Saturday, October 13, 2012
Thursday, October 4, 2012
The falling interest in missions
Here's an image that is sobering for me:
Chart showing the search volume for Christian missions (as a percent of peak) since 2004
As you can see, it looks like a pretty steady decline by 80% of the search volume for Christian missions! I am not certain what the cause for this is, but it distresses me a little since missionary work is where I feel my strongest calling. Perhaps we can do something to turn things around and bring those numbers back up.
What are your thoughts on why these numbers might be falling?
As you can see, it looks like a pretty steady decline by 80% of the search volume for Christian missions! I am not certain what the cause for this is, but it distresses me a little since missionary work is where I feel my strongest calling. Perhaps we can do something to turn things around and bring those numbers back up.
What are your thoughts on why these numbers might be falling?
A Walk in the Woods (Sorry, Bill Brison!)
I had an interesting assignment for class today. We were supposed to meet up with a classmate and spend 1 hour discussing how we've seen God active in our lives: guidance, answers to prayers, feeling connected during devotional time, etc.
I didn't know how to feel about the assignment at first because it struck me as sort of a strange thing to prescribe. I can't have special spiritual encounters with God on a deadline...that's sort of up to God, you know? But we decided since it is a GLORIOUS 80 degree day here in Berrien Center, MI, we would go for a walk at Love Creek Park since it's just a 5 minute walk from our house.
The fall colors are nearing their peak right now, and the paths through the woods were carpeted in golden yellow and royal crimson leaves: just gorgeous. There was a distinct smell of leaf mold lingering in the air that reminded me of being a kid and rolling in raked up leaves. I promise, I'm going to start bringing a camera with me everywhere I go, but we don't have anything pro-grade so even digital photos are going to fall short of properly conveying the beauty of life.
As we started talking, it felt like the perfect setting for talking about God...His goodness, His promises, His action in our lives. Both my friend and I felt God was clearly calling us into specific ministry. Derek--my friend--is going into children's ministry which is awesome. He's got such a big heart and I know he'll be perfect for youth ministry. He was lamenting that we are 10 years behind, as a church, in children's ministry, and that his vision is to start a youth camp up in the mountains of his native British Columbia, Canada. I hope with all my heart that he succeeds. Go Derek!
For my part, I feel drawn to Amazing Discoveries for a number of reasons. First and foremost, part of my conversion from atheism to Christianity was due to the ministry of Dr. Walter Veith whose lectures are available free of charge at their website. But more than this, they have active evangelistic outreaches and missionary work throughout the world and also host educational lecture series in British Columbia. I've dreamed of teaching, but do not want to give up on missionary work. Is God calling me somewhere I can do both? I'm excited by the possibilities!
David
I didn't know how to feel about the assignment at first because it struck me as sort of a strange thing to prescribe. I can't have special spiritual encounters with God on a deadline...that's sort of up to God, you know? But we decided since it is a GLORIOUS 80 degree day here in Berrien Center, MI, we would go for a walk at Love Creek Park since it's just a 5 minute walk from our house.
The fall colors are nearing their peak right now, and the paths through the woods were carpeted in golden yellow and royal crimson leaves: just gorgeous. There was a distinct smell of leaf mold lingering in the air that reminded me of being a kid and rolling in raked up leaves. I promise, I'm going to start bringing a camera with me everywhere I go, but we don't have anything pro-grade so even digital photos are going to fall short of properly conveying the beauty of life.
As we started talking, it felt like the perfect setting for talking about God...His goodness, His promises, His action in our lives. Both my friend and I felt God was clearly calling us into specific ministry. Derek--my friend--is going into children's ministry which is awesome. He's got such a big heart and I know he'll be perfect for youth ministry. He was lamenting that we are 10 years behind, as a church, in children's ministry, and that his vision is to start a youth camp up in the mountains of his native British Columbia, Canada. I hope with all my heart that he succeeds. Go Derek!
For my part, I feel drawn to Amazing Discoveries for a number of reasons. First and foremost, part of my conversion from atheism to Christianity was due to the ministry of Dr. Walter Veith whose lectures are available free of charge at their website. But more than this, they have active evangelistic outreaches and missionary work throughout the world and also host educational lecture series in British Columbia. I've dreamed of teaching, but do not want to give up on missionary work. Is God calling me somewhere I can do both? I'm excited by the possibilities!
David
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Great new recipe for dinner (and vegan, too!)
Pretty dreary day here in Berrien Springs, MI, but the wife and I took
the day to a new, higher level tonight by making our very own custom
vegan CRUNCH WRAP SUPREMES! Yup, it's a modification of a recipe from
http://busymamabird.blogspot.com/2012/04/yummy-crunchwrap-supremes.html
that we made vegan.
