Wittenberg Door

oooh that smell

Does anybody know what I am talking about when I say "the smell of consumerism?"

I went to Blockbuster to rent the new Lord of the Rings DVD - and Blockbuster has this smell - I smell it other places - it is a smell of "new stuff." Does anyone know what I am talking about? Anyway - it's a peculiar sensation that I thought I would record. I love that smell - the smell of new stuff!

I got my NT Wright books today. (ps they smell good) In all fairness I also ordered a book that critiques his works as well. But I am going to read him first. I am not sure if I will ever finish. His first book is the smallest - registering in at only a mere 535 pages. The mammoth - Resurrection - is 818 pages. All this and I am starting classes on Tuesday. 6 books one class - 4 books for another. I am glad that I love to read.

I will read a little 100 page book by Os Guinness this weekend about how Christians in trying to become relevant have become irrelelvant. Sounds good.

I will still try to blog - I will need it (the blog) probably to vent and to keep my sanity.

talking again

Why is it that when we explain the faith to someone - we immediately want to bring them to the incarnation and Jesus on the cross instead of back to where Paul did - creation. Isn't that the place where most world-views differ the most? Could it be that if a "pagan" understood the creation narrative and the ramifications of a teleological existence that we could then bring in the incarnation and cross and it make more sense? Do we just jump to the middle of the story? Is it like watching "The Two Towers" in the middle for 5 minutes and not understanding the story or the characters?

Wondering... still trying to listen - but failing fast. Want to talk tooo much!!

listening

I need to develop my skills as a listener. I took a small quiz in a book about listening skills and being a reflective listener and I failed miserably. I do listen - to my credit - more than I did, say two years ago, but that is not saying much. I guess the realization that I am coming to is that the world does not revolve around me (imagine that - to use a cliche.) I have knowledge of that intellectually - but I am having to let it trickle into the other areas of my soul.

So I am going to listen. Anyone need someone to listen? I need practice. Maybe I can shut up long enough to listen. My wife will be the perfect guinea pig. She gets tired of hearing me talk. But as soon as I start to do this spiritual practice she will immediately think that something is wrong. People always do when you talk a great deal and then decide to care about someone other than yourself and start listening.

I am shutting up now.

to cultivate conversation

I thought that this was a great idea - have a time and a place that people just get together - public invited - just to talk about spiritual and "meaning of life" issues.

Here is somewhere they are doing that - Cafe Grace

I am reading a book by the guy that started Cafe Grace. He is a scholar in New Testament and Pauline Studies but he works in the corporate world. His main idea in the book that I am reading in to decentralize "church." I see a decentralization coming not only of the "professional" God-man (clergy) but also of the "sunday service" or congregation-oriented christianity.

I think this is a great idea (see link)

just ordered books and various musings

I ordered some books by N.T. Wright tonight. I hope that they are interesting reads. I got the whole series Books 1,2, and 3. The third book on the resurrection - interests me very much. I have so many books on my to read list and I guess these will join them. I do read them - it just takes awhile to finish them when you are reading 5 at one time. I am such a nerd that I am starting to make out a reading schedule like I have in seminary for my personal reading - so that I will crank out the 2 books a week again. I am a student - so I am able to read more. But blogging has also made reading more of a challenge - blogging is fun!!! And also very time consuming. So now I must limit my time with it as well. My wife has finally realized that because I am a pastor and student that my reading is not excessive - it is my job. The people that go to our fellowship are an intelligent bunch - but with the exception of two guys - they read probably one book every 3 or 4 months. I believe that is good because I am sure for the average congregation reads far less. My dad who is a Warren Buffet disciple (yeah Jimmy's brother - very rich brother J/K) says that he is going to start reading 2 every month because that is what the world's "richest people" do. I cannot convince him that reading does not make one rich. (Ha Ha my dad says) But part of being a "pastor" is to devote time to "prayer and to the Word" which I do with Bible reading both devotionally and in study taking up a large percent of my time. I feel sometimes - pardon the analogy- like a momma bird who chews up the food and gives it to her chicks. I see that changing. I do not want to be everyone's "Moses" - I want people to learn to hear and seek God for themselves. It is tough to do though when you come from a system that spoonfeeds you everything that you need to know about "Christian Theology in 5 Minutes a Day". What a culture we live in.

newest rantings on "recapturing the pagan mind"

Pagan utopia - nature is self-generating and worthy of worship. No creator because there was no creation. No transcendence- WYSIWYG.

Christian utopia begins with creator/creature distinction. God exists independently of creation as Creator of life. Begins with God's act of creation and concludes with His act of recreation. Teleological - not cyclical.

Elementary christian philo 101 - but it gets better...

Paul was not your average rabbi - but the "apostle to the pagans"

20 things in the bible that drives the extreme left crazy

From Worldnetdaily article by Doug Powers

1.Moses parted the Red Sea without first performing an environmental impact study.

2. Jesus gave a Sermon on the Mount where he talked of giving to the poor, and spoke out against greed, and all without charging attendees $300 per ticket. (Barbra Streisand only).

3. The term "The Three Wise Men" is insensitive to the intellectually challenged. That should be changed to the "Trio of educationally advantaged amateur astronomers."

4. Instead of gold, frankincense and myrrh, they should have brought hummus, incense and a representative from Child Protective Services.

5. The Virgin Mary didn't first meet with consultants from Planned Parenthood.

6. Ten plagues and still not a single person thought of nationalizing health care?

7. Adam didn't ask Eve for verbal as well as written consent before touching her.

8. Of course Cain killed Abel. He was obviously suffering either from bipolar disorder, low blood sugar, emotional abuse as a child, or societal neglect.

9. "The trials of Job" were nothing. Try getting a job with nothing but a masters degree in Norwegian Art History – that's a test!

10. Too bad Greenpeace didn't have their own ark so they could have rammed Noah's Ark. You just know that, after the flood, Noah sold those animals to the circus.

11. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah could have easily been prevented if they would have passed hate-crime legislation sooner.

12. Jesus is one of the greatest teachers in history, but isn't a member of the National Education Association. In other words, God uses scab labor.

