Some interesting stuff elsewhere, Orthodox fairy edition (april 2018)

And we’re back at blogging here, and also back with a reboot of my monthly collection of interesting stuff I’ve read elsewhere on the web.It’s either a complete coincidence or a humourous plot of the Divine that there are so much Orthodox fairies in this collection, but it looked like a cool title.
Note that these are things that I’ve read recently, but not necessarily things that were published recently. I don’t subscribe to our societies slavery to the endless new.

(Picture is a random medieval miniature of Mary punching Satan.)

Here are the links:

Christ in fairyland at Copious flowers (featuring among others David Bentley Hart and C.S. Lewis)
The Psychic Jesus – Part One: Introduction looks like a beginning of a very interesting series at the God of Green Hope
Fairy Spirits and the Lamb of God – Part 1 and part 2 from Michael King at the Kings of Eden representing the more fringe Charismatic side
Ainulindalë: Angels, Demiurges, and the Making of Arda, some Orthodox Tolkienologie from A Kimel
Do You ever Think About Being A Hobbit , some more Orthodox Tolkienology but with less difficult words from Father Freeman

Side effects may include atheism by Elizabeth Ester on her side effects of mood stabilizers.
The Church I Dreamed Of, Against Christian Idol Worship by Kwon Jeong-saeng, written in Korea in the nineties, but very relevant and confronting nonetheless
The gift of not knowing by Chad Holtz
Opposite Sex Friendship — a few thoughts by Heather Goodman, one of the best posts I’ve read on the subject over the years.
St. Benedict and the prosperity gospel, Carl McColman the Catholic mystic reflecting on Hillsong and the prosperity gospel

When Pop Culture Sells Dangerous Myths About Romance

Purity Culture Can Ruin the Sex Life of Christian Couples: A Therapist’s Perspective is the affirmation that the term ‘purity culture’ can describe something quite toxic in the US that is completely unlike any of the purity teachings I’ve encountered in my life in evangelical Belgium. (see my post A purity culture I don’t know…)

Desert Island economics (featuring Ayn Rand and Karl Marx) at existential comics
How Iowa flattened literature

And finally: an application form from the website of the illuminati where you can join them, provided that you’re not a robot. Sounds legit.

peace

Bram

 

Some interesting links elsewhere (May 2015)

Ready for my list of links from May? Notice that the best thing I could do for my faith to not go in a crisis was to ignore certain things happening in the American fundamentalist/Evangelical church and mutations of it as much as possible. So I won’t comment on them at all…

The picture this month is a Saiga antelope, one of the weirdest mammals on the planet,. Really weird and bad things are happening with them too: 85,000 Endangered Antelopes Die Mysteriously In Just One Day

Orthodox  blogger Father Stephen Freeman on the ontology of hell : is hell real?

An app to find songs that use the same chords.  The weird thing is that it seems that my own song ‘Father I am tired’ which doesn’t have weird chords at all (for me) has no matching songs.

If you ever want to know how raising sea-levels would affect the place were you live, use this site.

More bad news: saving coffee from extinction.

Some pictures of a rare and mythical animal: the white raven.

Some thoughts on the idea that Satan was the first worship leader. Some people treat it like a well-known biblical truth in certain charismatic circles, others have never heard of it.

If the moon were one pixel. Scroll along to get an idea how enormously big space is…

Sam Harris and Naom Chomsky demonstrate that communication is not easy. It’s on Harris’ blog but I find it a bit shameful from his side. I also (as a European) would say that from reading this Harris -‘new atheist or not’- to me looks just like another war-hungy American rightwing nut.
So this might be a good proof that religion has not much to do with why American ‘conservatives’ are so war-hungry…

That’s it for now kiddo’s.

See you all next month…

peace

Bram

 

Does the gospel require the doctrine of ‘the fall’?

And we’re back after a blogging hiatus with more thoughts that might disturb some people.