We used some leftover vegan chili that the wifeykins made yesterday
evening in lieu of meat. We used vegan sour cream instead of the real stuff from the cow. We used this recipe for vegan queso and it
turned out fantastically delicious! One thing to note, instead of it being yellow like this:
It looks like mustard. I love mustard, but NOT on Mexican food! D:
it turned out orange and spicy-looking like this:
Ok, so my webcam stinks. Those chunks are real tomatoes, my friend.
Real, delicious, basil & oregano spiced tomatoes.
Yummmmmmmm!
When full assembled, the end product looked a little something like this:
Om nom nom. Delicious homemade vegan crunch wrap supremes!
Try them,try them, Sam I am!
Sadly, we were dumb and hungry, so it was only AFTER we had consumed them and done the dishes that we thought 'Huh...should've taken a photo of ours for the blog!' Such is life.
We actually put taco sauce right inside the wraps and then sealed them up and cooked them until they were browned-shut. I can't say that it would win awards for the most fantabulously healthy meal in the world, but one serving was most satiating, and there's plenty of stuff left over for leftovers. In moderately related news, Leah and I are going on a retreat soon to build spirituality and get closer to God. We'll be bringing some delicious vegan crunch wrap supremes with us to munch on Sabbath! Yum! :) Today has been lovely. I hope you've all had a splendid day as well. David
it turned out orange and spicy-looking like this:
Real, delicious, basil & oregano spiced tomatoes.
Yummmmmmmm!
When full assembled, the end product looked a little something like this:
Try them,try them, Sam I am!
Sadly, we were dumb and hungry, so it was only AFTER we had consumed them and done the dishes that we thought 'Huh...should've taken a photo of ours for the blog!' Such is life.
We actually put taco sauce right inside the wraps and then sealed them up and cooked them until they were browned-shut. I can't say that it would win awards for the most fantabulously healthy meal in the world, but one serving was most satiating, and there's plenty of stuff left over for leftovers. In moderately related news, Leah and I are going on a retreat soon to build spirituality and get closer to God. We'll be bringing some delicious vegan crunch wrap supremes with us to munch on Sabbath! Yum! :) Today has been lovely. I hope you've all had a splendid day as well. David
Worked on my singing voice a little bit today. I don't think I'll ever be great, but when I start missionary work after graduating, I want to be able at least to sing passably well so I can teach songs to the people with whom I work! We were practicing "All Things Bright and Beautiful" but not in the traditional hymnal arrangement. It was the arrangement by Ray Robinson. I can't find a good recording of it, sadly, but it was copyrighted back in 1983 so that may be why.
We also sang for the first time a really cool new piece called "With Peace and Joy." There are actually two songs in this set, and the one we practiced was called "Call to Praise" (low fidelity recording, but I can't find anything better!).
I'm HOPING that we can get some video equipment and record our group singing this song. I will be talking with the choir director, Dr. James North, Jr. about this very thing shortly.
We also sang for the first time a really cool new piece called "With Peace and Joy." There are actually two songs in this set, and the one we practiced was called "Call to Praise" (low fidelity recording, but I can't find anything better!).
I'm HOPING that we can get some video equipment and record our group singing this song. I will be talking with the choir director, Dr. James North, Jr. about this very thing shortly.
New software package
I'm excited! I just found out yesterday that the university offers a software bundle for $10 for students that includes all of Microsoft Office. To go along with this, I am also checking out OpenSong which apparently is a databasing and presentation program that will compile a list of all your song slides and make it so you can simply pull out the slides you want, throw them into an active presentation, and voila!
I work with the audio/visual team for the chapel services for the Tuesday mid-week worship services, and it is a perennially frustrating experience because I am forever making new slides every time a different group does the music because we keep changing songs. I'm hoping we will be able to find a pre-generated list of lyrics somewhere and draw off of that. Less time spent on the PowerPoint for chapel = more free time to study = exponentially more sanity for me! :)
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
I'm worried. This is day 2 of the fundraiser campaign and still not a dime. However, I have seen some people checking the blog! I am encouraged. Would you readers mind leaving a comment letting me know what more you'd like to see on the blog. Are you interested to know what I'm learning in classes at Andrews? My thoughts on God? Is there a discussion you'd like to have? Let me know and I'll start a post for it!
David
David
Cool cooking info
I don't want to muddy the waters too much here, but at the same time, if I'm going to be a blogger, I think it is incumbent upon me to be honest and transparent about my life (or is it?...you tell me if you don't want to know this kind of stuff, I'm writing for my readers!). At any rate, I am a vegan vegetarian, and while to many that may sound like "Ew gross, slimy tofu and salads", in truth it means some of the most exquisite, kingly meals I've ever seen. Right now I'm having a wonderful southwest chili that my lovely wife threw together in less than an hour (I'm impressed!).