13. David slew Goliath simply because he was unfortunate enough to have been stricken with gigantism.

14. "The Last Supper" didn't offer an option for people on gluten-free diets, and the fat content on the food was not labeled.

15. The part about Jonah and the whale becoming entangled in tuna nets is conveniently passed over in the Old Testament.

16. God should have spent the seventh day not resting, but rather going around putting warning stickers on all potentially dangerous, really pointy things.

17. What's the big deal about Nebuchadnezzar spending seven years ingesting grass? Heck, Woody Harrelson's done it longer than that.

18. The Bible mentions nothing about obtaining the necessary permits to build the Tower of Babel.

19. People lived to be hundreds of years old without prescription-drug coverage? I don't think so.

20. Jesus turned water into wine, which was not very mindful of those who happened to be teetering on the brink of plunging down the stairs of their 12-step program.

21. Of all the wealth possessed by King Solomon, the amount he donated to environmental causes: $0.

And the thing about the Bible that drives the left the most crazy? People can find salvation without their assistance.

capturing my attention

This is a new book I am reading- a must read for those who believe that something is going on in the world that is not quite peachy...

I quoted this book in an earlier blog-entry. I am very anti-LEFT BEHIND theology - thinking most of it is part of the "Christi-culture" as well as very alarmist. I will say this- Peter Jones who wrote this book - has captured my attention with a detailed exposition of Roman political, social, and spiritual history and its comparison to U.S.A. and UN. Even if the eschatological EVE of the world is not at hand - the demise of the US may be (?) I don't know. I am not a Hal Lindsey Scofieldian disciple - however the similarities of the two cultures cannot be ignored. In the second part of the book (which I am about to dive into) he gets into the apologetical side of pagan religion. Taking a pagan back to creation like the apostle Paul did. Sounds interesting. I will dialogue more about this later.

a christian blog entry

Taken from a GQ article 2002

WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?
BUT MORE, IMPORTANT, WHAT WERE JESUS' FITNESS SECRETS? IF YOU WERE ONE OF THE GROWING MILLIONS OF AMERICANS LIVING IN THE MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR CHRISTIAN ALTERNACULTURE—IN WHICH EVERYTHING IN MAINSTREAM CULTURE GETS CLONED AND THEN BLEACHED OF "SINFUL" CONTENT—YOU'D KNOW. WALTER KIRN SPENDS SEVEN STRANGE DAYS WALKING IN THE SHOES OF THE FAITHFUL.

DAY ONE: RESOLUTlONS

Today I will pray for Jewel, the singer-songwriter, "that Jewel's artistry in music and poetry will draw her audience into an encounter with truth." Tomorrow I'll pray for Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire, "that Allen and others working on the leading edge of interactive media will pursue their objectives with integrity." And later this week, in the manner and order prescribed by Praying for the Worlds 365 Most Influential People: 5 Minutes a Day to Change Your World, I will pray for Michael Crichton, the author/producer; for Jesse Helms, the North Carolina senator; and for Bill Nye, who hosts TV's Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Today I will start reading Desecration, the ninth installment of the Left Behind series, a best-selling fictional treatment of the Apocalypse that pits the heroic Rayford Steele ("original member of the Tribulation Force3 against the cloven-hoofed Nicolae Carpathia ("self-appointed Global Community potentate3. Today I will dine on foods from What Would Jesus Eat? by Don Colbert, M.D., heeding Dr. Colbert's solemn warning that "eating a diet high in salt, low in fiber, very high in fat and sugar, and virtually void of nutrients is not the way Jesus ate. Today I will ask my daughter, Maisie, 3, to pick out a video from the Bibleman series, a live-action superhero saga for kids directed by and featuring Willie Aames of Eight Is Enough and Charles in Charge fame.

Today I will plug in my TVGuardian, a handy electronic chaperone whose "patent pending, award winning technology" filters out "95% to 100% of foul language from TV shows" and replaces objectionable phrases like She's such a #%&#h! and Oh &#!t! with She's such a nag! and Oh crud!

Today I will leave behind the fallen world of secular American pop culture and enter the sell-contained parallel universe of American Christian pop culture, within which I've vowed to dwell, exclusively, for seven days and nights, watching PAX instead of NBC and letting Pat Robertson be my Tom Brokaw. But first, before I do any of these things, I will read from my new prayer book and ask God "to bless Jewel with safety, meaningful relationships" and, of course, "success."

DAY TWO: ADJUSTMENT

I wake aboard the Ark.

The old Ark, the biblical Ark, constructed to save the chosen from the Great Flood, had two of every creature in existence. The new Ark, the cultural Ark, built to save the chosen from the Great Media Flood, also has two of everything I'm learning. You say you're a Pearl Jam fan? Check out Third Day. They sound just like them--same soaring guttural vocals, same driven musicianship, same crappy clothes, just a slightly different message: Repent! You say you like Grisham- and Clancy-style potboilers! Grab a copy of Ted Dekker's Heaven's Wager--same stick-figure characterizations, same preschool prose, just a slightly different moral: Repent! Your kids enjoy Batman, you say? Try Bibleman. Same mask, same cape, just a slightly different...

That's the convincing logic of the Ark: If a person is going to waste his life cranking the stereo, clicking the remote, reading paperback pulp and chasing diet fads, he may as well save his soul while he's at it. Holy living no longer requires self-denial. On the Ark, every mass diversion has been cloned, from Internet news sites to MTV to action movies, and it's possible to live inside the spirit, without unplugging oneself from modern life, twenty-four hours a day.