I was participating in a discussion about evolutionary creationism on the blog of Rachel Held Evans, (look out for the actual article when it’s ready, it will probably very interesting)  and one of the subjects that always comes up in such discussions is that of the fall. The line of reasoning is that without the litteral story of Adam, Eve and the apple there would be no gospel at all, but I’m affraid that I don’t get the problem here…

Let me sayfirst that I myself have no problem at all with 6-day creation, nor do I have any problem with the idea of evolutionary creation. I do think that the scientific evidence points towards the latter, but by no means does that mean that one of those options is right and the other wrong. Au contraire, I don’t believe that modern science is capable of telling us how the world was created at all, since the visible world comes from the invisible. Investigating the traces left in the material world will never give us a complete view, but if the traces lead us to an old earth and universe, and biological evolution, it’s okay to me. But it will never be the whole story, and the whole story is outside the scope of science, and bigger than we can comprehend…

So I’m inclined to see the first chapters of genesis as a symbolic story to tell us in a poetic way about something that cannot be said in straight and exact ways and modern scientific discours. I would say the same about the story of the fall. The whole forbidden fruit story kinda seems symbolic, but still it says something real: man has at some point rebelled against God, and now we live in the reality described.

That ‘fallen’ reality is clear to everyone: this world in in the hands of the powers of sin, death and distruction. We see it everywhere if we open our eyes, and experience it every day. The power of sin is working inside of us, and also from the outside against us. This is so clear that I don’t believe anyone can deny this. So I’m always surprised that people need to use genesis to explain why we need salvation, just point to anywhere and you’ll see why…

Now we could have a discussion about Augustinian original sin, or ancestral sin. The first says that the sin of Adam is in some way transferred to all his descendants, the second one says that Adam had in his sin polluted the world, which brings all people born into this world under the influence and power of sin. I tend to the second, which makes me probably a bad protestant, but I don’t even see a problem for Augustinian Christianity without the story of the apple being litteral history, let alone non-Augustinian theology which does not place such an emphasis on the idea of ‘the fall’. Wheter or not we know what happened, we see the state the world is in and it’s not a good one, and Jesus came to solve that, and did solve it. Do we really believe that?? Or do we think Jesus came to solve some abstract ideas and man-made theological problems?

Jesus did defeat death, evil, sin and Satan in his death and resurrection, so the problem solved is bigger than the one the apple story explains anyway!

Wait here!

Did I just say that the problem solved is bigger than the story of the apple and the fall?

Yes I did. The hope we have as Christians is the New Heavens and the New Earth, in which all evil will be eliminated. So no more sin, no more death, etc… The whole problem of evil being undone by the work of Jesus; like I said earlier. That is the whole story of Christian salvation. The source of evil here is in a way irrelevant, if we look to explain it in a historical analytical way like we Westerners like to do it; but what we can say is that it defenitely lies outside of God. The whole story of redemprion, culminating in the incarnation, life, teaching, example, sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus is about God doing something against evil, and in the end eradicating it.

So evil is NOT from God, but what God is fighting against. And this evil has something to do not only with the fall of men, and the whole apple story, but with evil powers of which the origin isn’t explained in genesis either (the ‘snake’ is just called a snake, not even identified with satan except by the writer of revelation, and why he is evil is explained nowhere)

There’s more going on about evil than the fall of man anyway, and we don’t know that much about it… There are speculations about the fall of Satan, but we don’t have anything really clear about it in the bible.

So what are my shocking conclusions? The first one is that we don’t need a litteral story about the fall of man to see that this world is burdened by sin and evil and in need of the salvation Jesus brought, but we just have to open our eyes, and the second one is that the problem solved by the salvation Jesus brings is a lot bigger than what the apple story explains… The apple story might explain how those forces of evil infiltrated mankind, but not where they came from.

Any additional ideas anyone?

Shalom

Bram

The emmancipation of myth as a truer form of truth, and Truth beyond theory…

So here we go again with my weird rants, that might irritate some people.

Jason Coker on the pastoralia blog has a very interesting post called ‘the Lords prayer as a political manifesto‘. It’s about a very important subject that I’m struggling with myself at the moment, but I’m not going to repeat his point, you’ll have to read it for yourself (you really should!)

What I want to discuss is (in my opinion) probably one of his most controversial paragraphs up to date, at least from a more or less evangelical point of view.

It’s time to grow up. As long as the religious concept of evil remains limited to the personification of a mythical creature and our ability to imagine better possibilities remains limited to a mythical place, we will be forever relegated to the individualized realm of dualistic pietism.

We must follow Christ and the prophets in moving beyond our childish metaphors and concretely name evil for what it really is – starvation, exploitation, exclusion, vengeance, violence, and the like – so we can name goodness for what it really is: equality, provision, peace, and so forth.