Anyhoo, here's a link to a great site for info on how to go vegan, and if you already *are* vegan, it will help you be even healthier as a vegan! Vegan Coach
Anyhoo, here's a link to a great site for info on how to go vegan, and if you already *are* vegan, it will help you be even healthier as a vegan! Vegan Coach
New writing project!
I'm not certain if this will interest my readers, but it is of great interest to me, and that seems to be what a blog is supposed to be all about.
I have recently been studying the impact of Plato and Aristotle on the development of classical and contemporary Christian theology. It began as part of a class, but once I got the big picture of the impact these two men have had, it made me hungry to learn more. I can't say that I have learned a lot more yet, but I am going to be working my way through Plato's dialogues and other works to get a sense for the way he viewed the world.
From what I know thus far--from the class, so I'm largely parroting secondary sources, not primary--Plato viewed the world dualistically. Maybe you've heard of his analogy of the Cave? The way the Cave works is to imagine a person strapped in place inside a cave. That person is not able to move or even turn his head to see behind him. On the wall of the cave in front of him are a number of shadows cast from a light source somewhere behind him, presumably from the mouth or opening of the cave. Plato apparently reasoned that we are the man in the cave: all the world around us is impermanent and ultimate not real in the true sense of reality. The things outside in the light that are casting shadows are, by contrast, true reality, and they are just as incapable of entering the cave as the man in the cave is incapable of leaving. Thus, at the very best, there is a sort of murky interplay between the two realities which are ultimately immiscible, much like oil and water.
The cave would then be 'nature' and the outside world of light would be 'supernature'. Now Plato was not a Christian. He lived several centuries before Jesus Christ was born. As such, he was not writing his philosophy to be interpreted through a Christian-shaded pair of glasses. He was simply looking at the world around him and trying to reason his way to something that makes sense. He saw things around him that defied his ability to explain, and many of these things seemed to be organized in logical, efficient systems implying that there must necessarily have been some kind of higher authority governing everything. Moreover, his people did believe in a pantheon of gods, and so it was in this context that he tried to understand reality.
The final conclusion was that there definitely is a god, but that he/it/she is ineffably and immeasurably beyond realty, so much so that time and space themselves do not exist for this being. Why not? Because nature, in Plato's mind, is characterized by temporality: time passes and it ravages all things. Ostensiby, given enough time, even the mountains themselves would be reduced to rubble. Plato had the simple concept in mind that that which is greater is not impacted by such trivialities as time. Thus, for god to be higher, he must have been outside the scope of time. If god has no time, then he is not able to change. Thus, reasoned Plato, god must be completely perfect (or it may have been the other way around: god is completely perfect because he/it/she is god, therefore there must be no passage of time as time means the erosion and decay of all things, hence god would cease to be perfect).
The basic notion of perfection, in Plato's mind, is possessing everything and lacking nothing. But it was more than this, too. It also meant that god did not possess emotions, because emotions were thought to be the result of eros, which is 'desirous love'. Since god was thought to possess everything, there would be not impetus for it to have eros, as there would be nothing further for it to desire or try to obtain. Thus, god was 100% completely immovable, stoic, and impassable. Nothing effected him, but at the same time he could not effect anything temporal, because to do so would require him to have time, which would require him to experience decay, which would lead to his having emotions, which would essentially reduce him to humanity. Indeed, many of the early Greek authors portray such petty gods which are forever bickering, warring with one another, etc. From what I can parse, it doesn't seem that Plato thought of the gods/god in this matter. Rather, he felt that ultimately god would have no spatial dimension at all because he must be simple.
Why does this matter, David? Excellent question!
You know how the New Testament was written in Greek (if you didn't before, now you do!)? Well that's because Greek was the lingua franca of the day and age of Jesus. It's roughly synonymous to how most of the western world speaks English in addition to whatever their mother tongue is, because until very recently, English has been the 'way we do business' throughout most of the world. Not only was the Greek language en vogue at the time of Christ, but so was Greek culture. This is known as the Hellenistic period, and it is primarily responsible for the Greek Old Testament (a translation from the original Hebrew and Aramaic into Koine Greek). During the 400 years or so between the testaments (between the book of Malachi and the book of Matthew) many Jews fled Israel due to the constant bickering between the Ptolemies and the Antiochuses (rulers of Egypt and Syria, respectively). They fled to Alexandria, Egypt en masse (not all did, but many did), resulting in a sizable Jewish population in that city. Why Alexandria? Apparently the Ptolemies were relatively tolerant of the Jewish religion and culture whereas the Antiochuses were not so much.
