Wright's five act play...

Andrew Perriman discusses Tom Wright's 'five act play analogy for biblical authority' in a recent blog post, and, while he finds it has value, doesn't think it goes quite far enough.

He notes:

...it is a useful analogy. It gets away from the Bible-is-authoritative-because-it-says-so approach, and it brings into the foreground—stage front, if you like—the concrete, intentional, creative response of the biblical community. So far, so good.

My main disagreement with Wright here is that, in his view of things, history more or less grinds to a halt when we get to Paul.

To find out why he thinks so - and his thinking develops Wright rather than dismissing it - read it online here.

C S Lewis Bible

I'm not sure what part of our self-imposed 'mandate' this particular blog post comes under - maybe 'just plain interesting' - or in this case, 'just plain interesting??'

Harper Collins, who've had a firm publishing grip on the C S Lewis book titles for some time have produced....wait for it....the C S Lewis Bible. It's a combination of the NRSV translation and suitable commentaries extracted from Lewis' writings.

My initial reaction is that C S Lewis might be turning over in his grave, but that might be limiting my view of Lewis. He was surprisingly liberal-minded in some areas.

The first link I picked up on this had comments that claimed it was an April Fool's joke - it must have first been promoted around that date. Nope, it's listed on Amazon.co.uk. and also on Harper Collins own site. You can even see some sample pages.

Maybe it's what I want for Christmas after all....maybe not!

PS I should mention that one of my bete noires in my later days in OC Books was the increasing number of Bible ring-ins....Bibles for Promise Keepers, Bibles for Women Exercisers, Bibles for Teens who could barely read, Bibles for children with cartoon-like drawings that insulted the eye....and so on.

Immigration Paper

VisionNetwork publishes short papers on a regular basis, and has just produced by written by Dr Andrew Butcher & Dr George Wieland. Butcher is the Director of Policy and Research at the Asia New Zealand Foundation, and Wieland is a lecturer in New Testament at Carey College, NZ.

The Introduction states:

Immigration has played a significant role in the making of New Zealand. However, the growth in immigration from Asia since the mid-1980s onwards has significantly altered the ethnic composition of New Zealand society. This has, in turn, presented significant challenges for how New Zealanders respond to these changes, for how socially cohesive New Zealand is and could become, and for how churches in New Zealand respond to these changes as reflected in their congregations and parishes.

This paper seeks to identify and address some of these challenges as well as present implications and actions for the way forward. To begin, this paper provides a brief overview of immigrants and immigration policy in New Zealand. This is followed by a discussion of immigration and immigrants in the Bible. To conclude, we discuss the implications for Christian attitudes towards immigrants and immigration today.

The paper is available online here.

By way of advance notice...

I've just become aware of the following conference:
World Wide Scripture Engagement Consultation

Hearts Burning: Exploring Scripture Engagement for the 21st Century

Sunday 4 - Friday 9 October, 2009

Melaka, Malaysia

Sponsor: Forum of Bible Agencies International

Just some of the topics being looked at are:

• Unlocking the Bible in a non-book culture
• Contextualising Scripture in cultures condemned as irredeemable
• Building bridges between HIV and AIDS and the Bible
• Using poetic storytelling and music in helping people encounter Scripture
• Engaging visually with Scripture
• Creating safe and sacred spaces for young people
• Building interpersonal biblical conversations among lay people
• Helping pastors overcome the “Big Man” syndrome through participatory learning
• How NOT to impose prejudice and cultural assumptions on engagement
• “Open source” on-line engagement resources
• The challenge of Scripture Engagement among believers in secret

A good number of workshops are already in place, under the following four headings (click on any one of them for further information):

• Scripture Engagement in Churches
• Scripture Engagement among Marginalized Peoples
• Scripture Engagement among Children and Youth
• Scripture Engagement in Post-Christian Societies

In the last of those four, Mark Brown and Stephen Opie, from the NZ Bible Society, will both be involved.

For details about all other aspects of the conference, click here.

