and the world like House? He’s set up as the diagnostician par excellence, the one who’s way of thinking about the world, “everybody lies” is what makes him good at what he does; it’s what makes him useful. He always has an answer, a quip and yet even House, has to say, “because I don’t know”. Why did Eve choose House? It’s because he’s hurt too. The doctor needs healing as much as anyone else and House leg acts a metaphor for the internal pain and crippling he experiences. He’s sick too.

Is there a doctor in the House?

What if the one who has seen the end from the beginning, the only One who knows perfect health, what if he stepped into space-time? Would he be worth listening to? Do you think he would demand our attention? Do you think he would tell us the truth? Do you think we would like him for it? Many people hate House and yet have this respect for him because he tells them the truth. Oddly enough when you consider most of the judges in reality TV shows, like Simon Cowell, it’s the one who is willing to tell the truth straight that people want to please. When you get a good comment from Simon you feel like it really means something. Truthful judgement makes things meaningful. If the one who is truth in his very being, the one who will be Judge of all stepped into the room, would we want to listen?

In one of the biographies of Jesus’ life recorded by Mark, Jesus is portrayed, amongst other things as the Master Diagnostician, the Great Physician. He said this, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” The diagnosis is that there are sick people and they are the one’s that the Son of God has come for. What is this sickness, this sin?

Tim Keller draws it out in this way:

Sin and evil are self-centredness and pride that lead to oppression against others, but there are two forms of this. One form is being very bad and breaking all the rules, and the other form is being very good and keeping all the rules and becoming self-righteous. There are two ways to be your own Saviour and Lord. The first is by saying, “I am going to live my life the way I want.” The second is described by Flannery O’Connor, who wrote about one of her characters, Hazel Motes, that “he knew that the best way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.” … It is possible to avoid Jesus as Saviour as much by keeping all the Biblical rules as by breaking them… It is a Christianized form of religion.

You see, people’s self-diagnosis as righteous, as sorted, as basically good is shaken to the core by the only righteous one, the Doctor who says we’re all infected with this sickness of sin, this terminal condition of our own making.

Some respond, that’s a bit strong isn’t it? It’s not as bad as all that surely, people are basically okay aren’t they? Yet, they are like the knight in Monty Pythons’ Holy Grail who having had various body parts hacked off insists, ‘It’s only a flesh-wound’. What they fail to perceive…, what they fail to perceive will kill them. You see, no self-help techniques are going to work here, the thalidomide of good deeds or moral behaviour is wholly ineffective in dealing with this advanced cancer. Yet we see later in Mark’s biography that Jesus on the cross takes that terminal sickness into himself, strung up there symptom laid on symptom we see there the terrible ugliness of our condition and incredibly we find He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds we are healed. So much could be, should be said here. Jesus is the Judge who was judged, taking the judgement concerning us on himself. The only One who knows what true health is – the only well and whole One, took our sickness that we might be well. He is himself the medicine we need.

House asked, “You gonna base your whole life on who you got stuck in a room with?” and Eve responded, “I’m gonna base this moment on who I’m stuck in a room with. That’s what life is. It’s a series of rooms. And who we get stuck in those rooms with adds up to what our lives are.”

Whether you agree or not with Eve at this moment you’re stuck in a room with me. I’m pointing you to one who was outside the room and came in and finding me sick is making me well, now and on into an eternity with Him. He’s the doctor who has experienced the utter depths of our sickness and uniquely what it means to be truly well. Wherever you are at today, whatever you’re dealing with, whatever answers we lack and may never find, Jesus says to you: the doctor is in the house. Will you let me make you well?

Whilst some find it fun to bash Simon Cowell and the whole X-factor thing and there is some interesting stuff here about the whole spectacle, I was wondering about how much tax Simon Cowell pays. It’s been an exciting morning already, you can tell, right?

Taking figures from government websites about funding percentages in 2007/2008 and taking Cowell’s tax bill as £27.1 million in 2006 (just think what it would be now!) we can see that per week Simon contributes:

£93,808 to the NHS
£53,679 for schools
£121,429 for the OAP’s
£111,006 for those on benefits
£26,058 on the public debt interest
£31,269 for the Army, Navy and Airforce
£15,635 for the roads and rail
£26,058 for Scotland
£13,029 for Wales
£5,212 for Northern Ireland
£18,762 for Universities
£15,635 for tax credits
£5,212 storing nuclear waste
£2,606 the Iraq/Afghanistan wars
£5,212 for the police

I know he does this because he has to (though he could move his country of residence and pay his tax elsewhere) and I know that there’s a lot to gripe about (the vacuity of the celebrity culture he is helping to fuel, blah, blah, blah) but today the university that I go to is being funded by some of his money.

So I want to pause from the moaning and very legitimate issues about how he has made his money and the kind of world he is involved in making and say, “thank you, Simon Cowell and other super rich people out there for paying tax”.