After a wholesome scriptural breakfast of unsweetened wholegrain cereal, I start my morning with a holy workout based on a chapter from Dr. Colbert's book, "Did Jesus Exercise?" It's a question I never would have thought to ask, but in Ark culture there's a fundamental presumption that if one squeezes the Bible hard enough it will yield practical guidance on any topic, from personal finance to toilet training. And lo, it appears that the Lord did have a fitness program: Many days he walked "between ten and twenty miles" and thus "certainly was engaged in aerobic exercise." As I walk, I listen to music over headphones, a convenience unavailable in Jesus' time. The CD is the sound track from Extreme Days, a Christian movie for hyper suburban teens that was released last fall. According to a slick promotional video hosted by a bouncy-breasted blond veejay (she's a virgin, presumably, but just barely), the story of Extreme Days involves "five friends forever changed by a journey to the threshold of life and sport.... [They'll test their will and skill with the best extreme-sports athletes in the world." Skateboarders for the Lord, in other words. The sound track includes a range of acts-Audio Adrenaline, P.O.D., PAX217--from the born-again-rock scene's "alternative" department. They're not that bad. They're not bad at all, in fact. Because their lyrics are mostly unintelligible, there's no way to know they're even Christian, really. And yet, in the same way one sensed that groups like Abba were singing in a language they didn't speak, one detects a certain falseness in these bands' sound. They're trying too hard, somehow. They have the formula but lack the flair. They're straining at carelessness, but deep in their hearts they do care, one suspects--about their fans, their message, their authenticity. Bottom line: They sound a bit like foreigners--highly talented Asian prodigies whose governments have equipped them with guitars and trained them in some elite punk-rock academy.

These new Christian bands rock like Americans play soccer: skillfully but somehow not convincingly.

Or maybe it's the power of suggestion that makes the stuff seem counterfeit to me. At the Family Christian Store in Bozeman, Montana, the multimedia spiritual emporium where I bought the CD and my other Ark supplies, a poster above the music racks matches name-brand acts from secular radio with their closest sanctified equivalents. For the atheist teen who has suddenly been converted and wants to carry into his new life as many of his old attitudes and tastes as he can safely manage, such a chart would prove helpful, I imagine, much as a cookbook of sugar-free recipes might help a chocoholic with diabetes. For me, though, the chart confirmed a preconception that Christian rock is a cultural oxymorona calculated, systematic rip-off, not a genuine surge of inspired energy.

After my walk, I turn on the computer to survey the day's news, a morning ritual. Today, though, instead of going to the Drudge Report or NYTimes.com, I call up the home page of Crosswalk.com, the all-purpose Christian Internet portal whose NASDAQ symbol is AMEN. Crosswalk.com is a Net within the Net, where vulnerable children and sensitive adults can surf without fear of predators and porn.

Before I can find the morning headlines, I'm snagged by an ad for Pura Vida Coffee, a mail-order outfit that donates its profits to Central American children's ministries. They even have their own coffee on the Ark! There's no harm in that, of course, so I order a pound and feel a virtuous shiver, a passing glow. Can buying sundries score me points with God? If so, I wish there were Christian gasoline too--Christian tube socks, Christian printer cartridges!

Here are the day's big stories according to Crosswalk.com:

CHURCH PREPARES COURT FIGHT TO SAVE LAND FROM DEVELOPERS. PASTOR FINED $1,000 FOR REBUKING LEWD WOMAN. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN JEOPARDY IN GEORGIAN REPUBLIC. GOD AND GUINNESS" REACHES OUT TO POST-MODERN GENERATION.

It's not exactly CNN, and I find this refreshing. I'm burned out on bad news. As a member of the post-modem generation myself, I also support people's right to shape reality in whatever way they see fit. A world in which rebuffing lewd women rates a headline-a world in which lewd women get rebuked at all, a world in which the word lewd is even used--must be a cozy, reassuring place, and it doesn't surprise me that some should choose to dwell there. I'm tempted to hop off the Ark and check the real news, but why break the spell, why shatter the small-town silence? Instead I do the paternal-Christian thing and ask my daughter, whom I've prohibited from watching secular children's TV this week, to join me for a viewing of Bibleman: Conquering the Wrath of Rage.

"Who's Bibleman?" Maisie sneers. I'm taken aback. She's only 5, and she's never sneered before.

"That video you picked out. You want to watch it? It's like that Spider-Man movie you've probably heard about." She shakes her head and toddles off to her room. Despite the videos colorful, jazzy packaging, she has sensed the whiff of uplift in its title and wants no part of it. She'll break down soon, though. A few more days without Disney or Nickelodeon and Bibleman will look pretty good to her.

A few more days without sugar, salt, major-label music or mainstream news and I bet it will look pretty tempting to me too.

DAY THREE: APOCALYPSE KITSCH

I sit in an armchair and open Desecration (subtitled Antichrist Takes the Throne). What I don't understand about these Left Behind books is how there can be so f--ing many of them, given that their subject is Armageddon. How long can a writer drag out the Second Coming? Even a trilogy would be a stretch, but ten novels going on eleven, all huge sellers, with no final volume in sight? I smell a con.

But that's because I've failed to realize this: On the Ark, the End of the World is never ending, because it's the only dramatic game in town. Drop the curtain on the Apocalypse and there are no more stories--the party's over. Which means the art of Desecration, and of the Christian thriller in general, is the art of the stall--of giving the reader a sense of forward motion without moving things any closer to a conclusion. This task is complicated by the fact that the genre's basic principles rule out new suspense. Since the heroes are assured of going to Heaven, it doesn't really matter if they die, and since the villains are bound to bum in hell, it doesn't matter if they win. Which they won't, of course. The Bible tells us so.