Alexandria was named after Alexander the Great, one of the greatest leaders of the Greek civilization ever to arise. Indeed, it was his lightning fast blitz from Greece eastward into the Indian sub-continent that paved the way for much of the known world to share the Greek language and Greek mythology and culture. While in Alexandria, the Jewish refugees largely forgot their mother culture, which was cause for great alarm among the Jewish Rabbis. So great was the assimilation of Greek culture that the old Hebrew scriptures were no longer accessible as most young Jews did not speak or read Hebrew. Thus, there was a hustle to produce a Greek manuscript known today as the Septuagint (or the LXX).
The point of all of this is that Greek culture was en vogue, and so was Greek philosophy. Interject into the midst of this a radical event: God set aside His deity and created Himself into an incarnation, a little baby growing in the womb of Mary. He was born in obscurity, but lived life as a firebrand, challenging the status quo of religiosity of the day (and still doing so today, I might add!). Christ was teaching His parables in the midst of a culture whose higher thinkers were enamored of Greek philosophy.
Thus, it isn't really surprising that within a few centuries after His death, most of the Christian church fathers were trying to figure out a way to get the teachings of Jesus to sync up with the teachings of Plato. Indeed, Philo, a famous Alexandrian Jew and contemporary of Jesus Christ, went through the whole Torah and tried to explain how much of what was written was an allegory because he made the same assumptions about reality as Plato did: i.e. God was timeless and dimensionless, and totally incapable of speaking face to face with Moses as the Bible claims.
Thus it was that by the 4th century when Augustine came along, it wasn't a big logical jump to just assume that none of the Bible is truly inspired (because how could a timeless God interact in any way with a temporal mortal man to inspire him to do anything?), and that it was therefore just a collection of wise writings and effective traditions compiled over generations by noble Jewish scholars. Even the New Testament, it was reasoned, was tradition.
There were a number of heresies that circulated in the early days of the Christian church. Some said that Jesus never really existed as a mortal man, but that He had a spirit body and it was merely an illusion that He died on the cross. Others said He wasn't truly fully divine, but that He was the Logos. The Logos is a Greek philosophical concept. The idea goes like this: originally all of reality was timeless in the way God is. Every spirit spent eternity contemplating God. Then some spirits started to look away from God (how this happens if they are timeless is not explained, apparently), and in doing so, they were snared by time. Having fallen into time, they became mortal and sundered. Gnosticism is the process whereby people who believe in this theory of ontology attempt to access secret knowledge that is meant to elevate their souls back to the level of contemplating God, thereby freeing them from the fallen awfulness of temporal reality.
The point is, all of this assumes a Platonic structure to reality. Plato is not necessarily correct. Indeed, if we drop these presuppositions of Platonism and simply come to the Bible with as little bias as absolutely possible (i.e. we don't assume anything) and we read the Bible and take it at face value about what it says, then we come up with a vastly different ontology and cosmology.
The Bible says specifically and pointedly that God is temporal. He experiences time just like we do. It says specifically that He does have emotions: He is angry with the wicked, He loves those who seek mercy and compassion. He rejoices along with His angels when a wicked person decides to stop being wicked and give their life to Christ.
So what? Well, just about all of the modern top misconceptions and maledictions concerning God stem from the false interpretation of the Bible through a Platonic bias. For example, people may ask "How could anyone be happy in heaven while we are back here suffering on earth?" Excellent question. The Bible says quite clearly that the dead are sleeping, awaiting the judgment, and that they are not, in fact, in heaven. Thus the simple Biblical answer is: they couldn't be happy in heaven. But classical theology has always held that there is an immediate reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked at death.
Catholic thinktanks throughout the Medieval era teased this concept of instant payback at death into a two-part system. They reasoned that Jesus was able to pardon people from the ETERNAL consequences of sin, thereby saving them from hell, but that there still had to be a temporal penalty for their transgression, which meant Purgatory for a good long while to suffer and think about what you have done. Yikes! No such concept is found anywhere in Scripture; it is the tradition of men being held up as equivalent to the words of sacred Scripture that has led to people thinking of a Purgatory.
Moreover, the concept of an eternal burning hell where the wicked are tortured with fire and red-hot devil pokers is also, ultimately, the product of Platonist thought applied to the Bible. Someone thinking in terms of God's realm being timeless would look at texts in the Bible where it talks about "the smoke of their torment ascending forever" and "their worm dying not" and say "Ah, here we have a prime example of how the Bible is pointing us to timelessness in God's realm, because the burning of hell is eternal and going on forever. Thus the wicked never cease to experience their punishment." It's a horrible monstrosity. In fact, a Biblical approach to reading the Bible allows us to let the Bible interpret itself, and sure enough such texts as these are making explicit reference to Sodom and Gomorrah which were judged to be filled with nothing but wickedness day and night and were destroyed. The Bible says they, too, burn with eternal fire. Are they still burning today? No. Clearly this is metaphoric language suggesting that the result of the burning is eternal: they will never exist again.
