theo|digital

I taught several breakout sessions at IGNITE 2012 conference from December 28-30. The audio has been posted if you’d like to check it out. My audience for this was college students and campus missionaries. IGNITE is sponsored by Great Commission Ministries Churches, which is the original group of campus-focused churches that started GCM as a missions agency, and I have quite a few good friends here, so it’s very informal.

I started the workshop by telling the story of three Polaroids in my head:

I do use the white board a decent amount, so that doesn’t lend itself to audio super well. And this was the first time through this material for me in this arrangement. But disclaimers aside:

Breakout Session: O Come O Come Emmanuel: Jesus, Israel, and the Gospel

We probably sang this favorite Christmas hymn in the last few week–”ransom captive Israel” and “Rod of Jesse?” But did we get it?  And did we notice that the song itself shares the Gospel?  Using insights from Bible professor Scot McKnight’s new book, The King Jesus Gospel, (plus others), we’ll explore again how the Gospel we share today relates to Israel.

 Listen Now (at www.gcmcignite.com)

 Handout O Come O Come Emmanuel

And if it’s at all helpful, here are my actual raw teaching notes (hopefully nothing embarrassing in here!). For anyone who actually attended, this will have portions of things I cut from the workshop.

 Ridgeway Workshop Outline (raw notes) 2012

Ready for a (really) long scrolling post with not much more than a minor, un-life-altering rant? Perfect.

Click to Zoom: Amazon.com homepage refresh

Just a note from floating on the web on a Saturday morning.  Today, Amazon seems to be rolling out yet another visual update (beta-tested earlier?); my Amazon home page looks a even more sparse than usual.  It made me think about how much their information hierarchy and resulting customer experience have been sorta both the best and the worst of the web over the years.

A decade ago, Amazon.com used the be the very model of the new, data-driven, intelligently easy-to-use website.  It had perfect “just in time” links and seemed to know where you want to go.  Their tabs interface from the late 90sand into the 2000s was widely copied.

Credit: www.lukew.com | Amazon Tabs in the late 90s

These days, Amazon.com remains one of the top retailers in the US ($18.5 billion), but its website is a glut of chocked together, un-curated information presented in long scrolling pages.  Over the last several years they’ve tried to recover, and definitely have done better work on cleaning up the main page.  Today they did it again, simplifying the top two inches and giving higher preference to a google-like search bar. All other options are hidden back into drop-down menus.

The Real Problem: The Product Page

The problem is that most of their attention has gone to cleaning up their front page, which I spend very little time on. 80% of the time, I google for a book or product I’m looking for, and jump straight through the search results to the Amazon product page.  Then I jump from product to product.

And let’s be honest, the product pages really are pretty bad.  Some key features shine (like “Search Inside” for books) and fortunately the pricing (for book editions at least) is cleanly displayed. But the rest of the page is a disordered, redundant mess of widgets demarcated only by dashed lines and populated by unreliable data.

For instance, I just searched for an iPhone (yep, got one of those now) charger. USB Sync and Charging Cable Compatible with Apple iPhone (White) came up first.  (It’s .78 cents.  I’m guessing because of the price the vendor will make up the cost in shipping charges. I had clicked on it because it was Amazon Prime eligible, but of course, that didn’t come up first:  I’ll have to find the Prime price.  But I digress.)

Is this the charger I want?? Maybe.  Maybe I’ll get help to decide by s c r o l l i n g   d o w n…

 (ps – clicking on screenshots quickly zooms in)

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(Okay, hiatus on writing and reading while I survived December and holidays is over.  Back to the blog.)

I’ve been all over on books, but I’ve finally picked back up NT Wright’s Scripture and the Authority of God, and like usual, always quickly wonder why I ever put Wright down. His writing is simultaneously fun and data-rich—I wind up pencil marking on nearly every page. That’s not typical for me. So many other writers I grasp their point in the first page of the chapter, and from then on it’s just repetition. Wright repeats themes, but always with nuance that makes not want to miss a paragraph.

Anyway, here he’s talking about the “authority of scripture” as a phrase that gets thrown around a lot but needs more critical examination.

In Christian theology, such phrases regularly act as “portable stories”—that is, ways of packing up longer narratives about God, Jesus, the church and the world, folding them away into convenient suitcases, and then carrying them about with us.

(A good example is the phrase “the atonement.” This phrase is rare in the Bible itself; instead, we find things like, “The Messiah died for our sins according to the scriptures”; “God so loved the world that he gave his only son,” and so on. But if we are to discuss the atonement, it is easier to do so with a single phrase, assumed to “contain” all these sentences, then by repeating one or more of them each time).

Shorthands, in other words, are useful in the same way suitcases are.  They enable us to pick up lots of complicated things and carry them around all together. But we should never forget that the point of doing so, like the point of carrying belongings in a suitcase, is that what has been packed away can then be unpacked and put to use in a new location.

Too much debate about scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases. It is time to unpack our shorthand doctrines, to lay them out and inspect them. Long years in a suitcase may have made some of the contents go moldy. They will benefit from fresh air, and perhaps a hot iron.