theo|digital

That the newest Christian culture blockbuster sported shiny endorsements from Michael W. Smith and Wynonna Judd almost had me quitting before I started. But Eugene Peterson’s reassuring quote (plus the predictable rumors of heresy) drove me in to the William P. Young novel about a father who faces God after losing his little girl.

Theologically, The Shack has been condemned by everyone from Mark Driscoll to the Amazon.com review panel (“Trojan horse subtly infiltrating the Christian community”). But what first caught me was the writing. Its opening words sketched wind and color with a soft touch, a paragraph of hope breaking the clouds of Christian mediocrity. No sunshine followed. As quickly as it began, the weather froze into painfully unrealistic dialogue, belabored scenes, and complete loss of point-of-view, that clever tool invented by writers to provide characterization via appropriately framed perspective.

Trudging past overt lines underlining the writer’s agenda (“This came as a shock to Mack’s religious system”), some nicely constructed themes still emerge. Young’s representation of God the Father as a large, generous Black woman is effective reminder of God essential gender neutrality. That she is “especially fond of” both Mack—and every other person she’s made—brings a smile, and seems just about right. And I like the Holy Spirit portrayed in Sarayu’s wildflower garden: chaos from within but an intricate fractal pattern from above.

I find no heart-stopping theological points insidiously poised to hijack orthodoxy. Still, poor attempts at plot (reconciling with a father we’ve never met?) and a slew of eye-roll chapter titles don’t add up to a new generation’s Pilgrims Progress (sorry Eugene) as much as a novel hastily nailed together and soon to be left forgotten in the woods.

Two things. One, I liked McCain’s speech to the NAACP last week. I caught some of it on TV, and not only did he graciously commend Barack Obama’s acheivement of being the first African American nominated as a major party candidate, but kept a humble tone throughout. Not that he lacked courage: I was surprised to hear him choose the platform to champion school choice in the form of government vouchers.  This is a “conservative” issue which I tend to agree with.  And his additional education points were detailed and well-founded:  making sure school principals hold primary spending authority, and investing federal money in virtual classrooms to expand the availability of AP classes in under-funded schools.

On the other hand, I smiled and agreed with the following news commentary posted via Google News:

Comment by Leonard Steinhorn, Prof, School of Communication, American University
Getting Old Versus Keeping Current - 24 July 08

Concerns about Senator John McCain’s age may be less important than how he keeps himself current and young, and on that account we must ask some relevant questions. Senator McCain seems physically vigorous, and his medical reports all point to a generally healthy man who gets regular check-ups. And despite his occasional gaffes and verbal slip-ups, which some suggest may be a sign of a tired mind, he appears to remain sharp and mentally focused. But general health isn’t really the issue. When Senator McCain admits that he really doesn’t get the Internet and describes on-line searching as “a Google,” it suggests that he doesn’t have even a rudimentary appreciation of the new economy and the next generation he hopes to lead. Arguably, our economic vitality these last two decades has been built on an information and knowledge society structured around high technology, social networks, and the Internet.  More.

Oh it’s nice to be back home.  The Walls house in Charleston, SC might be the most consistent home in my life… a place where “Aunt” Kathy and “Uncle” Dan and Sherry, Randy, Cindy, Katy, Lori, and Heidi stayed while my family spent our time in orbit.  But Katy (and her Almost Husband Mike) is the center of this weekend

I’m just sitting on the couch in the family room, though there’s plenty going on.  The wedding trellis is being strapped in the back of a pickup, and the girls are bagging lime green and white M&Ms.

And the sweet tea is in the fridge, just where it always is.

The summer is beginning to threaten its end, and I think my heart has found a way to mourn without telling me about it. That I wouldn’t notice until the sadness comes… that’s not unusual for me, I think. Today I walked through the dirt past Laundry and stared up at Mt. Ypsilon, thick and permanent on this backdrop. I’ll miss it when I leave.

My heart has been with my students here. Most are tired now, full with a summer that for them has been cleaning, conflict, mornings, trust, patience. Many probably had hoped for greater revelation or stronger hope. Only a few already see that what they got in patient endurance was worth the labor, God himself living in the toughest moments.


John Drage says that he’s still not sure how LT works. The economist in me agrees. The entire idea is that we “set the conditions for growth.” We couldn’t compel it to happen.

And so it’s true that a few of my student will walk away from the summer feeling no change. Wondering why they came out, frustrated there was only an empty promise of spiritual growth: certain that the eleven speakers were a disappointment, their project groups weren’t organized, their dorms noisy, and their bank accounts smaller than they had imagined. The saddest part isn’t for me that they didn’t like what we set, but that they never understood it in the first place.

I can only hope that Mt. Ypsilon draws them out here again, maybe a second chance at finding God in mountains.

Because our society has elevated tolerance to the highest of virtues, our society remains confused about what “love” means.  Christians are not called to tolerance; Christians are called to love.  Tolerance condescends; love honors.

But for many, love-as-toleration implies not exercising moral judgment about another’s choices and actions.  We all hear about Christian love a plenty—and what we hear is that Jesus says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”  Thus, they infer, Jesus teaches love that means we are not to make moral judgments about others.  Eau contraire:  Jesus’ love is always moral, because love is always sacred.  Love is the human response to others in light of the Abba’s sacred love and our scared love for Abba.

