theology - Todd Way on Diigo

13 Jan 09

I have come not to bring peace, but a sword | open source theology

Tom Wright offers an interesting proposal on the “sword” statement. Perhaps it needs to be viewed in light of its historicity, and the story of Israel. Those who followed Jesus would be vindicated as true Israel, the true people of God. Those who clung to the old way, of nationalistic zeal and the temple would indeed experience the “sword” of Gods judgement, carried out by the Romans in AD70.

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Re: I have come not to bring peace, but a sword
Submitted by Andrew on 10 January, 2009 - 16:20.

Exactly. That makes perfect historical and literary sense. Historical because that’s what happened. Literary because that’s how the language was used in the Old Testament, which is by a very long way the most relevant interpretive background for the Gospels.

www.opensourcetheology.net/...1651 - Preview

theology narrative

Narrative-realism, Preterism, and the relevance of scripture | andrewperriman

Hey Todd, finish reading this and see if you can explain the difference between a narrative-realist reading and a "modern-platonic (or some other better term)" reading

www.andrewperriman.com/1576 - Preview

theology bible

Much everyday biblical exposition - the do-it-yourself exegesis that we get in sermons, bible studies and popular Christian literature - is essentially either moralizing or allegorizing in character. Or we find that the dense, troublesome text of scripture is everywhere assimilated into the reductive evangelical ’myth’ of the personal saviour who enters into the world to deliver people from their sins and eventually bring them to heaven.
In all these instances the story is told from the perspective of a much later reader who, consciously or unconsciously, views the distant text through the telescope of a tradition, and the tradition inevitably distorts because it must subordinate the text to the interests of an unintended and situationally remote readership.
3 more annotations...
- This leads to what I have called a ’narrative-realist mode’ of reading scripture: we read the Bible as though it were a road traversing the landscape of history; we imagine ourselves walking along that road; we notice the close connection between text and circumstance; and we ask how those who told or heard the story experienced the journey. This is a very different exercise to the more common approach which is either to treat the text as a body of undifferentiated sacred material to be mined for pietistic or dogmatic purposes.
- As we walk this road, however, we may discover that much of what we took to be universal teaching has a restricted historical reference or application. When we begin to suspect that this is equally true for what is said in the New Testament about the future, we find that we come under a barrage of accusations that this is nothing other than classic Preterism. So what is Preterism?
- we should expect the texts to address the circumstances and concerns of the original reading community unless there is a clear indication to the contrary. One crucial implication here is that that when future events are described, it is likely that a foreseeable state of affairs is in view rather than an inconceivable future beyond the historical purview of the first century church.

29 Dec 08

Universalism and the Bible

pantheon.yale.edu/...univ.htm - Preview

hell universalism theology bible

Some read many of these passages
as
Jesus predicting the suffering incurred during the destruction of
Jerusalem.
It was apparently a big issue in the Jewish community around the time
of
the writing of the book of Matthew whether this truly horrible and
gruesome
event was due to the Christians following a false Messiah (as some
non-Christians
claimed) or rather because the non-Christian Jews had failed to
recognize
the hour of their visitation (as some Christians held).
Consider Romans 16:25-26, which, as our
translations
have it, speaks of "the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but
is now disclosed." Here, the Greek that gets translated as "for long
ages"
includes the very Greek work that is translated as "eternal" or
"everlasting"
elsewhere, including the "eternal" punishment passages. But in this
Romans
passage, Paul seems not to mean "eternal" by this word, for he
immediately
goes on to say the secret "is now disclosed", so of course it wasn't
kept
secret eternally. That's why our translations don't translate it as
"eternally"
here.

19 Dec 08

Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop - TIME

www.time.com/...0,8599,1710844,00.html - Preview

theology wright heaven

It has, originally, to do with the translation of Jewish ideas into Greek. The New Testament is deeply, deeply Jewish, and the Jews had for some time been intuiting a final, physical resurrection. They believed that the world of space and time and matter is messed up, but remains basically good, and God will eventually sort it out and put it right again. Belief in that goodness is absolutely essential to Christianity, both theologically and morally. But Greek-speaking Christians influenced by Plato saw our cosmos as shabby and misshapen and full of lies, and the idea was not to make it right, but to escape it and leave behind our material bodies
Never at any point do the Gospels or Paul say Jesus has been raised, therefore we are we are all going to heaven. They all say, Jesus is raised, therefore the new creation has begun, and we have a job to do.
1 more annotations...
- Much of "traditional" Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won't be going up there to him, he'll be coming down here.

