Bibles for Profit

Back in November over carne asada, Ronster the Monster and I had a good discussion about the wanton publishing habits of Christian bookhouses. Do we need yet another Introduction to the Gospels? Is a New-er, Re-Revised, Corrected Version of the Bible (2^nd ed.) really going to make much of a difference? How many Da Vinci Code rebuttals does the church require (if any)?

Perhaps it’s all about el dinero, the cash. That’s what I said last April.

Jason at Gower Street offers a similar commentary. oHoHe wonders why Bibles are sold for profit, and where to send the Holy Spirit’s royalties.

I [don’t] have access to the accounting books of Christian publishers. Perhaps they are single-handedly bankrolling the Sisters of Charity, although I'm not optimistic. … I do not know what the profits are like on Bible sales and licensing, but I suspect they are good. The Bible is consistently the largest selling book in the West. And I doubt that so many different versions -- CET, NLB, NIV, NRSV, NKJV, et al. -- and so many different versions of versions -- the Precious Moments Bible, the Men's Study Bible, the Ryrie Study Bible, et al. -- would proliferate if there were not some profit in them. And what public good arises because of these sales?

Holy Christmas

Dear Friends,
I am hoping for a holy Christmas and a peaceful 2007.
Blessings, Aaron

The Blasphemy Challenge (3): Schleiermacher responds

The so-called Rational Response Squad is anything but rational in their narrow depiction and nippy dismissal of Christian religion. Perhaps what is needed is a fresh re-reading of Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers.

Here are two passages especially appropriate to the new cultured despisers:

"If you have only given attention to these dogmas and opinions, therefore, you do not yet know religion itself, and what you despise is not it. Why have you not penetrated deeper to find the kernel of this shell? I am astonished at your voluntary ignorance, ye easy-going inquirers, and at the all too quiet satisfaction with which you linger by the first thing presented to you. Why do you not regard the religious life itself…?"

“How unjustly, therefore, do you reproach religion with loving persecution, with being malignant, with overturning society, and making blood flow like water. Blame those who corrupt religion, who flood it with an army of formulas and definitions, and seek to cast it into the fetters of a so-called system.”

The Blasphemy Challenge (1)

The Blasphemy Challenge (2)

Draw Like Jackson Pollock

Let your inner expressionist out here (be sure to click your mouse). HT 99

The Blasphemy Challenge (2)

“Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.”

What should we make of Mark 3.29? This is as much a pastoral question as it is a theological one (not that the two can be cleanly separated). Troubled souls want to know, how a forgiving God can refuse forgiveness?

Recently, a high-school student asked me about this verse. Here is my response:

Dear Suzy Q,

Thank you for your excellent question about the so-called “unforgivable sin.” As you may know, this is a really popular topic right now as lots of people are taking “The Blasphemy Challenge” on the internet.

Your question is one that has bothered lots of people, but if we keep a few things in mind, it isn’t so troublesome:

First, in Mark 3.28 (just before this verse) Jesus shows how wide God’s love is. “People will be forgiven their sins and whatever…” What a great promise – mercy is available to all kinds of people who have done all kinds of really bad things! It is important to keep the “good bits” in mind when wrestling with the “bad bits.”

Second, Jesus often exaggerated. He used larger-than-life language to make a point; in literature this is called “hyperbole.” (See Luke 14.26 and Matthew 23:24). In the scripture about the unforgivable sin, he could be exaggerating to make a point. Perhaps the point is this: “God forgives all sins. The only sin that won’t be forgiven is the extreme sin of refusing to be forgiven.”

Third, what does it mean to “blaspheme”? Even if a person says the words, “I blaspheme the Holy Spirit,” have they actually committed the unforgivable sin? I’m not sure they have. First of all, blasphemy is more a way of life than a specific swear word like “Oh, my God.” (More about this later.) Secondly, they'd have to know what the Holy Spirit is. How can you reject what you do not understand? How can you deny what you haven’t experienced?

