The most popular posts here in 2011

 Since I didn’t post this before being busy with other stuff, I’ll do it now when the year is still young: a list of the most viewed posts in 2011. I’m quite surprised by some of these, but it seems that the theological discussions are dominating the list. What’s also notorious is that certain names of known people just tend attract  lot of readers, much more readers than my own ideas. Which is not a good thing actually… (I supose Jeff ‘I hate religion’ Bethke will be in my top-10 of 2012 if this trend continues)

 1. C.S. Lewis on the resurrection as true mythology (January 29, 2011)
I’m not so proud having this as my most viewed post of 2011, consisting of just a C.S. Lewis quote about the ‘resurrection as true mythology’. Pity that it’s just a big name that attracts, and not my own writings, but he indeed was a better thinker and writer than myself I guess…

2. Why I wanted to marry an ugly girl as a teenager… (February 22, 2011)
I love this post, but I wonder what people where looking for in a search engine when they stumbled into this one, and if they found anything remotely connected to their original search intent…

3. Love your enemies, bless those who persecute you.. (October 14, 2010)
Some good solid biblical content, and a post from 2010, on the third spot, and I’m actually quite happy with that! This is important stuff that should not be overlooked, so the more people search for these verses the better!

4. The cultural problem of Mark Driscolls effeminate worship leaders… (July 9, 2011)
Mark Driscoll, mega-church calvinist, hypermasculinist and anti-feminist has made enough statements that shocked people, even last week something about him was going round, and then I don’t even mention his book.. (be sure to read Dan Brennan’s reviews here and here) A bit of a pity that his name should turn up in my top-10 posts though…

5.evangelical universalism? (and Rob Bell) (February 27, 2011 )
Maybe another discussion I shouldn’t have gotten myself into. Still haven’t read the book…

6. Is this the good news of the gospel? (April 14, 2011 )
A video that explains the gospel, or maybe not, made me write this… This one got 28 comments some of which were probably more interesting than my post…

7. Judgement day on may 21, ’11 or wacko theologies (July 13, 2010)
Harold Camping prophesied the end of the world at october, 21^th, 2011, and the rapture for earlier that year on may 21^th but nothing did happen except for a lot of traffic on my old blog post from 2010 about it…

8.Substitutionary atonement and Christus victor (April 9, 2011)
And now for some theological discussion… I still think this is an important discussion, so I’m glad with this post in the top-10…

9. a truly orthodox view on salvation… (March 3, 2011 )
Truly orthodox as in eastern orthodox that is, in the same vein of the atonement and gospel discussions of #6 and #8, but with a video of a bearded priest, which is quite cool!

10.Harry Potter & Hermione on St-Paul and the defeat of death (January 29, 2011)
Yes, that’s a post about bible interpretations in Harry Potter. I’m glad that this one made the list, and it might be one of my more original writings of last year….

My favorite post from 2011 that didn’t make the list was teenage flashback: I’m not flirting, but I might need a hug…, and maybe this one: Do you love your wife or a picture in your head? So love, sex, relationships and gender roles seem to be recurring themes on this blog. Don’t ask me why…

I want to thank all of you for reading, commenting, enduring, and not burning me on a stake!

Shalom

Bram

New musical discovery: Brian McLaren

New musical discovery: Brian McLaren

For those who like soft folky singersongwriterstuff with a seventies sound, I’ve found this onscure gem on a site that archives old and rare  christian records: an album called ‘learning to love’ by some guy called Brian McLaren. He seems to have made only one record, back in 1978, filled with christian inpired dreamy acoustic folk & rock.

Brian McLaren - learning to love

So how does it sound? Mostly like soft acoustic mellow folky music of the kind that had a revival some years ago with the ‘quiet is the new loud’ movement, but with Christian insipired lyrics… If we’d do a more ‘classical’ namedropping it would fit somewhere between the acoustic John Michael Talbot, Nick Drake, and sometimes some Larry Norman or Neil Young… I don’t say it’s as good as those names, but there something in the sound that reminds me of them. Brian seems to be a skilled guitarplayer, and the arrangements are quite good. My favorites are the Larry Norman-like ‘publican and pharisee’ and the acoustic talking blues ‘depersonalisation blues’.

It’s a shame that this album was never re-released on Cd, I find it actually quite good for christian music from the seventies(I say that as someone who is very critical of so-called Christian ‘music’…) Anyway I’m very glad that the heavenly grooves have made it available in 320kbps mp3 format. check it out here

such a shame nobody has ever heard of this guy… I wonder what he’d be doing right now. aging and without hair he probably would look like this:

an older guy

Wait, what did you say he was called???

shalom

Bram

christians and cross-gender friendships

One of the things of american christianity, which sometimes get copied in this part of europe but seems totally alien to me, is the way some people seem affraid of the other sex, and use theology to justify that.