Thus, many of the biggest issues causing people to hate God and hate Christianity today are the result of taking a mode of thinking predating Christ by 5 centuries or more, and applying it to the whole of the Bible, which was never even remotely intended to be Greek in culture or philosophy and was only Greek in language as the result of the events in the New Testament happening to transpire during the time that Greek was the common tongue.
There are many more examples of how Plato has impacted Christian theology, but I feel this will suffice for now. If there is interest in greater study, I will be writing a magazine article for Amazing Discoveries. I just have to read a metric ton of Plato's writing first so that I can establish my assertions with direct quotations from primary sources! Wish me luck and please pray for my success and my time management abilities!
My best,
David Stratton
P.S. As always, I would appreciate you taking a gander at my IndieGoGo.com/PromisedLandPastor site. Page views help, and donations really help. Help spread the word by using the "share tools" on the IndieGoGo.com website.
I have recently been studying the impact of Plato and Aristotle on the development of classical and contemporary Christian theology. It began as part of a class, but once I got the big picture of the impact these two men have had, it made me hungry to learn more. I can't say that I have learned a lot more yet, but I am going to be working my way through Plato's dialogues and other works to get a sense for the way he viewed the world.
From what I know thus far--from the class, so I'm largely parroting secondary sources, not primary--Plato viewed the world dualistically. Maybe you've heard of his analogy of the Cave? The way the Cave works is to imagine a person strapped in place inside a cave. That person is not able to move or even turn his head to see behind him. On the wall of the cave in front of him are a number of shadows cast from a light source somewhere behind him, presumably from the mouth or opening of the cave. Plato apparently reasoned that we are the man in the cave: all the world around us is impermanent and ultimate not real in the true sense of reality. The things outside in the light that are casting shadows are, by contrast, true reality, and they are just as incapable of entering the cave as the man in the cave is incapable of leaving. Thus, at the very best, there is a sort of murky interplay between the two realities which are ultimately immiscible, much like oil and water.
The cave would then be 'nature' and the outside world of light would be 'supernature'. Now Plato was not a Christian. He lived several centuries before Jesus Christ was born. As such, he was not writing his philosophy to be interpreted through a Christian-shaded pair of glasses. He was simply looking at the world around him and trying to reason his way to something that makes sense. He saw things around him that defied his ability to explain, and many of these things seemed to be organized in logical, efficient systems implying that there must necessarily have been some kind of higher authority governing everything. Moreover, his people did believe in a pantheon of gods, and so it was in this context that he tried to understand reality.
The final conclusion was that there definitely is a god, but that he/it/she is ineffably and immeasurably beyond realty, so much so that time and space themselves do not exist for this being. Why not? Because nature, in Plato's mind, is characterized by temporality: time passes and it ravages all things. Ostensiby, given enough time, even the mountains themselves would be reduced to rubble. Plato had the simple concept in mind that that which is greater is not impacted by such trivialities as time. Thus, for god to be higher, he must have been outside the scope of time. If god has no time, then he is not able to change. Thus, reasoned Plato, god must be completely perfect (or it may have been the other way around: god is completely perfect because he/it/she is god, therefore there must be no passage of time as time means the erosion and decay of all things, hence god would cease to be perfect).
The basic notion of perfection, in Plato's mind, is possessing everything and lacking nothing. But it was more than this, too. It also meant that god did not possess emotions, because emotions were thought to be the result of eros, which is 'desirous love'. Since god was thought to possess everything, there would be not impetus for it to have eros, as there would be nothing further for it to desire or try to obtain. Thus, god was 100% completely immovable, stoic, and impassable. Nothing effected him, but at the same time he could not effect anything temporal, because to do so would require him to have time, which would require him to experience decay, which would lead to his having emotions, which would essentially reduce him to humanity. Indeed, many of the early Greek authors portray such petty gods which are forever bickering, warring with one another, etc. From what I can parse, it doesn't seem that Plato thought of the gods/god in this matter. Rather, he felt that ultimately god would have no spatial dimension at all because he must be simple.
Why does this matter, David? Excellent question!