In my experience, and from seeing what is happening in the internet’s “Blasphemy Challenge,” most people making the bold claim that they deny Jesus and the Holy Spirit don’t actually know much about the Bible. Perhaps some of them have been hurt or turned-off by an ugly form of Christianity and that is what they are actually denying – not the Holy Spirit itself.

Fourth, we often think of sins as specific acts (taking a DVD without paying) specific feelings (bad thoughts), or specific language (swear words) but sin should be thought of as a life-style. To “sin” is to practice a way of life that is repeatedly, routinely distant from God.

Finally, what did Jesus actually mean in Mark 3.29? I think he is saying those who purposely, deliberately, and intentionally live away from God will never experience forgiveness; at least not until they stop deliberately attempting to escape God. When we say, “My heart beats for evil; no-God is my life plan” than we are incapable of receiving forgiveness.

Notice the emphasis on receiving. God forever extends the offer of forgiveness, but if our hands are shut into tight fists, we will have a difficult time accepting it. It is like trying to swim through concrete. When we open our hands, forgiveness is immediately available to us.

Hope this helps.

Your friend, Aaron

The Blasphemy Challenge (1)

YouTube is rife with blasphemy.

Richard Dawkins wannabes are taking “The Blasphemy Challenge” in hopes of winning a free DVD. The catch? You must first damn yourself to eternal hellfire by saying the words, "I deny the Holy Spirit."

Some of the homemade videos are quite funny, but mostly they are sad. Sad, not so much because their makers aren’t Christians, but because of the Christianity they want to denounce. Their mostly-angry productions sketch an ugly, suppressed Christianity that Paul Tillich would have called an “emaciated, intentionally childish, unexciting, unecstatic thing, without color and danger, without heights and depths.”*

These livid productions are not denials of the living drama of God-with-us; rather they are a refusal to watch "deadly theater" – the great Story drained of Spectacle. It's rejection of shallow propositionalism masquerading in Truth’s mask. Indeed, “modernist atheism itself is the spawn of biblical literalism.”

If George Lindbeck is right that, “One must learn the language of faith before one can know enough about its message knowingly to reject it and thus be lost,” than the DVDs should all be returned. They impotently reject what they do not know. A life-denying, planet-destroying, wife-beating, science-ignoring Christianity is not the real Christianity.

I deny that Christianity too.

Paul Tillich, The New Being (1955), chapter 19.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama Of Doctrine (2005), 403-407.

Why Advent?

Why did God come to us? The answer isn't what you (evangelicals) think.

At Advent we Wait.

At Advent we wait.

Anthropologists talk about “liminality” – a moment of transition where the meaning of one’s life is ambiguous, uncertain. This is what happens at Advent, we are in a liminal state. We stand on a threshold – neither outside nor inside, only in-between.

We wait. We’ve left the runway, but haven’t landed. We’ve finished the exams, but haven’t graduated. We’re engaged, but not yet wed. Already, but not quite yet.

Theologians call this waiting “prolepsis” It is living a live of anticipation for what is coming, but hasn’t yet fully arrived.

“Although waiting is not having, it is also having. The fact that we wait for something shows that in some way we already possess it. Waiting anticipates that which is not yet real. If we wait in hope and patience, the power of that for which we wait is already effective within us. He who waits in an ultimate sense is not far from that for which he waits.”

— Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (1955), chapter 18.

“The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed."

— Saint Paul, Romans 8.19

Blessed waiting.