So why am I still reading? It's a mystery. Desecration's dialogue is preposterous ("In all candor, Anika, our intelligence reports indicated that we might face more opposition here, in the traditional homeland of several obsolete religions"), and its situations; and episodes develop in a pell-mell, miscellaneous cascade, careening from Jerusalem holy sites, where Ultimate Evil haunts the ancient shadows, to the family rooms of average midwestern homes, where true-blue Americans with names like Ray battle the Beast using laptops and ham radios. No, it must be the freakish tone that holds me: part Marvel Comics ("Mac jumped out and realized his front tires were on the edge of the gigantic crevasse") and part Sunday sermon ("We often wonder, when the truth is now so clear, why not everyone comes to Christ"). Who'd have thought such styles could ever be united? It's the prose equivalent of a sideshow monster: a snake with fur or a dolphin-flippered lady, unbearable, repulsive, yet irresistible. I decide to make this an all Armageddon day, so I pop in a tape of Megiddo: The Omega Code 2, starring Michael York as Stone Alexander, the Antichrist, and Michael Biehn as David Alexander, the straitlaced American president who opposes him and also happens to be his brother--a touch that suggests that Doomsday by itself is not sufficient but needs a soap-opera family angle too. After a brief intro by Hal Lindsay, a leading doomsayer from the 1970s and proof that a Christian can cry wolf for decades on end and still not lose his audience, the movie deals its familiar hand of cards. As in the Left Behind books, the Antichrist is an oily Eurotrash bureaucrat whose globalist rhetoric masks his raw ambition. His cosmopolitanism marks him as the Evil One as surely as David Alexander's Yankee bluntness shows he's a born lieutenant of the Lord. Does this come from the Book of Revelation? Of course not. The folks behind Megiddo and Desecration may pose as scholars of biblical prophecy, loading their products with murky sacred symbols and fancy numerological allusions, but at heart they're cornpone vaudevillians.

As the evidence mounts that Megiddo's cosmic climax will be a dud and necessitate a sequel, I find myself pitying Michael Biehn. Biehn is your typical Christian-movie star: a semilegitimate Hollywood leading man (remember Navy SEALS?) who hasn't been seen much for the past few years and appears to have weathered some crisis or tribulation that has dimmed his good looks without completely wrecking them. Because his role in Megiddo has no substance, what comes through most clearly in his numb performance is his gratitude for finding work mixed with his self-hatred for taking the work.

Biehn has plenty of company, of course. Ark culture is all about the comeback and the redemption of the mainstream hasbeen. The music aisle of the Family Christian Store features a number of John Tesh CDs. The former cohost of Entertainment Tonight has rebranded himself as a composer of inspirational music. In his photos, he's a praying man's Michael Bolton, all stuble and jawline and long–if thinning–blond hair. He's just the type church ladies go nuts for: a sort of macho eunuch. Burt Reynolds comes in a Christian version now, too. In Waterrproof, a weepy melodrama about forgiveness and spiritual growth, he plays a crusty Jewish deli owner who's shot in a holdup by a troubled black kid. The air of studly mischief that made Burt famous persists, but only faintly, subliminally. Once, long ago, he sinned, but now he's harmless.

I suspect Christian movie fans love to witness such neuterings. You thought you were such hot s--t, I hear them thinking. Look at you now--you're not even allowed to cuss!

DAY FOUR: REVELATION

Eating as Jesus ate, I have lost one pound. I can't bring myself to pray for Jesse Helms. The ending of Desecration was a cheat. Maisie still refuses to watch Bibleman.

When I'm depressed, I drive, and I'm depressed today so I set out for Bozeman, thirty miles away, to fetch more Ark supplies. On the way, I tune in to Christian radio, and the moment I hit the right frequency, I know it. There's a curious hush in the announcers' voices, as though they're broadcasting from a library, and though the top-of-the-hour news report is heralded by a dramatic burst of music not unlike those used on secular networks, the stories that immediately follow deal with abortion and pornography instead of politicians and celebrities. There's news from Israel, reported straight, but I detect an agenda between the lines--the correspondent is hoping to remind me that suicide bombings mean the End is near and it's time to get my life in order. Fair enough, but I need no reminding. What I need is a little meaningless entertainment.

The station--one of those disembodied jobs that's beamed via satellite from a distant headquarters--serves up a relentless series of buzz-kills. A man discussing the war on terrorism, which is depressing enough, digresses into a rant about damnation and how the real terror threatening the world lurks inside the sinful human heart. A therapist specializing in relationships instructs the wives out there to bow their heads and pray for a spirit of obedience. A rambling sermon about generosity loses itself in an endless and painful anecdote about a mentally retarded busboy who toiled at a truck stop to buy medicine for his sick mom until he fell ill and was hospitalized himself.

An odd sense of dislocation comes over me. I'm floating out of my Ford and into space. Secular radio, with its sports and weather, grounds one in a specific time and place — it's rush hour, the Vikings play the Rams tonight, tomorrow it will be fair to partly cloudy —but Christian radio bypasses such trivia, conjuring up a vast eternal void in which titanic forces of good and evil struggle over man's immortal soul. Who cares if it's sunny or rainy? Details, details. Who cares about traffic conditions? The Lord is coming!

I'm amazed that regular listeners can bear such weight, yet I've spoken to some who find it soothing. They say Christian radio makes them feel cocooned, particularly when they play it in the car. It's Babylon out there, corrupt and dangerous, but they drive right on past in their little rolling tabernacles.

One must grow used to it. Maybe after a while the buzz-kill becomes the buzz.

But I need a break. I skip the Christian store and stop at a supermarket for some junk food. Standing in line with my chips, I pick up a National Enquirer without thinking and binge on forbidden Hollywood scandal. It's silly stuff but exactly what I need. And then I turn a page and understand, utterly, profoundly, and in my gut, why so many people seek refuge on the Ark despite the copycat music, crappy fiction and fifth-rate performances by third-rate actors.

Before me, so raw and obscene that they look sticky, are enlarged color photos of the Columbine crime scene taken just moments after the shooting stopped. A teenage boy's skull leaks brains onto the floor next to a blood-smeared black rifle. He has a face, but it's like a McDonald's hamburger in cross section–more ketchup and cheese and special sauce than meat. Even harder to look at is the bland school furniture. It wasn't designed to shield sophomores from shotgun blasts. I put down the tabloid. I feel infected, soiled. A week ago, I could have handled this image, but my spell on the Ark has weakened my immune system. Afterward, at the Christian store, I put on headphones and sample a track from the latest John Tesh CD. It's not any good, but considering what I've just seen, it could be worse, and right now that's good enough.