You know how the New Testament was written in Greek (if you didn't before, now you do!)? Well that's because Greek was the lingua franca of the day and age of Jesus. It's roughly synonymous to how most of the western world speaks English in addition to whatever their mother tongue is, because until very recently, English has been the 'way we do business' throughout most of the world. Not only was the Greek language en vogue at the time of Christ, but so was Greek culture. This is known as the Hellenistic period, and it is primarily responsible for the Greek Old Testament (a translation from the original Hebrew and Aramaic into Koine Greek). During the 400 years or so between the testaments (between the book of Malachi and the book of Matthew) many Jews fled Israel due to the constant bickering between the Ptolemies and the Antiochuses (rulers of Egypt and Syria, respectively). They fled to Alexandria, Egypt en masse (not all did, but many did), resulting in a sizable Jewish population in that city. Why Alexandria? Apparently the Ptolemies were relatively tolerant of the Jewish religion and culture whereas the Antiochuses were not so much.
Alexandria was named after Alexander the Great, one of the greatest leaders of the Greek civilization ever to arise. Indeed, it was his lightning fast blitz from Greece eastward into the Indian sub-continent that paved the way for much of the known world to share the Greek language and Greek mythology and culture. While in Alexandria, the Jewish refugees largely forgot their mother culture, which was cause for great alarm among the Jewish Rabbis. So great was the assimilation of Greek culture that the old Hebrew scriptures were no longer accessible as most young Jews did not speak or read Hebrew. Thus, there was a hustle to produce a Greek manuscript known today as the Septuagint (or the LXX).
The point of all of this is that Greek culture was en vogue, and so was Greek philosophy. Interject into the midst of this a radical event: God set aside His deity and created Himself into an incarnation, a little baby growing in the womb of Mary. He was born in obscurity, but lived life as a firebrand, challenging the status quo of religiosity of the day (and still doing so today, I might add!). Christ was teaching His parables in the midst of a culture whose higher thinkers were enamored of Greek philosophy.
Thus, it isn't really surprising that within a few centuries after His death, most of the Christian church fathers were trying to figure out a way to get the teachings of Jesus to sync up with the teachings of Plato. Indeed, Philo, a famous Alexandrian Jew and contemporary of Jesus Christ, went through the whole Torah and tried to explain how much of what was written was an allegory because he made the same assumptions about reality as Plato did: i.e. God was timeless and dimensionless, and totally incapable of speaking face to face with Moses as the Bible claims.
Thus it was that by the 4th century when Augustine came along, it wasn't a big logical jump to just assume that none of the Bible is truly inspired (because how could a timeless God interact in any way with a temporal mortal man to inspire him to do anything?), and that it was therefore just a collection of wise writings and effective traditions compiled over generations by noble Jewish scholars. Even the New Testament, it was reasoned, was tradition.
There were a number of heresies that circulated in the early days of the Christian church. Some said that Jesus never really existed as a mortal man, but that He had a spirit body and it was merely an illusion that He died on the cross. Others said He wasn't truly fully divine, but that He was the Logos. The Logos is a Greek philosophical concept. The idea goes like this: originally all of reality was timeless in the way God is. Every spirit spent eternity contemplating God. Then some spirits started to look away from God (how this happens if they are timeless is not explained, apparently), and in doing so, they were snared by time. Having fallen into time, they became mortal and sundered. Gnosticism is the process whereby people who believe in this theory of ontology attempt to access secret knowledge that is meant to elevate their souls back to the level of contemplating God, thereby freeing them from the fallen awfulness of temporal reality.
The point is, all of this assumes a Platonic structure to reality. Plato is not necessarily correct. Indeed, if we drop these presuppositions of Platonism and simply come to the Bible with as little bias as absolutely possible (i.e. we don't assume anything) and we read the Bible and take it at face value about what it says, then we come up with a vastly different ontology and cosmology.
The Bible says specifically and pointedly that God is temporal. He experiences time just like we do. It says specifically that He does have emotions: He is angry with the wicked, He loves those who seek mercy and compassion. He rejoices along with His angels when a wicked person decides to stop being wicked and give their life to Christ.
So what? Well, just about all of the modern top misconceptions and maledictions concerning God stem from the false interpretation of the Bible through a Platonic bias. For example, people may ask "How could anyone be happy in heaven while we are back here suffering on earth?" Excellent question. The Bible says quite clearly that the dead are sleeping, awaiting the judgment, and that they are not, in fact, in heaven. Thus the simple Biblical answer is: they couldn't be happy in heaven. But classical theology has always held that there is an immediate reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked at death.
Catholic thinktanks throughout the Medieval era teased this concept of instant payback at death into a two-part system. They reasoned that Jesus was able to pardon people from the ETERNAL consequences of sin, thereby saving them from hell, but that there still had to be a temporal penalty for their transgression, which meant Purgatory for a good long while to suffer and think about what you have done. Yikes! No such concept is found anywhere in Scripture; it is the tradition of men being held up as equivalent to the words of sacred Scripture that has led to people thinking of a Purgatory.
