theo|digital

(Etching of Jesus is 1647 by Rembrandt)

O.C. Edwards writes an encyclopedia article on the History of Preaching:

There are several genres of Christian preaching, including at least the missionary or evangelistic, catechetical [teaching/training], and the liturgical [context of worship]. … Such a sermon may be defined as a speech delivered by an authorized person applying some point of doctrine, usually drawn from the biblical passage, to the lives of the congregation with the purpose of moving them to accept that application and to act on the basis of it

Clearly there is little in the New Testament that can be identified according to these criteria as Christian preaching. … The preaching of Jesus could be thought to provide an exception, but it fails to on at least two counts. First, since it’s content was the breaking in of the reign of God, and it refers only by implication to its proclaimer’s role in that inauguration, it is not, strictly speaking, Christian preaching.
Edwards Jr., O.C. “History of Preaching” in Willimon, W., & Lischer, R.. Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995.

Edwards goes on to invalidate most of Paul as a model for preaching as well. I’m not sure I could disagree more. If Jesus proclamation doesn’t fit out definition of Christian preaching, isn’t it time to examine our definition?

My model for “preaching” for a number of years has been modeled on Jesus, phrased perhaps as:

“Like Jesus, we use stories, (i.e. narrative, setting, character, plot (tension), etc) set in our down-to-earth lives to illustrate (<– too weak…embody?) the kingdom of the heavens—the subjective revealing the objective, the temporal as eternal. We tell stories contrasting what life is like inside the kingdom and outside the kingdom for the ears of four “rings” of people within earshot: the absolutely committed, the followers, the apathetic or curious, and the skeptics.”

This is my model of preaching, using what I find from Jesus. I know it’s not typical of whole streams of the church’s exegetical preaching. But I think this is one that many got wrong. I wonder what O.C. Edwards would think.

When I was originally on my grad school and then seminary search, I was hugely attracted to Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle. Already familiar with their President Dan Allender, the way MGHS framed their approach to theological education through a Deep Beauty view of the world called to me like family I hadn’t yet known.

But in the end, though I struggled, I wound up dismissing them because they did not yet have the accreditation I needed to keep the door open for PhD work. But I still like to keep tabs on them now and then.  Check out this great promo video on loving your neighbor.

mhgs what no. 2 from blaine hogan on Vimeo.
(I don’t know who Blaine Hogan is, but I have noticed that it looks like he just recently moved over to my neck of the woods to work for Willow)

I still have this funny hope that’ll I’ll find some connection with MHGS people. It’s been a rather different experience here at NPTS… as an artist I sense I’ve shelved an entire side of me.  The social tone and space is warm, but encourages a traditionalism more akin to the Thanksgiving silk flowers on your parents table than the open mic, silver and expectant in the upstairs part of the gallery. The portraits in the halls are of elderly Swedes (none of whom I know about).  Culture is recognized here, but as something “other?”—something to be studied (vs. created). Sometimes it is perhaps presented in contradictory ways. My communicating the faith class made attempts, but at the end of the day had a superficial, contrived approach (to its defense–it’s focus was personal evangelism). My theology class and others have had a incredibly dim view of beauty in the face of sin. I haven’t had a class with missiologist Paul DeNeui (I typically find the missiologists the most insightful on culture in general). But I suspect that none of our classes embody expression that is detailed, creative, playful, and revelatory. I haven’t seen professors here that think this way. (Nor at TEDS, where I’ve taken some additional courses).  Honestly, I think there are only a few classmates here that would naturally fit in a MHGS-lensed world.  Only a few of us who want to talk about life as art, indie music, and discover truth while tracing a twilight skyline.

Which again is hardly to discount the things I like very much at North Park. Just to wonder again at how I’m a “different person” here than I might be elsewhere.

First snow that’s stuck.

Fundamentalist Christian Bob Jones University recently published a formal apology for their long-standing policies of disallowing inter-racial dating, and not admitting blacks until the 1970s.

BJU’s history has been chiefly characterized by striving to achieve those goals; but like any human institution, we have failures as well. For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures. We conformed to the culture rather than provide a clear Christian counterpoint to it.  Read the entire statement.

A BeliefNet blogger has a great perspective on this, I think:  accept genuine repentance.