And it's no different here

Figures from a survey of 300 Canadian pastors came out in the February 2009 edition of Presbyterian Record, as a sidebar to an article entitled: Breaking the Silence - the mental health of our clergy. The issue of wellness, or the lack of it, amongst clergy has tended to be covered up for decades, because clergy are expected to be so 'holy,' 'capable,' 'fit and healthy' that they never need be sick or off-duty. The situation in New Zealand is little different. There are times when it seems as though ministers have little to do all day except write the weekly sermon and visit a few elderly ladies in the parish. But the truth of the matter is, of course, that most ministers are frantically busy, overloaded to such an extent that they don't have nearly enough time for their families, nearly enough time to relax, or virtually any time to just sit and listen to what the Lord is saying to them.
There are many reasons for this, including:
Ministers working a minimum of 50 hours a week, and often more than that;
Not having the days off to which they're entitled;
Feeling as though they have to be perfect when they're often under huge stress to perform;
Feeling empty, going through the motions, in terms of prayer, worship, Bible reading, spiritual life in general;
Lacking someone who can counsel or mentor or come alongside them;
Suffering depression or burn-out or panic attacks and having to live with it.

The Canadian situation only confirms what is known in New Zealand. This is what the National Mission Office has been working on for several years: finding ways to help ministers avoid breakdowns and depression.

The full report can be found at the Caring for Clergy site - click on Current Research and then on 'Clergy Well-Being - Seeking Wholeness with Integrity'.

Love those old people

Matt Chandler, who isn't an old person, led a church of 100 through substantial change - and now has a congregation numbering some 6000. There's a short interview with him here on the rev.org site. What I appreciated were these two paragraphs, though he has some other very good things to say too.

There were a lot of older people in the church, and here's what I did not do: I did not walk into that place and beat up old saints and demand that our way was our way and they could just deal with it. I'm mortified at how often it plays out that way. And I don't know what young guys think they're doing; I don't know how they think they're pleasing God by beating up people who have been nothing but faithful to Him.

So first I started taking all these old guys out—to coffee, lunch, and dinner—and the message I communicated over and over again was the same: We need you, we need you, we need you. I immediately started putting 20 year-olds together with older folks. "Hey, this guy can show you how to live life; he can teach you about the Bible, he will have you into his home…" There's a hunger among twenty-somethings for that type of mentorship. And at that point the old saints don't care about peripheral things any more. They're not arguing about music and style and whether I'm wearing jeans or not any more.

Skye Jethani's new book, The Divine Commodity, is now out and about (in the States, at least). There's a not-very-long review in a post on the signs of life blog, written by the blog owner, David Swanson.

He makes the following comment at one point, and quotes from the book:

It is the description of an alternative to consumer Christianity that is most commendable. In a chapter about the tendency to place institutions before relationships Skye writes,

What may be needed is a fundamental rethinking of the church within the minds of the members, cultivating the imagination to conceive of the church as a relational community rather than an institutional organization. Beginning on the smallest end of the scale, this means relearning the lost art of friendship.

Swanson notes elsewhere:

The Divine Commodity is organized into nine chapters, each which observe an aspect of consumerism that has infiltrated the church. Filled with stories, cultural artifacts, and Biblical reflection these observations are easily connected to the reader’s own context.

BIBLE SOCIETY SURVEY MARCH 2008

A survey done by the Bible Society of New Zealand in March (results published around June this year) has only just come to my attention. The survey was aimed at research attitudes and behaviour regarding the Bible in New Zealand. The following is a list of some of the major stats from the survey.

Note that some stats apply to New Zealanders as a whole, and some to Christians as a sub-group.

Just under 3,400 people responded.

46% described themselves as Christian. (NZ Stats reports just under half of population describe themselves as Christian, that is, just under 2 million)

74% of people 65 and over described themselves as Christian.

68.4% of Pacific Islanders. (Europeans: 40.6%)

15% of New Zealanders attend church at least once a week.

20% say they go at least once a month.

80% of the population has attended a church service at some time. This includes weddings and funerals.

30% of Christians attend church at least weekly.

56% of Christians say they attend church less than five times a year, or only on special occasions.

Estimated monthly attendance: 760,000 (around 17%)

68% of all New Zealanders own a Bible.

86% of people over 65 own one.