At a prayer meeting this week I found it odd that we sat to pray. To me sitting feels like quite a passive posture and doesn’t help me to pray with the kind of boldness that is available to us. Also, it is difficult to pray with lifted hands whilst sitting!

In terms of worship the Bible is full of exhortation to use our bodies. Bob Kauflin writes:

In addition, physical expression is both commanded and spontaneously modeled in Scripture as a way of giving God glory. (Ex. 12:27; Job 1:20; Ps. 47:1; Ps. 95:6). Those expressions include clapping, singing, bowing, kneeling, lifting hands, shouting, playing instruments, dancing, and standing in awe (Ps. 47:1; Eph. 5:19; Ps. 95:6; Ps. 134:2; Ps. 33:1; Rev. 15:2; Ps. 149:3; Ps. 22:23).

Some have pointed out that the New Testament contains few references to physical expression other than kneeling, singing, and lifting hands (although this last one isn’t emphasized too often). However, it’s not readily apparent that the bodily responses commanded in the Old Testament have been superseded or fulfilled in Christ’s high priestly work, or that we now obey them only in a “spiritualized” manner. (“I’m shouting in my heart.”) Rather, we need to seek to apply these Scriptures in a way that truly honors God and edifies the church.

For more on this check out his essay on Bodily Expression and the Worship of God.

One thing I notice that the people of God never do is to sit. Indeed, Deuteronomy 17 is quite explicit that priests stand and since all believers are now priests I suspect one could apply that the whole people of God too.

What about prayer though? Am I really suggesting we shouldn’t sit to pray? In one sense no, for we have the glorious privilege to be seated with the God who sits in sovereign power and kingly authority alongside Christ who sat down, job done.

However, I do want to suggest that though that may be our position our normal posture should be something else. While God sits, the elders around the throne seated on their thrones fall down in worship before Him.

The Bible makes a really big deal of God sitting (2 Samuel 6:2, 1 Chronicles 13:6, Psalm 2:4, Psalm 9:7, Psalm 9:11, 29:10, 33:14, 47:8, 99:1, 113:5, 40:22, Ezekiel 1:26, Matthew 26:64, Mark 14:62, Luke 22:69, Ephesians 1:20, Colossians 3:1, Hebrews 8:1, 12:2, Revelation 4:2, 4:9, 5:1, 5:7, 5:13, 6:16, 7:10, 7:15, 19:4, 20:11,21:5), which is to be a great encouragement to us about the kind of God that He is but also points to how we ought to relate to the one who will one day stand: The Lord has taken his place to contend; he stands to judge peoples. (Isaiah 3)

I think we should think very carefully about what we’re doing with our bodies when we worship and pray. For example, what would it communicate about the kind of God we were worshipping if we had our hands in our pockets?

So, I reckon we should think about if our sitting (if we do)  is an expression of trust in God’s finished work or a troublesome lethargy or passivity on our part? Even if we don’t consciously think of either of these things – that it is just our common practices, our ‘culture’ or tradition – what might we understand differently about the nature of prayer if we did things differently?

Not quite sure what to make of this…

I was struck today by someone praying that a speaker for a CU event would speak ‘clearly’. I realised that first I wasn’t quite sure what that meant and secondly I wasn’t sure that I’d ever seen the phrase in the Bible. In fact I thought it wasn’t there.

Turns out I was wrong: Paul does asks the Colossian believers to prayer that he would proclaim the message clearly.

Still this language is uncommon. You also have:

Speaking the word with boldness (Acts 4:29, 4:3, 14:3 26:26, 28:31,  Ephesians 6:19, 6:20, Philippians 1:14, 1 Thessalonians 2:2)

Speaking the word in power and the in the Holy Spirit (Acts 14:3, Romans 15:18-19, 1 Corinthians 2:4, 1 Thessalonians 1:5) (i.e. with signs and wonders)

Speaking that reasons and persuades (Acts 17:2, 17:4 17:17, 18:4, 18:19, 19:8-9, 19:26, 24:25, 2 Corinthians 5:11)

Speaking the word with all wisdom (Colossians 1:28, 3:16)

Speaking with integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned (Titus 2:7)

Speaking, not to please men, but to please God (1 Thessalonians 2:4)

Speaking sound words (1 Timothy 1:10, 6:3, 2 Timothy 1:13, 4:3)

So whilst clarity is important let’s be praying for the other things too!

My friend Chris is a repository of the quirky and a magpie for the interesting and unusual. The latest link he sent me is no different. Have a listen to the recordings and the video…

While you’re surfing away you may also enjoy his 365 project in which he’s uploading one photograph he’s taken that day giving you a year in his life in snapshot form. You can follow the RSS feed to see how it develops.

Enjoy!