DAY FIVE: GOD'S COUCH POTATO

Despite my invitation to pop some popcom and curl up together on the sofa for a big Saturday night of Christian television, my wife and kids go to bed early. I'm not surprised. Courtesy of Falwell and the Bakkers, Christian TV has a lousy reputation, even, I bet, among a lot of Christians. Between the nonstop frantic appeals for funds and the apoplectic praise-athons, it throws a lot of heat for a "cool" medium. Or at least it used to. It's changing now--blending into the mainstream, as the music has. That's a shame: I miss those frenzied traditionalists. Like the old-style gospel singers, the classic televangelists were geniuses, inimitable products of a culture that stood as a rival to middlebrow mass taste and didn't try to beat it by joining it. Now, instead of soaring, perspiring rants staged amid profusions of potted lilies and amened over by bouffanted grandmas who seemed about to either cry or come, you get shows like the Sky Angel network's Ten Most Wanted–a low-voltage rip-off of those MTV music video-countdown programs. The twentyish host has a fuzzy soul patch, a grungy plaid shirt and a shock of spiky hair that like most Christian versions of "downtown" style, is years out of date and ever so slightly too clean. Plus, his earrings look suspiciously like clip-ons.

Both of the videos I manage to sit through–by Gibraan, a black rapper who seems to lack his race's stereotypical gift for rhythm, and by 12 Stones, a gang of mussed-up white boys whose sisters are probably standing just offstage mixing pitchers of Country Time lemonade for when the guys knock off–are set in what seems like the same abandoned apartment building. Its broken windows and peeling paint presumably stand for the sinful human condition that teens today are struggling to transcend.

An ad comes on for a pro-life pregnancy hot line, and then it's back to the shaggy veejay, who drops his rebel pose, earnestly asks his young viewers to come to Christ ("call 877-949-HELP") and then slips back into jive talk for the sign-of: "Thanks for hangin' wit' me. I'll see you guys later." Such lame mimicry is the curse of most youth ministries. I start changing channels, looking for fire and brimstone–healings, tongues, exorcisms, spectacle–but wimpiness reigns in the Kingdom of the Lord. A lot of Ark TV, particularly on PAX, seems to consist of nothing but reruns of Murder, She Wrote and other shows aimed at the nursing-home demographic (like that one in which Dick Van Dyke plays a crime-fighting pathologist). There's nothing particularly Christian about such programs, but insofar as they feature extremely old people using their wits to bring younger folks to justice, they do radiate a diffuse conservatism. Then there are the specifically Christian shows, such as Touched by an Angel, whose soft-core, herbal-tea spirituality meld old-time religion with the New Age. I catch one on PAX--Twice in a Lifetime, starring Mariette Hartley as a grown-up '60s hippie chick who, way back when, betrayed her longhaired boyfriend in order to please her crusty Republican dad. The plots of these tearjerkers are all the same: Someone screws up very, very badly and then, with the help of a kindly intercessor from outside the space-time continuum, is granted a do-over, which the person aces. Of course, the whole agony of moral choice is that do-overs aren't possible on earth (unless you're a Hindu or a Buddhist), which makes these shows meaningless as religious instruction, if not heretical. Also, I find their stories hard to follow. There's always one being who's visible to some people but not to others (or not at the same time), and there's always some tricky problem that results from leaving the present to tinker with the past.

DAY SIX: DECEIVED

It confused me at first, but I think I understand now why my book on praying for powerful people targets Bill Nye of Bill Nye the Science Guy. It's because he talks to children about dinosaurs.

Fundamentalist Christian children's media is preoccupied with dinosaurs. The monstrous lizards and their fossilized remains represent a big black buzzing fly in the wholesome lemonade of creationism. If you lose a bright 5-year-old on the dinosaur issue--and what bright 5-year-old isn't mad for dinosaurs?--then you may lose him on the God thing too, or at least on the Holy Bible-as-perfect-truth thing. Then again, if you win the kid over on the dino stuff--and it's best to start this effort early, before a school trip to the Smithsonian saturates the kid's spongy brain with lies--then you've opened a hole in the fortress of his intellect wide enough to drive the Rapture through, or maybe even the theory that the Beast is somehow using grocery-store bar-code scanners to brand people with magnetic 666s.

As luck would have it, I finally persuade my daughter to join me in some Christian-TV viewing just as one of the ' dinosaur shows starts. Maisie loves ancient reptiles. She sits up straight, her right hand motionless in the popcorn bowl. For a 5-year-old, she's a prodigy on this subject, able to pronounce the word Cretaceous and hip to all the latest hunches and theories about the abrupt demise of pterosaur. She favors the killer-asteroid scenario but is open to extinction by natural climate change. I've taught her well.

But incorrectly, I learn. Through a combination of patronizing slapstick and earnest pronouncements from middle-aged male authority figures, the program proceeds to reeducate my daughter on the following points: (1) Dinosaurs are just 6,000 years old, since Earth itself is just 6,000 years old and both were breathed into being at the same time. (The figure is arrived at, it's explained, by adding the ages of all Adam's descendants down to Jesus and then tacking on the next 2,000 years.) (2) Dinosaurs and people once coexisted, as evidenced by biblical references to "Behemoth" and other massive beasts. (3) There were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark but, due to space limitations, only little ones, which accounts for the survival ofthe crocodile and the fading away of diplodocus. (4) The carbon-dating process is a farce. It just is. (5) Scientists who dispute these facts are really not scientists at all, since the definition of science is truth seeking and the whole of truth is in the Bible and either most of these eggheads haven't read the Bible or they have and they've consciously rejected it. (6) Science is really a religion, taking on faith what it purports to prove, while the Christian religion is really a science, which means that when you have a question about T-Rex you should visit your pastor, not the library. (Even better, avoid the library altogether--a kid can only get into trouble there.) I steal a quick look at Maisie's wondering face. She's buying this new line, I fear, and I don't blame her--the image of dinosaurs living next to people is a natural fantasy for kids. It makes for great cartoons. It also, if you truly believe in it and you share this belief with the wrong person, can keep you from ever getting into Harvard except on some special affirmative-action program for underprivileged Caucasian hillbillies. "We're turning this off," I tell Maisie. "Can I watch Rugrats?" "Only if you forget you ever saw this. By the way, the prayer for Bill Nye is as follows: " 'My modest little goal is to change the world,' says Nye. Pray that science education will engage both the imaginations and the spirits of students." That's code for this: I'm a forgiving person, you atheist bastard, so I'm giving you one last chance. Change your tune about the dinosaurs, or don't blame me when you wake up in hell.