59% of 15-24-year-olds own one.

5% of New Zealanders read the Bible daily.

23% read it at least monthly.

11% of Christians read it daily.

24% read it at least once a week.

25% of respondents say the Bible influences their lives.

18% of 15-24-year olds agree.

41% of 65 and over agree.

47% of Christians say the Bible influences their lives.

39% of Christians say it sometimes influences their lives.

Of those who read it daily, 94.6% said it influenced their lives.

77% of New Zealanders never or rarely discuss the Bible with others.

Only 14% discuss the Bible’s teachings weekly or more frequently.

26% of Christians regularly discuss the teachings of the Bible (at least weekly).

60% of Christians rarely or never discuss the teachings of the Bible with others.

Everyone is Called to Serve

While the church today (and the world as a whole) seems preoccupied with leadership and the achievements of leaders (with endless books and seminars on how to become a better leader), it leaves me wondering whether anyone might purchase a book or attend a conference on “Becoming a Servant.” Yet, when we consider the work of the early church, leadership and sacrificial service were inseparable.

While our world seems eager to grasp positions of authority and leadership, scripture makes it clear that hard work, sacrifice, and service are integral to one’s calling as a leader, guide, shepherd, overseer, deacon, and elder. Biblically, a case can be made that one’s reach as a leader stretches only as far as one’s willingness to stoop and serve others.

Two paragraphs from a short blog post by Mimi Haddad on Jim Wallis' God's Politics' blog. Do we spend far more time looking at leaders and leadership than at the much larger group of people who quietly get on and do the basic work?

How do YOU read the Bible?

In a talk at this year's 'Catalyst' Scot McKnight outlined five flawed ways many people read the Bible. I'll only include the headings and a brief note; the fuller version can be read here.

The Morsels of Law Approach: searching the Bible for all the commandments, and then only obeying those that suit.
The Morsels of Blessings Approach: doing the same thing with the blessings - although probably tending to believe more of the blessings than the commandments.
The Rorschach Approach: reading the book from your own political/psychological/whatever perspective.
The Systematic Theology Approach: pulling all the relevant bits together into an organised whole, but leaving out all the 'other' bits.
The Maestro Approach: in which one 'master' book of the Bible is taken as the focus for all other books.

McKnight's says: These five approaches are all very common, and all very flawed. We must read the Bible as a story. But it’s not just a story that we read, it is a story that we live. “We must let the Bible’s story become our story,” he said, “so that it becomes us, and we become it.”

Afraid of the Holy Spirit?

Mark Driscoll (looking slightly worn out in the photo) spoke to a bunch of Anglicans in Australia recently. He listed 18 obstacles to evangelism in Australia - as he saw it. One of them stood out to me:

8. Many of you are afraid of the Holy Spirit. You don't know what to do with Him, so the trinity is Father, Son and Holy Bible. You are so reactionary to pentecostalism that you do not have a robust theology of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit calls people into ministry. He also empowers people for ministry. You don't have to be charismatic but you should be a little charismatic, enough at least to worship God with more than just all of your mind. The word charismatic here means prosperity, excessive, bizarre. In London, it means you're not a liberal. Don't get hung up on all the terminology. Do you love the Holy Spirit? Jesus says the Holy Spirit is a ‘He' and not an ‘it'." Ministry cannot be done apart from the Holy Spirit - I think that is in part leading to the lack of entrepreneurialism and innovation, because if it's not already done and written down, you're suspicious of it.

I don't think the Aussie Anglicans are alone in being afraid of the Spirit. Even Pentecostal churches in NZ don't seem to have quite the life they had back in the 70s and 80s, when there seemed to be a real Holy Spirit move.

Being innovative

One of the biggest difficulties we face as Western churches is our seeming inability to reach out to the world around us. Calvary Bible Church in Colorado has used five (mostly) innovative ways to reach out over the last few years. These are the first two. You can find the others here.

They gave $100 to 100 people and directed them to use the money to raise more money. This idea was, of course, based on the parable of the talents. Their $10,000 was multiplied into $50,000, which they donated to local charities - it wasn't used to prop up the church.