Moreover, the concept of an eternal burning hell where the wicked are tortured with fire and red-hot devil pokers is also, ultimately, the product of Platonist thought applied to the Bible. Someone thinking in terms of God's realm being timeless would look at texts in the Bible where it talks about "the smoke of their torment ascending forever" and "their worm dying not" and say "Ah, here we have a prime example of how the Bible is pointing us to timelessness in God's realm, because the burning of hell is eternal and going on forever. Thus the wicked never cease to experience their punishment." It's a horrible monstrosity. In fact, a Biblical approach to reading the Bible allows us to let the Bible interpret itself, and sure enough such texts as these are making explicit reference to Sodom and Gomorrah which were judged to be filled with nothing but wickedness day and night and were destroyed. The Bible says they, too, burn with eternal fire. Are they still burning today? No. Clearly this is metaphoric language suggesting that the result of the burning is eternal: they will never exist again.
Thus, many of the biggest issues causing people to hate God and hate Christianity today are the result of taking a mode of thinking predating Christ by 5 centuries or more, and applying it to the whole of the Bible, which was never even remotely intended to be Greek in culture or philosophy and was only Greek in language as the result of the events in the New Testament happening to transpire during the time that Greek was the common tongue.
There are many more examples of how Plato has impacted Christian theology, but I feel this will suffice for now. If there is interest in greater study, I will be writing a magazine article for Amazing Discoveries. I just have to read a metric ton of Plato's writing first so that I can establish my assertions with direct quotations from primary sources! Wish me luck and please pray for my success and my time management abilities!
My best,
David Stratton
P.S. As always, I would appreciate you taking a gander at my IndieGoGo.com/PromisedLandPastor site. Page views help, and donations really help. Help spread the word by using the "share tools" on the IndieGoGo.com website.
Monday, October 1, 2012
An uplifting thought for the day
I'd like to get the ball rolling on some uplifting thoughts. I've been rising every morning at 6:30 am (early for me because classes don't start until 9:30 most days of the week) and journaling. Specifically, I've been reading a devotional for maybe 5 minutes, then writing a reflective response. I am going to share with you what I've read, and maybe a little of what I have thought about it to encourage others to think about the same topic but give different feedback.
Something that has really hit me hard in the last few weeks is Jeremiah 29:11-14. To put it in summary, it says God knows precisely what He thinks about me (about any of us!) and that His thoughts are to strengthen and establish us, to prosper us (!!!), and to give us hope and a future. He says, furthermore, that we will find Him when we seek Him with our whole heart, and that when we have found Him and connected with Him, He will restore our freedom.
Sometimes I think we are oblivious to the fact that we are captives. Maybe the children of Israel sometimes forgot they were in captivity, especially their children who grew up never having known what it was to live in Canaan. Moreover, can any of us say we have sought something with our WHOLE HEART? I did some thinking about Biblical characters who have sought God with their whole heart. I couldn't come up with anyone really other than Jesus. Jesus sought God the Father through agony and suffering in Gethsemane, but even then I don't think He was seeking Him with His whole heart. Rather, it was on the cross when Jesus' heart was broken because of the terrible ordeal He suffered and the peculiar absence of God's presence. I believe that when He cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" it was a cry that was seeking more than life itself just to know God, to touch God, and to have his assurance of blessing.
I do not mean to suggest that we need to go seek out a cross to be crucified on. I simply mean that we have so many distractions in our lives that we allow to act as substitutes for God. When I say WE, I mean we. I have distractions. I spend way too much putzing around on the web instead of doing what I can in the world around me. Do you ever have the same experience? What if we decided, as a community, that that was no longer acceptable? What if we started giving each other service homework? What if we made a commitment to each other as a group to get out into the world and do something productive? Would any of you like to help me brainstorm ideas? I believe that if we focus our energy and our efforts, we can do something amazing.
Have a great day,
David
Something that has really hit me hard in the last few weeks is Jeremiah 29:11-14. To put it in summary, it says God knows precisely what He thinks about me (about any of us!) and that His thoughts are to strengthen and establish us, to prosper us (!!!), and to give us hope and a future. He says, furthermore, that we will find Him when we seek Him with our whole heart, and that when we have found Him and connected with Him, He will restore our freedom.
Sometimes I think we are oblivious to the fact that we are captives. Maybe the children of Israel sometimes forgot they were in captivity, especially their children who grew up never having known what it was to live in Canaan. Moreover, can any of us say we have sought something with our WHOLE HEART? I did some thinking about Biblical characters who have sought God with their whole heart. I couldn't come up with anyone really other than Jesus. Jesus sought God the Father through agony and suffering in Gethsemane, but even then I don't think He was seeking Him with His whole heart. Rather, it was on the cross when Jesus' heart was broken because of the terrible ordeal He suffered and the peculiar absence of God's presence. I believe that when He cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" it was a cry that was seeking more than life itself just to know God, to touch God, and to have his assurance of blessing.