DAY SEVEN: SAVED

Even the mouse pad I'm using comes from the Christian store. It features a quote from Hans Christian Andersen printed on a snowy olde-time Christmas scene rendered by Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light. You've seen his stuff: wee little button-nosed children, frisky dogs, a diffuse golden glow that drips from everything as though somebody spilled a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's. It's not even good kitsch--it's too slick, too savvy somehow. Ark culture is mall Christianity. It's been malled. It's the upshot of some dumb decision that to compete with them–to compete with N'Sync and Friends and Stephen King and Matt and Katie and Abercrombie & Fitch and Jackie Chan and AOL and Sesame Street–the faithful should turn from their centuries-old tradition of fashioning transcendent art and literature and passionate folk forms such as gospel music and those outsider paintings in which Jesus has lime green bat wings and is hovering lovingly above the Pentagon flanked by exactly thirteen flying saucers, and instead of all that head down to Tower or Blockbuster and check out what's selling, then try to rip it off on a budget if possible and by employing artists who are either so devout or so plain desperate that they'll work for scale.

What makes the stuff so half-assed, so thin, so weak and cumulatively so demoralizing (even to me, a sympathetic journalist who'd secretly love to play the brash contrarian and rate the Left Behind books above Tom Clancy) has nothing to do with faith. The problem is lack of faith. Ark culture is a bad Xerox of the mainstream, not a truly distinctive or separate achievement. Without the courage to lead, it numbly follows, picking up the major media's scraps and gluing them back together with a cross on top. You like this magazine--you like GQ Then check out New Man, "America's #1 Christian Men's Magazine." Subscribe to Time, you say? Give World a chance. The covers are almost identical.

Bibleman, however, stands alone-a pearl in this vast pile of lukewarm mud. Maisie and I finally watched it together, father and daughter, the way it was meant to be, and damn it if Willie Aames of Eight Is Enough hasn't pulled off a wily deconstruction, as clever in its way as Rocky and Bullwuinkle, of all the clunky old superhero clichés. He's a guy in a mask who instead of socking people stands stock-still with his slushy gut sucked in, squares his not-broad shoulders, faces the evildoer and bores him into submission by quoting Isaiah. That's it. That's his superpower: the ability to compose at will tidy chapter-and-verse-packed sermonettes that send the villains into instant comas and, if you think like a college professor, subtly parody piety itself while also signaling to Willie's old mainstream costars that though he's doing Christian stuff these days, he's smarter than all of them and he'll be back. I'm serious: This Bibleman show has layers.

It's bedtime now. Tomorrow is a new day. Off the Ark and back onto the sinking ship.

But first, before I sleep, a prayer for Jewel: Do whatever it takes to get back on top, my dear, but don't go "Christian." They have their Jewel already. I forget her name, but I saw her on the CD rack, and the chick is your twin, only prettier, and a virgin. •

Walter Kirn is GQ's literary editor. His most recent novel, Up in the Air, will be released in paperback by Anchor Books this fall.

bread and circuses

Roman writer Juvenal wrote in 100 A.D. about "panem et circences - 'bread and circuses' to indicate how the Roman state looked after the population through material plenty and endless entertainment. Such economic plenty must have caused many to believe that life could not be much better." - Capturing the Pagan Mind

Interesting thought - what does that remind you of? The similarities between Rome and the U.S. are staggering - not just coincidence, huh?

Bread and Circuses? Mcdonald's and Hollywood?

quote

"Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results."
Thomas Merton

How true is that even of churches and pastors - not just business oriented people?

I find myself fitting in that mold.

I really need to go to bed - I have to do some walking in the morning - in the "hills" - I must put the new "toy" down.

my new mac

I love my new Mac. It is got to be the coolest computer that I have ever had. I love my PC but I have a feeling that the Mac's capabilities will surpass the PC by far. I will continue to use my PC - but I will now be fluent in both Mac and PC.

I am reading through manuals now - trying to decipher the differences between the two operating systems. They are like two totally different cultures. I will learn - yes - I will learn.

I have been so engrossed in the Mac stuff that I have not hardly read at all today. I do have some thoughts moving around the old cranium. I turned 29 yesterday and today I don't feel any different. I am a husband and a father - and those things make me feel different - but putting on age does not. Maybe I not "normal" (the truth is I know that I am not normal.) Nonetheless I am excited about being older - I am starting to see life as the best teacher (second to God) there is.

Behold - my son

Feeding the son is always a way fun thing to do. My wife is out tonight to meet with a friend of hers and so me and the son are running solo. He is old enough now to do some finger foods - so while I type - he eats.

I love being a father. It is so rewarding. One of the most interesting things is the insight that I get into the father heart of God. There are things that I understand better now than I ever have before. A father is always going to take care of his kids. Hold on -now for some spoon action....

I am back. Well anyways - I love my son. He is such a blessing.

Mac

This is my first entry with my new Mac Os/x.

Mac OS/X rocks!!!

burdens

Relationships have got to be the hardest thing in the world. Especially if you are the type of personality that absorbs and bears people's burdens. I know that there is unhealthy people burdens - taking on too much. I also know that Paul told us to bear one another burdens. Sometimes it is tough to distinguish between what to bear and what to roll over to Jesus.

I really need to get my worry under control. It is sin and the realization of that is really starting to dawn on me. Even if I am bearing a burden I should not worry about it. It really shows my struggle with sometimes believing God.