For me the interesting part is the language “ethos of American culture” and “counterpoint.”  It’s odd to think that as far apart as I’d naturally want to feel from BJU’s stance on things… this language in reference to culture isn’t that objectionable.  The difficulty would be if BJU would understand Christian counterpoint as wholy “other”—counterculture that is labeled only Christian—or if they allow for the reality that we’re natural born into a pluralistic American culture, and Christianity must modify and challenge that, but cannot replace.

It’s interesting to find “culture” used twice in BJU’s mission statement.  It begins, “Within the cultural and academic soil of liberal arts education…” and ends with “Bob Jones University seeks to maintain high academic standards, an emphasis on culture, and a practical Christian philosophy that is both orthodox and fervent…”  The former is really interesting: the context of a format for education as culture. The latter is curious in relationship to the race statement. Is the emphasis on “American culture” (and how to understand that? Christian culture as distinct from non-Christian cultures? American Christian culture? Culture as a neutral anthropological condition/construct?

Thanksgiving evening is a weird feeling.

I spent the day out with family. My aunt hosting, crushed olive hors d’oeuvres, red wine, great uncles, football on Direct TV, and not few Republican laments about Obama.

And after pumpkin pie, I did go back for apple crisp. And then coconut cream pie.

There’s the fake kisses, long small talks, phone calls from out of state, and then my drive back to the city, a little less than an hour with no traffic. I stopped at Walgreens on the way home cause I had run out of Dial, and I expressed sympathy with the cashier for having to work ’till 6:30pm on Thanksgiving. “Now it’s gonna be 7:30,” her boss walked up and joked.

There’s the return to the apartment and the kicking of the shoes and e-mail check and the casual browsing on Amazon.

But these aren’t the weird part.

It’s that time about 7:45pm when I identify what’s been bothering me for the last thirty minutes.

I’m hungry.

Really?!?

I ate today! I ATE today! White meat turkey (two ladles of gravy), green bean casserole, mashed potatoes thick enough to stand up, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes and raisins, soft rutabaga, dips, and oven-baked dressing in the middle to keep the wrong juices from flowing together.

I’m hungry.

The weird part is admitting that it could be true. That me microwaving some leftover soup and snacking on corn chips while the last 45 seconds count down isn’t something dreadfully immoral. That six hours from the last meal really is a biologically acceptable time to return to the feeding. But I still I feel gluttonous. Who needs more food on Thanksgiving?

These past months I’ve felt pangs when I notice how little I’m writing reflection. This is a genre that’s helped me sort through years of confusing moments and big-grin highs. But school has tended to suck the writing and creative contemplation right out of me into critical book reviews and take-home exams, leaving scarce left-over words for text messages and terse to-do lists. So tonight, as I think, I’ll take it as the grace of God on a late November evening.

And on Thanksgiving, spiritual is where I’ve gotta go. But it’s not to rehash my necessary gratitude for extravagant American wealth in contrast with a poverty-clasped world; my three desserts to a cross-ocean family’s hunger. This is not because this thought is not strikingly true (to whom much is given…), but that it is not striking enough.

Maybe instead I’m noticing the inescapable similarities between reheating leftovers and choosing turkey from this afternoon’s candle-heated silver tray. Between the ordinary and the celebratory. Maybe it turns out that what we counted at 2pm as Food To Die For is the same substance I’m eating tonight as I’m Hungry Just Like Every Day At This Time. That I make much of something that isn’t special. That the consecrated isn’t remarkably changed from the plain.

Sure there are some special foods that I don’t often eat (my grandma makes cranberry sauce with orange rind bits that could solve Mideast peace). But for the most part: food is food. And I don’t emphasize this to desacralize the holiday as much as to bless the ordinary.

Sure, I’m struck by the wealth I live in that I “take for granted”; the vegetables I ate in early life because Mom’s rhetoric included those starving African children. But if I’m taking anything for granted, it’s that the Spirit is the one who animates my life, not the food. That special-ness (and there should be that) is brought by the same overlooked One who runs circumstance-independent throughout my life, mundane or not. The Blessings, the Right-ness, the Peace That Makes No Sense–comes from my citizenship in a kingdom is built by wine I don’t stock.

The prayer of thanks said in tired corners of the world over Too Little is the same dependence on the same food from the same God who both gives and takes what we need for life.

Meaning a beeping microwave—if moved by the King Who Gives—can be more a holiday than anything else I’ve experienced today. Extra-Ordinary Thanksgiving at 7:45pm. Weird.

More from Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982). (long I realize, but try it anyway)

Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objection commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing.