I do not mean to suggest that we need to go seek out a cross to be crucified on. I simply mean that we have so many distractions in our lives that we allow to act as substitutes for God. When I say WE, I mean we. I have distractions. I spend way too much putzing around on the web instead of doing what I can in the world around me. Do you ever have the same experience? What if we decided, as a community, that that was no longer acceptable? What if we started giving each other service homework? What if we made a commitment to each other as a group to get out into the world and do something productive? Would any of you like to help me brainstorm ideas? I believe that if we focus our energy and our efforts, we can do something amazing.
Have a great day,
David
Fundraiser at IndieGoGo
Well, the mad dash to fundraise is underway! The campaign can be
found at http://www.indiegogo.com/PromisedLandPastor. I appreciate any
contribution you can make, even if it is spreading the word on the
campaign! Thank you in advance!
Photographing the Holy Land
If all goes according to plan, this will soon be a place for many to
gather for spiritual bread. I am going on a pilgrimage to Turkey,
Israel, and Greece to see the places where Jesus walked, where His
disciples taught, and where Christianity had its nascence. I am taking
with me a few changes of clothing, a little bit of money, and a
high-powered camera. My goal is to bring you high-quality photographs of
the Holy Land, the kinds of photos you are unlikely to get from a
random Google search. More than this, I am going to bring you the back
story to each site I visit. I will translate from ancient Greek for you
so you can better understand what you are seeing.
Not my work. Cool shot of the Wailing Wall though.
Who am I? I'm David. I'm a seminary student at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, MI. I am a husband, I am a student of the world, I am a former biologist, and I am 30 years old. I have a passion for reaching people through digital media. I believe that as the 21st century continues to gain momentum, classical methods of evangelism are going to become increasingly obsolete, and it will be up to digital media to reach people.
Thus, it is not my intention to make this blog a place for bashing people who do not share my faith in Jesus Christ. It is, instead, intended to be a place for open, honest discussion. It is a place for spiritual nurture and inspirational encouragement. It is a little corner of the web which I intend to keep as safe for you as I can. Hatred and intolerance are not welcomed here. Who is welcome? People who are fed up with TV, political talking heads, and pop-culture trying to force-feed them meaning, purpose, and motive for living. Have you lost your joie de vivre? Have you lost your raison d'etre? Do you need a new zest for living? Welcome. I have been in your shoes. I have felt that life was grey and meaningless. I have despaired, actually. I have lost a lot in my personal life, yet I have also been to the top of the mountain. I have doggedly pursued the truth, even though it has led me through the valley of the shadow of death.
I will not lie to you and say that I know more than you do, that I know better than you, or that I am holier than thou. Instead, I simply want to communicate with other seekers, other people who long to know God or if there is a god out there. It is my hope that between the photography and the philosophy, we can find a theology that is bold and daring without being bigoted and derogatory. Wouldn't that be achieving something monumental? Be enormous with me. Be exceptional with me. Together, let us forge a community that will sprint forward, rather than shuffling.
Who am I? I'm David. I'm a seminary student at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, MI. I am a husband, I am a student of the world, I am a former biologist, and I am 30 years old. I have a passion for reaching people through digital media. I believe that as the 21st century continues to gain momentum, classical methods of evangelism are going to become increasingly obsolete, and it will be up to digital media to reach people.
Thus, it is not my intention to make this blog a place for bashing people who do not share my faith in Jesus Christ. It is, instead, intended to be a place for open, honest discussion. It is a place for spiritual nurture and inspirational encouragement. It is a little corner of the web which I intend to keep as safe for you as I can. Hatred and intolerance are not welcomed here. Who is welcome? People who are fed up with TV, political talking heads, and pop-culture trying to force-feed them meaning, purpose, and motive for living. Have you lost your joie de vivre? Have you lost your raison d'etre? Do you need a new zest for living? Welcome. I have been in your shoes. I have felt that life was grey and meaningless. I have despaired, actually. I have lost a lot in my personal life, yet I have also been to the top of the mountain. I have doggedly pursued the truth, even though it has led me through the valley of the shadow of death.
I will not lie to you and say that I know more than you do, that I know better than you, or that I am holier than thou. Instead, I simply want to communicate with other seekers, other people who long to know God or if there is a god out there. It is my hope that between the photography and the philosophy, we can find a theology that is bold and daring without being bigoted and derogatory. Wouldn't that be achieving something monumental? Be enormous with me. Be exceptional with me. Together, let us forge a community that will sprint forward, rather than shuffling.
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