I had some JW's (Jehovah Witnesses) come by yesterday. I always offer them water and invite them in from the hot. One woman was sweating profusely. I take scripture seriously about a cold cup of water (a good deed.) You never know when that generosity might make an impression. Most people want to argue with them or not even bother answering the door. All they are is people who really,really, believe what they are taught (without questioning) They are basically treated bad by non-JW's and then they say they are suffering for "Jehovah." I do not want to give that pleasure - I am going to love them.
I have so much pity for them sometimes - it is such slavery.

gotta post this

This site that I found about this guy who is a preacher that uses his blog as a psuedo-confessional is great. This guy is so real and authentic - and plus he tells really cool stories. I like the one that he has on there about the three sisters - see if you can find it on the site. Man I hope to start to tell stories - and effectively - again. I want to leave a legacy for my son - of not only my faith but my creativity as well. Plus I want a way to communicate my heart for life and Jesus.

liquid

The whole concept of christianity being a web of interlocking relationships instead of a programmed agenda that takes place on Sunday mornings has appeal to me. Already being part of a house church and experimenting in relational Christianity has laid a foundation for attempting to build a network of relationships that are the church - people together - knit together are the church.

There is a guy named Wayne Jacobsen who has been doing this for years. His website has great articles about relational christianity. Realtionships are the hardest things to do - and what Jesus talked about most of all. Modern day piety-to-the-extreme or purist-orthodox-meaness is no at all what Jesus had in mind. I say this not to say piety and orthodoxy are not good things but to say that they must be tempered by relationship and relationship tempered by them.

But I must not only talk about this - I must do this.

great article - mel's passion

J. Grant Swank, Jr.
MINUS REACTION TO GIBSON’S JESUS MOVIE EXPECTED
By J. Grant Swank, Jr.
Aug 14, 2003, 10:50

Jesus told His disciples, "They hate me. They will hate you."

That’s in the record. Jesus said it, if we conclude the record to be historically accurate.

Right there is the nub of the current debate regarding Gibson’s movie, THE PASSION. Can we take the accounts in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as historically accurate? Or are they trumped up in some passages? Are they fabricated in others?

When at Harvard Divinity School, my first class in New Testament rattled my ears. The professor, a tall fellow wearing clerical collar, informed the room that we basically would dismiss the start and finish of Jesus’ bio for they were myths — the virgin birth and resurrection.

I later learned that most of what was left in between was to be dismissed as well — not historically sound, trumped up, fabricated material believed by the doofuses but scorned by the academically legitimate.

At the start I told my young conservative head ...

that it was not smart to speak up in that class, not unless I wanted to be bludgeoned by the elite on campus. So I kept my silence, as many did in Europe as Jews were led to the gas ovens. Neither they nor I should be proud of our cowardice, but I did survive the stint.

When approaching the Holy Scriptures, I was introduced to demythologizing. That was the clever technique spun particularly in European theological backrooms and transported to the Western Sphere of how one can read a biblical passage and then scissor out the whatevers. Whatever was too outlandish could see the scissors. Whatever was not scientifically posh likewise. Whatever would not be regarded as historically feasible to a second grader would be shown to the door. And so on and so on.

Frankly, when I got finished with the scissor exercise, I found out that there was not much left to the paper. A lot of it was torn, shredded at my feet on the study floor, so the Book was left pretty much in see-through sheets with gaping holes.

Thus it was that I was to begin my three-year studies toward a Masters of Divinity degree preparing me to minister to others in preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior. Thus it was that I found out that if I proceeded in such mode I would be pastoring churches whereby I would have little to proclaim from the pulpit but be well equipped to run the church day care center.

So it was that I learned that if I spoke out for the simple Gospel record’s historical accuracy I would be laughed out of Cambridge. Thus when I went to the school’s bookstore I found stacked the latest bestseller authored by none other than Jerry Falwell — this was in the early 60s. The book was there, not to add to Falwell’s royalties, but to deride what a Bible thumper in Virginia was up to. In other words, it was to instruct divinity school pupils in how to shoot holes in the likes of a Falwell, dimwit that he was.

What is currently happening via debate regarding Mel Gibson’s move-to-be is old stuff. The back-n-forth has been around a long time, but mostly in seminary classrooms and lunchrooms. It’s one big secret kept intact by the theologically liberal. If the truth got out to all the pews, the churches would find another purpose for being — like day care centers — and the clergy would turn their salary checks into chads.

But when a Gibson movie comes up that is religiously aligned with the actual biblical record — sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase — then the demythologizing must begin. And so it is going on as I type.

They are warning Gibson that he is not reading the account correctly. He is too infantile and shamefully innocent in his faith in the record. He must grow up, spread his soul, and thus come into the actual truth of the fabricated beginnings of the Christian trump card.

If I had left Harvard Divinity School believing what was taught me, I would have chucked the virgin birth and literal resurrection along with the feeding of the four thousand, the raising of Lazarus, the changing of water into wine, the healing of the sick man at the Pool of Bethesda. I would have become the arch disciple of superboy theologian hero-of-that-time Bultmann but the failure to Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

That is exactly what the theological liberals of any religion are attempting to do right now to Gibson, devote biblical Christian that he is. They want to blame him, shame him and chuck him before the movie has a ghost of a resurrection of landing in the public lap.

If it gets to the public lap, the liberals say insurrections will rise up against the Jews. And so there will be civil war in the nation. Synagogues will be set aflame.

The opposition says that if Gibson is civil he must prove that he’s not anti-Semitic by exorcising the Gospel records of their Jewish content. Of course, Gibson cannot do that unless he wants to turn THE PASSION into squash. Hopefully, Gibson knows the nub of the debate. And so Gibson will not relent.

Therefore, Gibson is literally hated by some. They will not put it like that; they will dance around verbiage, but what the enemy is up to is to hate Gibson, if not Gibson, then his product.

So it is that Gibson must realize that that comes with the territory.

-------
email comments to josephswank@yahoo.com

© Copyright 2003 MichNews.com

First sentence

" The question is whether our churches are part of the problem or part of the solution. When evangelism is discussed in books or at conferences there seems to be a growing appreciation that some version of church is vital for outreach in contemporary culture...The irony is that the search for the relevant church illustrates the extent to which church is still part of the problem."
- Liquid Church p.13

Newest Read

This is my newest read -

What I have read so far is very intriguing.