Using the verse from Luke 12 that a man's life doesn't consist in an abundance of possessions, they challenged people to live radically, stop accumulating possessions, and give to the poor. The project was for 200 people to sell $200 worth of their possessions and give the money to the poor. $84,000 of possessions sold went to local community organizations. The congregation, meanwhile, was encouraged to live with less and be more kingdom minded.

N T Wright

This is the point where a genuine biblical theology can come out of the forest and startle both those who thought that the Bible was irrelevant or dangerous for political ethics and those who thought taking the Bible seriously meant being conservative politically as well as theologically. The truth is very different--as we should have guessed from Jesus' own preaching of the kingdom, not to mention his death as a would-be rebel king. His resurrection, and the promise of God's new world that comes with it, creates a program for change and offers to empower it. Those who believe in the gospel have no choice but to follow.

N.T. Wright
Surprised by Hope

Memorizing Scripture

Years ago I became convinced that learning portions of the Bible was a good thing to do. I can't even remember how this came about now. However, it's stood me in good stead over the years, particularly in those dark times in the night that most of us experience at some point, when it's too cold to get out of bed, but your brain is fizzing...!

Keith Mannes writes on this topic in the Leadership Journal, and confirms my feelings about the value of memorizing scripture. And for him as a pastor, it has the additional value of giving him confidence with his parishioners in being able to quote Scripture without having to look it up.

Click here to read the article, My 3.5 Salvation.

The Word Became Fresh: How to Preach from Old Testament Narrative Texts

About a decade ago one of my former customers encouraged me to read the first of Dale Ralph Davis’ Old Testament commentaries. It was on the Book of Judges, and subsequently, Davis produced commentaries on Joshua, 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings, all of which I acquired and read – usually more than once.

If six commentaries strike you as too much to get going on, then the solution is to check out the book Davis produced in 2006 called The Word Became Fresh: How to Preach from Old Testament Narrative Texts. While this book does focus on preaching the OT, it also gives a clear outline of Davis’ approach to studying the OT, and I believe you’d be hard pressed to find a better overview of OT Bible study anywhere.

This book, like Davis’ commentaries, is very readable and not at all heavy-going. Nor, on the other hand, is it lightweight; while Davis doesn’t have the room here to work in detail, as he does in the commentaries, he still discusses background and structure.

Davis is no slouch: he not only preaches what he writes, but he’s also a full-blown Bible scholar. His footnotes often contain the views of other commentators he disagrees with. While he’s never unpleasant towards these other writers, it’s plain he’s done his homework, and his reasons for saying what he does are valid.

He’s also a great storyteller. Both in this book and in his commentaries he backs up his arguments with stories from the American Civil War, or the Second World War (remember there are a lot of battles in the narratives!), or from his own experience. His own stories, like the rest of his writing, are full of wit and good humour.

He treats the text with great respect. If something is there, he sees it as being there for a good reason. If it’s obscure he’ll do his best to elucidate it, but he won’t speculate just so he can give an answer. Sometimes he admits that the answers aren’t easy for modern readers.

Perhaps his greatest gift is to remember that the Bible is literature. Time and again he clarifies the layout of a section or chapter by looking to see how the writer has planned the story. This is one of Davis’ great skills: to be able to see the structure in the midst of what might appear to be randomness.

A book for preachers, teachers and lay people.

Published by Mentor, a subsidiary of Christian Focus Publishing, UK. £7.99

Steve Graham at Mosgiel

The South Island Pastors' Conference took place last week in Mosgiel, at the East Taieri Presbyterian Church. The main speaker was Steve Graham, the Dean of the Bible College in Christchurch.
I'll be mentioning other books and articles Steve spoke about, but let's start with one that's available on the Net. It's called Teaching a Calvinist to Dance. A couple of quotes:
It can be a little intimidating in a Reformed context to admit that one is Pentecostal. It's a bit like being at the ballet and letting it slip that you're partial to NASCAR and country music. Both claims tend to clear a room. And yet I happily define myself as a Reformed charismatic, a Pentecostal Calvinist.
I started a master's degree in philosophical theology at the Institute for Christian Studies, a graduate school in the Dutch Reformed tradition at the University of Toronto. So my week looked a bit odd: Monday to Friday I was immersed in the intellectual resources of the Reformed tradition, diving into the works of Calvin, Kuyper, and Dooyeweerd.