~ Scot McKnight (www.jesuscreed.org);  The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others, page 57.

I can’t agree more strongly with this, yet I’ve found that it’s counter-cultural nature makes it difficult. The post-modern emotional reaction to moral discernment is defensiveness at best, and more likely complete marginalization.

One of my best friends Nick just convinced this cute girl to spend the rest of her life with him.  Being trapped back here in Colorado, I had to follow the story long distance, but it was made easier by a couple other good friends with telephoto lenses.  Congratulations, Nick and Amy.  Love you guys.

On theological studies…

“Scriptural scholars of both the Old and New Testaments frequently say that while their treatment must be linear, the subject is not. The subject treats of the relations between God and man, and between God and the world, and of the relationship between man and his neighbor – all these subsist together, and act and react upon one another at the same time.
The Hebrew and Eastern mode of though tackles problem and resolution, at the outset of a discussion, in a way typical of oral societies in general. The entire message is then traced and retraced, again and again, on the rounds of a concentric spiral… one can stop anywhere after the first few sentences and have the full message, if one is prepared to “dig” it.” p43

In the context of the cold war…

Is a severe penalty the best deterrent to serious crime? With regard to the bomb and the cold war, is the threat of massive retaliation the most effective means to peace? Is it not evident in every human situation that is pushed to a point of saturation that some precipitation occurs?… It is obvious that numbness is the result of any prolonged terror. The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.” p48

~ Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Critical Edition

My random information bucket of things I found interesting today:

• Toyota will start selling a Prius hybrid with built in solar panels on the roof that power the air-conditioning. Only in Japan, though.
• A political story from Australia about a child posing nude for a magazine cover highlights the idea that any kind of standard societal sexual morality is out the window as soon as some of the older generations die. I’ve been predicting for a number of years that things like the legal age of consent will drop much lower, and acceptance of some child p-rnography will become mainstream. This isn’t scary as much as sad, and I believe rather inevitable. But Christians work best as as compassionate counter-cultural agents, anyway.
• Who knew that Mark Zuckerberg‘s college roommate Chris Hughes is the social architect behind Barak Obama’s social networking website: my.barackobama.org? It has almost 1 million members. The NY Times did a story.
• Related: Rolling Stone just published a bio of Zuckerberg during his Harvard-dorm days (not that long ago) that paints him as a calculating jerk who stole the Facebook idea from other students. Whether or not he’s a jerk, he’s clearly a genius programmer. Obama’s Chris Hughes wasn’t mentioned as one of the belligerents.
• Meanwhile, employees of Google are, interestingly, big contributers to Obama’s campaign. Though David Brooks points out that Obama’s fundraising, while significant with small donors, is hardly the grass-roots-only system that Obama’s campaign implies.
• Today’s younger college faculty are more likely to politically moderate than politically liberal.
• The Anglican church has now had the closest thing to a real split between conservatives and liberals. The former met in Jerusalem for GAFCON (Global Anglican Future Conference) and drew up fourteen evangelically-worded statements of orthodoxy. Suprisingly, liberal archbishop of Cantebury Rowan Williams was “positive and encouraging.”

The YMCA feels a lot like a small town, and Fourth of July carries holiday excitement that anonymous communities don’t seem to have.  Who dresses up for the 4th?  Everyone.  Plus the winners of the parade contest will dog the other departments for at least a week.  Here are my photos of our morning parade under the visage of Long’s Peak, featuring LT students in almost every department.

Welp, now having searched, I now realize this was new in the theology blogging world last week, but I just last night happened to stop to watch the The Colbert Report (silent “t”) and was surprised to hear that his guest was biblical scholar and Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright.The interview itself was typical of Stephen Colbert:  the only promise to guests is that they get the picture of their book on-screen:  no expectation that they’ll be able to get a rational sentence out without Stephen jumping in with comments about Republican heroes.  But Wright did rather well, able to hit the one main point that he’s been hitting for a little while now:  that a Christian conception of heaven as the soul floating off to another place is not Biblical.  Instead, Wright emphasized that the final stage after this creation is the “new heavens and new earth.”  (transcript by Jake Bouma)It’s a point that originally heard from J.R. Woodward, and have further heard from Wright and others, and one I’m fairly certain I’ve come to agree with, in my slow progress to de-spiritualize everything (which has the ironic effect of making “everything spirtual.”).   Essentially I mean that in all aspects of my theology, I’m less seeing the “world” and the “body” and the “flesh” as the opposition to the Christian life I once caught in language from pastors all over.  I still believe sin has damaged and tainted these, but that their re-making is the wonder of the Kingdom both now and later.

NT Wright:…the Middle Ages is when it started to go wrong. If you go back to the very early church, yes, resurrection was the standard doctrine. I’m not saying anything radically new that wasn’t in the New Testament in the early church. In the Middle Ages there’s a lot of stuff [that] comes from the Greek philosophers — people like Plato — which says that actually you have a soul and the soul ends up going off.. and so you don’t need a body anymore.

NT Wright: Yeah, well, absolutely. I mean the whole point about this is that most Christians have this vague idea of going to heaven. It’s something that may happen to you –Stephen Colbert: — No, mine’s very specific. You get a harp, and I’ll have a mint julip, and I’ll ask Ronald Reagan questions.

  (Again thanks to Jake Bouma for his transcript)