Now, I do know some people just can’t get along with the other sex. In working class circles I noticed that there sometimes was a really large gap between the sexes that I could not understood, but I always noticed that such a disconnection was almost always paired to a porn-like objectification of the female. which is very evident: the more you treat female humans as sex objects, the less you will relate to them as human beings that you can be friends with… So I’m not that surprised when that kind of men would tell me that it’s impossible for them to be just friends with a woman. It is a deep and grave wound in their sexual human-ness, but totally understand, even though it’s sad and evil and it does no goed for man neither woman and brings lots of hurt to both…

But I’ve always seen Christianity as something which goes beyond that, something which bridges the gap between the sexes (‘in Christ there is male nor female’…) and cures the disconnections bethween people. But some people seem to totally disagree with that. I know some ‘true love waits’ type of people disapprove of being alone with the other sex at all, just like some ministries have rules for pastors to never be alone with someone of the other sex. Like this one from saddleback church. For reasons of temptation or reputation if you’d be seen with someone and stuff… But all of this looks so cramped in my eyes….

My whole life is opposed to that anyway, I am the kind of guy who sometimes makes friends with girls more easily than with other guys, even though the girls I like to be friends with are not the type of girl I would be romantically interested in. (Except for one interesting exception, who is now my wife…) I like to be friends with girls and women, and nothing of that did substantially change when I passed from celibate singleness into a relationshop into marriage, au contraire: she likes about me that I see girls and women as humans to be friends with, and not just sexuals things that could tempt me or that I could sexual fantasies about or something like that. Yike! Women are people to be friends with, and sisters in Christ.

In the end, doesn’t common sense and basic ethics tell us that we should consider every woman as a sister, mother, or daughter, depending on age? Or am I too naieve in thinking such things are a matter or logic? maybe I am. Maybe the disconnect is rooted too deep in our societies, and it may be growing with the explosion of porn and R&B-videos…

But still: that has nothing to do with Jesus And reading through the bible I see Jesus also acting against all that cross-gender paranoia. Jesus breaks all taboos when talkin (alone!) to the samaritan woman at the well: a rabbi doesn’t speak to women, and a jew doens’t speak to a samaritan, and one does not speak to people with the sexual history she has when one wants te be respected. That kind of logic is what I recognise in the Saddleback story, but it’s exactly what Jesus opposes.

Besides, I find it sexist and degrading, the idea that being with someone from the other sex should be considered unsafe. Very insulting even if I would be a woman offering to drive some speaker to somewhere, and he would refuse for that reason. Even autistic maybe. But totally unchristlike. Indeed Christ would not be hired at all in such ministry with the attitude he had towards women, if we look at the samaritan woman, and his friendship with Maria and Martha…

I still don’t get the christian intersexual disconnect, it is totally alien to me, and every time I read things suggesting that it is a controversial subject, like this zoecarnate blog-post, I am amazed again.

May we all learn to love…

shalom

Bram

ps:  for people interested in the subject, I do recommend the blog of Dan Brennan, who writes a lot about cross-gender friendships and related subjects from a somewhat post-evangelical perspective…

american synchretism

hi readers all over the world (if you exist at all…) this is another rant from me…
Like I said, sometimes I feel like an alien. That applies to my own secular belgian culture and the evangelical and pentacostel churches I know alike, but it applies even more to some ‘christian subculture’ from other places that I sometimes encounter, which may be promoted as the one and only real christianity in its purest form, or something like that…

Take for example the american evangelicalism. Some of its culture and tradition is very weird to me, and focussing on very irrelevant details which mostly distract from the gospel instead of bringing people closer to Jesus’ eternal Kingdom… Like Marc Driscolls macho-sexism, or the patriotism interwoven in some forms of american christianity, or the whole pragmatic approach to evangelism which seems more like world conformity than anything else. I don’t buy any of it, and though some of it may be cute and harmless, I am affraid that lots of this kind of synchretism are very harmful to the gospel.

And if the church culture you are in in a middle european country is a bad imitation of some american church culture that wouldn’t even be relevant in its own surrounding would, then something is wrong.

We have to contextualise the gospel our way. We don’t have to repeat the irrelevant mistakes of another culture in ours because lots of evangelical and pentacostel churches have american roots. That’b be a very bad idea. We have to get to learn Jesus Christ as the way, the Truth and the Light, and make that true in our own life. And we have to find a way to contextualise that in our own world. We don’t have to use language and structures from another time (when they did still work) or another continent (where I hope they work) to our own culture to bring the gospel.

We have to live the gospel, bring the gospel, and let christ transform our (sub)culture and change our life… And it is unavoidable to have a certain degree of ‘synchretism’ when we are ‘everything to everyone’, or american to the americans, goth to the goths, african to the africans, flemish to the flemish people, to paraphrase Paul. But we as europeans do not need the enlightened american culture to understand the gospel… We need more Jesus, and less hypes, less consumer-capitalistic synchretism, less weird fundamentalism,…

More Jesus, more Father, more Spirit in our lives!!!

shalom

Bram