Advent Joy

The readings for Advent 3 centre on joy and rejoicing. I will end my sermon on Sunday with this quote from Henri Nouwen:

“In our secularized Western society Christmas offers a good occasion to experience [an] illusory happiness that offers a short break in our fear-filled lives. For many, Christmas is not longer the day to celebrate the mystery of the birth of God among us, the God hidden in the wounds of humanity. It is no longer the day of the child, awaited with prayer and repentance, contemplated with watchful attentiveness, and remembered in liturgical solemnity, joyful song, and peaceful family meals. Instead, Christmas has become a time when companies send elaborate gifts to their clients to thank them for their business, when post offices work overtime to process an overload of cards, when immense amounts of money are spent on food and drink, and socializing becomes a full-time activity. There are trees, decorated streets, sweet tunes in the supermarkets, and children saying to their parents: ‘I want this and I want that.’ The shallow happiness of busy people often fills the place meant to experience the deep, lasting joy of Emmanuel, God-with-us.”

Henri J.M. Nouwen, Lifesigns (1986), page 98

Lent Book for 2007

Thinking of Lent during Advent might be odd, but if you have to deal with overseas shipping like I do, you’ll understand (besides, for most church traditions, both seasons are coloured purple.)

The Archbishop of Canterbury has named Sam Wells’ recently published book, Power and Passion: Six Characters in Search of Resurrection, as the Lent Book for 2007. Like last year’s selection, Miroslav Volf’s Free of Charge, Rowan Williams has written the Forward. Both books are published by Zondervan.

The book:

[V]ividly paints the stories surrounding Jesus’ cross and resurrection. We see the weakness of Pontius Pilate and Barabbas, and the compromised character of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. We discover the subtle power of Pilate’s wife. And in Peter and Mary Magdalene we find the true power of resurrection, bringing forgiveness and ending the stranglehold of death, thus transforming all human passion. Through close readings of the gospel texts, Wells demonstrates the significance of these characters for faith and life today.

Hot Actress, Hideous Character

That (and mentally able actor playing a mentally disabled character) seems to be the latest recipe for an Oscar. Dan wonders about the ethics of such casting.

Preaching is Bad....

...so says David Allis from New Zealand.

Gallery RFD

My cousin, BryanGhiloni, is opening a new art studio in Georgia. Gallery RFD is a part of the "rural arts movement" and hopes to bring arts education to far-away places. To learn more, or to submit a piece to the inaugural exibition click here.

"RFD stands for Rural Free Delivery- a service enacted by Congress in 1896 providing rural regions with the same mail delivery system that urban regions already had. Rural Free Delivery was only enacted after heavy lobbying by the Grange Movement. The Grange Movement was an affiliation of local farmers working on behalf of their community's economic and political advantage."

On Preaching

My friend Ronnie pointed me to this quote by Marva Dawn in her book The Unnecessary Pastor:

“One of the most severe failures in churches today is that so often preaching has become therapeutic instead of proclamatory. The point of sermons is not to tell listeners how to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps; we don’t advise them on how to fix their lives and adjust their attitudes. Rather, we preach to paint so beautiful and compelling a vision of the kingdom of God that we enable the hearers to inhabit it.”

Neo-orthodoxy’s denial of reality

In The Heretical Imperative Peter Berger takes issue with the deductive methodology of the neo-orthodox. Neo-orthodoxy’s assumption that faith is simply given (like Barth’s manna from heaven) is incredibly unreal. Religious choice – the so-called “heretical imperative” – is a necessity in our relativized world.

Berger is at his sharpest when he gives this stinging assessment:

“Neo-orthodoxy seeks to…gain a sort of immunity against the heretical imperative. Heroic the act may well be; it is also illusionary. And so is the immunity to relativization that it purports to produce. The neo-orthodoxy imagination conjures up characters who confront the ‘Word of God’ in an empirically inaccessible realm. But concrete humans beings do not exist in such a realm. Rather, they exist as troubled Swiss pastors, French-speaking Arabs who also want to be Muslims, American college students with access to paperback editions of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, ex-Jews and neo-Hindus, and all the rest of us in the grip of pluralism. That is the realm in which religious experience and religious reflection empirically occur. To deny it is to deny the reality of our world. The denial of reality is always a bad place to begin.”

Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Anchor: New York, 1979), 87.