Steve talked about brokenness in leadership too, but perhaps more of his focus was on the need for Presbyterians to work more in the middle area of the supernatural-this-worldly, in other words, not being content to live just in the natural, with the supernatural as something for the future next world, but to live with a sense of the supernatural in our everyday lives. (This is sometimes called the Flaw of the Excluded Middle.)

We'll look at these other areas further in other posts.

A bunch of various quotes

Sometimes the quotes come thick and fast. Here are two that arrived in my email box this morning, and another that's a quote from an essay I mentioned a day or so ago.

Nothing is so important as human life, as the human person. Above all, the person of the poor and the oppressed... Jesus says that whatever is done to them he takes as done to him. That bloodshed, those deaths are beyond all politics: They touch the very heart of God.

- Oscar Romero
March 16, 1980

Humans possess an innate affinity for narrative. Narrative surrounds us, and something about narrative movement captivates the hearts of human beings. Why is this? Christians can look to scripture to uncover a reason for this affinity: storytelling resides in the heart of God. Genesis 1:26 says that man is created in the image of God, and God has an affinity for storytelling. How are we certain of this? Jesus Christ, God incarnate, presented truth after truth during his earthly ministry in story form. At several points, Jesus’ disciples question this practice. Matthew 13:13 relays Jesus’ answer: “This is why I speak in parables: ‘Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing they do not hear or understand.…’” Jesus answers their question with an invitation. He invites the disciples to explore his stories, to question them, to examine them, to break through their blindness and discover the truth.

Bill Boerman-Cornell and Annette Witte
"Neither Minnie Mouse nor Wonder Woman" in catapult magazine

The Bible is not actually older than church tradition. The writings of the first fathers precede the uniting of the biblical books in one volume as we have it today (the first list of the books of the Old and New Testaments that matches our own Bibles comes from St. Athanasius in 367, though the key books were in place long before). St. Clement of Alexandria speaks of "Scripture" simply as what we think of as the Old Testament, which for him demonstrably sets forth Christ without ambiguity! Even after the formation of the biblical canon, tradition still functioned as a hermeneutical rule: "an approach for interpreting the Bible by investigating and following the ancient consensus of the fathers."

Not that that consensus is always clear. In fact, learning to read like the fathers should make our reading of the Bible a good deal more difficult. The fathers often affirm an "infallible Bible," music to the ears of today's evangelicals. But they also celebrated "points of obscurity or even contradiction" in the Bible—the very things many superficial readers today would prefer to ignore or iron out. The letter of Scripture is plain enough for all readers. But God has intentionally placed obscurities in the Bible as opportunities for spiritual growth for its readers: "because he only wants to open [the Scriptures] up to those who are prepared to look" for God's mysteries, as D H Williams quotes St. Augustine.

From Reading with the Saints, The art of biblical interpretation.by Jason Byassee

Reading the Bible

Because [the Bible is] a story, the Spirit who is its presiding author and editor is free to use all the devices available to any storyteller.... The deepest difficulty with literalism is that it fails to see the principal device the Spirit uses to weave all those elements into a single story. All that wildly various wet-wash is hung on a paradoxical clothesline of imagery, not on a string of uniform propositional truths. The Bible is held together by icons, by word-pictures like Light, Word, Water, Marriage, the Garden, the Tree, the Blood of Abel, the Paschal Lamb, the Blood on the Doorposts, the Rock in the Wilderness, the Bread from Heaven, and finally the City, both as the historical Jerusalem in the Old Testament and as the destiny of the world in the book of Revelation. It's these icons, these sacraments of the real presence of the Word himself, that make it a whole.

Robert Farrar Capon
The Fingerprints of God

Plus, for a (reasonably) lengthy essay on the way the early Fathers and later theologians looked at reading the Bible, check out Jason Byassee's essay-review "Reading with the Saints," on the art of biblical interpretation. He not only discusses the issues, but looks at several worthwhile books on the subject.