Today

I am going in the next few weeks to get a Mac for school. I have never used a Mac before (except doing a little pagination at our local newspaper) I am not familiar with Mac OS at all. I am excited about learning the new machine though. I have heard a lot of good things.

Today was a good day - a day of mixed emotions. Sometimes I wonder if I really hear God correctly or if I just imagine His guidance and leading. I have been involved with a church plant of house churches - a network to reach the indigenous population cultures of the US. The US is truly a mission field (Newbigin) and I feel called of God to be a missionary.

But it is such discouraging work. Weekly I feel like quitting. I tread on. I have no idea why - except that I have been called. I feel like Abraham - " GO "

"Where God?' says Bran
"Just go - out there - make disciples."
"But people don't like me - I am demanding and rough around the edges" replies Bran sheepishly.

"Go"

So here I am - in a small town that I grew up in - with no "culture." That really stinks because I want to be apart of the "cutting edge" of the "postmodern church revolution" and wah wah ad nauseum. I think entirely too much of myself.

Then I remember. I remember one summer night when I first moved back to Vicks. I was on the tallest hill in the city, a place called Fort Hill which overlooks the Mississippi River, and I cried out to God

"Give me this town for you Lord, or I die" ( I really dug John Knox.)

I had no idea that my novel sentimentality would actually mean something to God. But He has had me here since. I cannot leave until I see God pour out His Spirit here - I have tried.

So I guess as I reflect now I see - I remember why I fight on. May God pour His grace upon me. I need it.

why homosexuals make better christians

While pondering all the things that have been going on with the episcopal church I have come to a few conclusions about the matter.

1) While my title may appear like I am doing satire or comedy, I am not. I am really beginning to think that homosexuals would make better christians.

2) While to most heterosexuals, christianity is a sidebar - something you do on Sunday, a way to keep me from hell, and if they are really serious they become politically active "fightin fundamentalists." But above all else they are something else besides christians whether it be american, or ad nauseuam of other attachments.

3) Not so with a homosexual. They are homosexual through and through. homosexuality is the lord of their lives. It effects everything they do. They do not go to homosexual meeting for an hour on sunday. They don't have to wear tshirts that say "Gay? Yeah!" - witness wear for everyone to know that they are homosexuals. They live the life. It effects their politics, food choices, clothes, spending habits, EVERYTHING. Whereas we may disagree morally with their way of life - they by far are less of hypocrites than we as "christians" are.

Before you blast me - or think that I am for the pro-gay agenda - read over again what I have written.

quotes

I have a love for quotes - I guess that I like someone who can say what is in my heart before I can verbalize it (especially in one sentence)

Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.

-- Martin Luther (1483-1546)

It has pleased God that divine verities should not enter the heart through the understanding, but the understanding through the heart.

-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

The last quote is especially good for me - considering my love of study.

I don't know why

I don't know why, but I have been grieving over this gay bishop thingie for the past few days. I have no idea why it has bothered me so much - maybe its just the prospect that the church is perhaps in stages of falling away or maybe it could be the very scary prospect of God judging our country. I don't know. I just know I have been thinking about it cutting grass, watching TV, blogging, especially in my devotions. It is like I have lost a relative that I really don't know but yet I feel grief and I really don't understand why. I felt this way when I lost my estranged grandfather. I never knew him - but when he died I felt a loss - but it was a different kind of loss. Not the kind I felt when I lost my grandfather that I was close to. Anyway - I just feel really sad. Sad for the episcopal church. Sad for the people in the system America calls church. Sad for Gene Robinson. Sad for a people who have a form of godliness but lack the power thereof. Please pray for me. I am grieved over a church that because of our sins keeps our Father from taking us under His wing. Yes - MY sins too.

God have mercy on us.

A camp

While we are having our discussion of "christian stuff" look at this. I got it off another guys blog - he too appears to think that this is amusing.

Christian Deer Hunting Camp

Not sure if the person who posted this to the FMC Mailing list meant this to be funny or not but I have seen it all now.

?Christian music?

There was interesting discussion that my brother-in-law brought up on his page that I would like to continue here. That is about contemporary christian music. I agree with Bill Colrus and what he said about 98% of cont. christian music. It is bush. No good - stinks - pop- inauthentic. However - I thought of this question while at my in-laws.

What would authentic music look like that was done for the glory of God? Religious music. I hestitate to call anything Christian other than people because only something that chooses can be christian - the bible makes that clear. You have no Christian cars or gum or etc.

But what would authentic music with a christian message be like?

the race card

Is it me or is anyone getting tired of the race card being thrown out whenever someone is just incompetent or not getting their way? Here is an article about Sharpton and how the liberal "white" media is giving him disrespect. I don't know what media he is talking about but the one I am familiar with would not dream of dissing blacks - unless the democratic party had a better chance of getting elected with a white man. We all know that basically the liberal white men of today are all about power and exploit blacks and other minorities to get elected. So get over it Sharpton - ever thought that your own party has politics too? OR what about qualifications - the civil rights movement as King and others knew it is dead. All that exist now are guys that are perpetratin' a myth to make money.

Whew!!

I have completed (at least for now) the other blog. I gave myself a crash course on HTML and XML, CSS etc. this week. I am not a master by any means but I did learn a great deal.

I haven't blogged here for a few days. Let see ... so what is going on?

I have been doing a lot of church work - meetings etc.

I have also resolved to find a place here in Vicks that when I am not doing admin ministry stuff, that I can hang at (starbucks type place - we have no starbucks here) and have conversations. I am going to try to build new relationships with people. I am going to start counting conversations and not "conversions." That quote is not original to me - got it from Brian McLaren in More Ready Than You Realize - great book about evangelism. I so want to love and get to know people - not "conquer" them for Christ. I guess the Crusades are over?!

Well anyway my wife is telling me to go to bed. She is a morning glory and I am a night owl.

What a combination, huh?

Almost midnight - quick entry. Started setting up another blog today for our church - the beacon This site is much better than the one that we had started at blogspot. Movable type is just better and easier to use.

So hopefully - if I can find a cool template and tweak it - the new site will be up and running soon as possible.