02 Nov 08

How Can The Bible Be Authoritative? by N.T. Wright

5th act hermenuetics

www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Bible_Authoritative.htm - Preview

wright theology authority

23 Oct 08

USATODAY.com - Transcript: Bono remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast

www.usatoday.com/...06-02-02-bono-transcript_x.htm - Preview

poverty theology

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.

15 Oct 08

Interview with Stanley Hauerwas

Jim Wallis interviews Stanley Hauerwas (sometime in 2002) on his response to 9/11, terrorism, and global police forces.

www.sojo.net/index.cfm - Preview

hauerwas nonviolence politics theology

Is "pacifist" a word that you use to describe yourself?

Hauerwas: I oftentimes say in public that I'm a pacifist, but I don't like the word for two reasons. One, it's just so passive, and I think Christian nonviolence is very active confrontation with violence. Second, I think the word pacifism sounds like you have a position that is somehow separate from your worship of the crucified Savior. Christian nonviolence is entailed in the very heart of what it means to worship a crucified God. So I don't like the idea that pacifism has some further implication for my belief in Jesus.
Tonto principle of Christian ethics.
12 more annotations...
- it for the long haul
- I don't like calling it "terrorism" because it's completely uncontrollable -- it doesn't do work that you need it to do for moral discrimination. I think you need to call it murder -- and insofar as it's murder, you want to arrest the perpetrator.
- B52s turn out to be very crude police officers
- My best hunch right now is that the allies of nonviolent people are political realists. Political realists have a sense that bombing a Stone Age country back to the Stone Age is exactly what bin Laden wants us to do.
- How could you have had the Civil Rights movement without the patience of the black church? You've got to have people schooled in the gospel to say, "We would rather lose than fight wrongly."
- I think a police force is the best institutionalization of what just war should be about. But then the arresting agent is not the same as the judging agent. In war, those two are the same.
- "What would you do if your grandmother's going to be raped and you need to kill somebody?" Given the alternatives, of course I can support it! (Laugh.) Yes, that's certainly the least violent alternative we have, and I would think that's good
- We want to support those who would rather die than murder. If you take Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- if you call the World Trade Center terrorism, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrorist acts. And I've had people say, "Well, that was war." And I say, "Well, you murder in war, too." The question is, would the American people have been ready to have more American soldiers die and more Japanese soldiers die on the beaches of Japan rather than to commit the murders of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? That's who we want to be: a people that would rather have more people die than to have to do a murderous act. I think that's who the military is, by the way. I think the military was profoundly embarrassed about the bombing in Yugoslavia. They're honorable people. I think there are probably some of them who are embarrassed about the bombing we're doing in Afghanistan, because they understand that part of what they're about is that they would rather die than murder. I give high credence to that.
- we're not running the world. But in a world we're not running, we want to be an alternative that forces imaginative possibilities that wouldn't be there otherwise
- You've got to be really embedded in a different set of practices to force a different imagination.
- Pacifism, Christian nonviolence, is a commitment to vulnerability. We have to put our lives in one another's hands, because that's the way God created us -- to be vulnerable.
- I don't want to be terribly judgmental about people rediscovering their patriotism, because I think it's a sign of how deeply lonely the American people are that suddenly they feel together. And that's very frightening, because a rootless consumer society suddenly deciding it has something to kill for is a very frightening reality.

14 Oct 08

The Last Word and the Word After That | open source theology

Andrew Perriman (author of "The Coming of the Son of Man") critiques McLaren's "Last Word"

www.opensourcetheology.net/...656 - Preview

theology hell eschatology mclaren

stanley hauerwas on sin

3 quotes from stanley on sin

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hauerwas theology soteriology

“Another hallmark of Christianity is that salvation is not individualistic—it’s not something one person receives for himself or herself. Salvation is the reign of God. It is a political alternative to the way the world is constituted. That’s a very important part of the story that has been lost to accounts of salvation that are centered in the individual. But without an understanding that salvation is the reign of God, the need for the church to mediate salvation makes no sense at all.” (The Hauerwas Reader, p. 533).
“I don’t have any faith in myself of living a virtuous life; but if I am surrounded by other people who are also formed by the same commitments, then we’ve got a better chance. We need one another to live up to the wonderful invitation we’ve been given to be other than we are.” (534).