Writing, Plato has Socrates say, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only int the mind.  It is a thing, a manufactured product.  The same of course is said of computers.  Secondly, [Socrates] urges, writing destroys memory.  Thos who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack…  Today, parents and others fear that pocket calculators provide an external resource of memorized multiplication tables.  Calculators weaken the mind, relieve it of work that keeps it strong.

One weakness in Plato’s position was that, to make his objections effective, he put them into writing.

Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word. Once the word is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available. Moreover, the new technology is not merely used to convey the critique: in fact, it brought the critique into existence. Plato’s analytic thought…was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes.

Over the Rhine played a private show at North Park University on Wednesday evening, 5 November 2008. They’re one of my favorite bands—an intimate fusion of folk, soul, bluegrass, and jazz set on an Mid-Western landscape.

I still don’t have a good lowlight lens for my digital SLR, so many of these aren’t the greatest shots… but they capture the spirit of Linford, Karin, and their current band (which retained the bass player and insanely good drummer from last year, but added a great slide/electric guitarist). The show, being private, was undersold, and it was a bummer, because most of the audience that did come wasn’t familiar their work. At times, I felt like I was one of only three fans in the whole room, embarrassingly the only one yelling for songs I recognized as they began. I know OtR felt it. At one point, Karin leaned into the mic, smiled, and said “mmm… you guys are so well behaved.” Which, translated from her charm and professionalism meant: “wow, I can’t believe how you’re just sitting there.”

I had that urgent desire to stand up waving my hand like an idiot saying—I’m not with them! Really! I like it! Keep going!

They only played one short encore, which my fellow-fan Tim pointed out, was the shortest he’d ever seen them do.

But regardless, the music was, as usual second to none.

Earlier the day, Linford was invited to speak at the North Park chapel service. I posted some quotes.

Linford Detweiler, one half of the folk-jazz-pop- bluegrass-acoustic duo Over the Rhine, spoke last week at North Park University.  OtR usually comes up on my “top 3″ favorite bands list for a long list of reasons, but the not the least that they project a view of the world that sees doubt as part of faith, winter as warm, and back-roads as essential to human experience.

I’d never seen Linford speak more than a few words (he doesn’t talk a lot at concerts, usually letting his partner Karin Bergquist hold down center stage).  His topic was on faith and art, which he approached mostly by storytelling through parts of his childhood.

Some quotes (not quite verbatim, cause I was sketching them with my thumbs on my Treo keyboard—which can also be thanked for the blurry picture—but pretty accurate).

All good art involves getting caught up in a story that’s bigger than you.

My father grew up in Amish community.  No tv, no radio, no electricity.  He was restless.  The first thing he did that was unusual was sketch faces along the whitewashed barn.  People from the community came by and recognized themselves.

At one point [my father] discovered the reel to reel tape recorder.  He’d take it out to the woods and point that microphone at the swamp, the insect symphony, that extravagant useless beauty that’s all around us.

At breakfast he take these recordings and play them for us as we leaned over our hot cereal.

Linford explained that in the religious tradition he grew up in, instruments were not allowed (with the exception of a harmonica, which he didn’t understand. Was portability a criterion?). The piano, Linford’s home instrument, was considered a sin, and he didn’t know immediately what one was.

The first time I heard a piano:  My mother took me to visit an adopted boy. He was sitting at a small wooden house with pedals like a car…

The first time I heard the trumpet: ” It pierced me.  It was like I was thinking my first thoughts.  And one of them was: I’m out here. That sound is coming from up there. I need to be where the sound is coming from

On advice to young song writers:

“Are there powerful early memories that you have that you need to take care of?”

“Write the song that someone would listen to on the next to last day of their life. Maybe that’s the song you’re called to write.”

The Covenant Church website has a feature story on my roommate and classmate, Luke Johnson.

‘Frisbee’ Passion Drives Student’s Choice of Seminary

By Stan Friedman

CHICAGO, IL (November 11, 2008) –  Luke Johnson had to decide whether to work fulltime for Young Life or attend North Park Theological Seminary. The decision was a difficult one as the seminary had offered him a Presidential Scholarship, which would pay all of his tuition.

In the end, Johnson says he chose the seminary because it gave him the opportunity to play Ultimate Frisbee.

Johnson is one of a number of North Park students and Covenanters – especially youth groups – across the country who are passionate about the game. The school also increasingly has become a national presence in both men’s and women’s competition.
Read the rest