06 Sep 08

ABORTION, THEOLOGICALLY UNDERSTOOD

Article from 1990. Hauerwas shares a sermon on abortion then offers ethical commentary.

lifewatch.org/abortion.html - Preview

abortion ethics theology hauerwas

We cannot simply throw the issue of abortion in the faces of women and say, 'You
decide and you bear the consequences of your decision.' As the church, our response to the
abortion issue must be to shoulder the responsibility to care for women and children. We
cannot do otherwise and still be the church.
Christians in America are tempted to think of issues like abortion primarily in legal
terms such as "rights." This is because the legal mode, as de Tocqueville
pointed out long ago, provides the constituting morality in liberal societies. In other
words, when you live in a liberal society like ours, the fundamental problem is how you
can achieve cooperative agreements between individuals who share nothing in common other
than their fear of death. In liberal society the law has the function of securing such
agreements. That is the reason why lawyers are to America what priests were to the
medieval world. The law is our way of negotiating safe agreements between autonomous
individuals who have nothing else in common other than their fear of death and their
mutual desire for protection.
9 more annotations...
- We
  Christians do not believe that we have inalienable rights. That is the false presumption
  of Enlightenment individualism, and it opposes everything that Christians believe about
  what it means to be a creature.
- We do not believe that we have a right to our bodies because when
  we are baptized we become members of one another; then we can tell one another what it is
  that we should, and should not, do with our bodies.
- Here is the way it works: you can only act in the world that you
  can see, and you must be taught to see by learning to say.
- One of the crucial issues here is how we learn to be a people dependent on one another.
  We must learn to confess that, as a hospitable people, we need one another because we are
  dependent on one another. The last thing that the church wants is a bunch of autonomous,
  free individuals. We want people who know how to express authentic need, because that
  creates community.
- We, as church, are ready to be challenged by the other. This has to do with the fact
  that in the church, every adult, whether single or married, is called to be
  parent. All Christian adults have a parental responsibility because of baptism. Biology
  does not make parents in the church. Baptism does. Baptism makes all adult Christians
  parents and gives them the obligation to help introduce these children to the Gospel.
  Listen to the baptismal vows; in them the whole church promises to be parent. In this
  regard the church reinvents the family.
- I often remind my right-to-life friends that Christians took their
  children with them to martyrdom rather than have them raised pagan. Christians believe
  there is much worth dying for. We do not believe that human life is an absolute good in
  and of itself. Of course our desire to protect human life is part of our seeing each human
  being as God's creature. But that does not mean that we believe that life is an overriding
  good.
  
  To say that life is an overriding good is to underwrite the modern sentimentality that
  there is absolutely nothing in this world worth dying for. Christians know that
  Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been
  about. Listen to the Gospel! I know that today we use the church primarily as a means of
  safety, but life in the church actually involves extended training in learning to die
  early.
- Honestly, I cannot imagine anything worse than
  people saying that they have children because their hope for the future is in their
  children. You would never have children if you had them for that reason. We are able to
  have children because our hope is in God, who makes it possible to do the absurd thing of
  having children. In a world of such terrible injustice, in a world of such terrible
  misery, in a world that may well be about the killing of our children, having children is
  an extraordinary act of faith and hope. But as Christians we can have a hope in God that
  urges us to welcome children.
- Even Christians now think that we ought to marry people simply because
  they are "in love." Wrong, wrong, wrong! What could being in love possibly mean?
  The romantic view underwrites the presumption that, because people are in love, it is
  therefore legitimate for them to have sexual intercourse, whether they are married or not.
  Contrary to this is the church's view of marriage. To the church, marriage is the public
  declaration that two people have pledged to live together faithfully for a lifetime.
- Christians witness to wider society first of all not by
  lobbying for a law against abortion, but by welcoming the children that the wider society
  does not want. Part of that witness might be to say to our pro-choice friends, "You
  are absolutely right. I don't think that any poor woman ought to be forced to have a child
  that she cannot afford. So let's work hard for an adequate child allowance in this
  country." That may not be entirely satisfactory, but that is one approach.

Todd Way's Library tagged theology → View Popular

I have come not to bring peace, but a sword | open source theology

Re: I have come not to bring peace, but a sword

Narrative-realism, Preterism, and the relevance of scripture | andrewperriman

Universalism and the Bible

Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop - TIME

How Can The Bible Be Authoritative? by N.T. Wright

USATODAY.com - Transcript: Bono remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast

Interview with Stanley Hauerwas

The Last Word and the Word After That | open source theology

stanley hauerwas on sin

ABORTION, THEOLOGICALLY UNDERSTOOD

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