My first reaction is one of protest. Calling satan a mythical creature and heaven a mythical place at first sounds like some kind of liberal theology that tries to do away with all things supernatural. But maybe that’s just how my modern bias tends to read it.

The use of the word ‘mythical’ here is interesting, because in a modern discourse its use would mean something negative. But that’s not the case, as Jason makes clear in the comments in an answer to his use on the ‘m-word’:

Well that’s a big question, but a fair one since I’m the one that dropped the m-word. I have no problem with the idea of realms of existence beyond our field of perception. Such a thing has already been demonstrated in theory by physicists.

However, I think we actually know almost nothing about that sort of reality. Moreover, I think the Bible communicates about those realities along the continuum of myth and folklore – which is not a bad thing, in my opinion, as long as you don’t confuse myth and folklore with objective facts. In other words, I think those stories represent real knowledge…just not the kind of knowledge we wanted it to be in the Modern age.

Especially with the note of Jamie Arpin-Ricci that “mythical” does not equal “fictional” and that Something can be mythical and still be true, I think this is a very important discussion. Tolkien and Lewis already spoke of Jesus as ‘true myth’, but I think it’s time to stop the pejorative use of words like myth, or even fable. (And I’m also talking here to people who use ‘myth’ as a synonym for ‘lie’ as Greg Boyd does in book titles as ‘the myth of a Christian nation’ and ‘the myth of a Christian religion’)

We cannot describe everything in modern categories of scientific knowledge… The fact is, that some of the most important things are far beyond fact and measurement. Creation, atonement, the nature of God, the nature of evil and the powers, the Kingdom in its full realisation/heaven, the final judgement, etc… are all things that are too big too describe with our language and the concepts we know from this world. We need to use methaphor and -yes- myth, because our modern conceptions of absolute truth are inaccurate. This is where Derrida and the medieval mystics meet: language nor science could ever descibe those things. Not because they’re not true, but because they’re more true than our so-called ‘scientific’ knowledge…

So all our methaphors fail. All our ways of decribing and imagining fail too, and indeed, if we think that our litteralised methaphorical stories about satan and heaven are all there is to say, we miss a lot. We cannot speak about these things with more scientifically accurate precision than my pet mice can speak about the openoffice program I’m using.

So what I’m advocating is the opposite of the modern ‘liberal’ idea that discards anything that’s non-scientific. Myth, methaphor and parable are the only ways to speak about the things that are most real! And still it’s not at all about speaking of those things, but about living the Life, and letting Christ transform us. Knowledge, be it scientific or mythologic, is not what saves us, except when we are gnostics maybe, but in reality it can only describe things.

If all we have is a faith in theory, we only have faith in theory, and are left with nothing. I am reminded here of the words of a bend from Antwerp called ‘think of one’ who sing ‘tzen gien fabels ginen thejorie’ (‘it’s no fable, and no theory’) in our beautiful dialect, which in turn reminds me of the working class people I’ve worked with. They used the word theory in a pejorative way, and did not believe that anything mattered that could not be used practically… If we don’t have the life of the resurrection in us, what use is there in all our theology?

So myth can be the only way to communicate something that’s truer than any scientific language can contain, and yet truth that’s not incarnated into our lives is not of worth…

Does any of this make sense?

Shalom

Bram

Reclaiming supernaturalism III: Andrew Jones and exorcism

I’ve been writing about the problems some postmodern expressions of Christianity seem to have with the supernatural earlier (see reclaiming supernaturalism 1 and 2) and I’m reminded of the topic now Andrew Jones, the tall skinny kiwi, is blogging about exorcism.

On the lighter side, I must confess that I at first misread the title of his post, and thought it would be about exorcising baptist and catholic demons, which would’ve been a bit surreal and even more freaky I guess… [I once had a muslim tell me that djinns can have the same religions as humans, so you have muslim and christian and jewish djinns, so why not baptist and catholic demons…]

Andrew, who has been travelling around the world meeting all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, has seen way too much of supernatural activity to ever deny the existence of ‘demons’ who influence people. It’s a luxury of our sleepy Western church that’s lulled into materialistic oblivion to be able to deny such a thing I guess, and it’s very comfortable, since it feels very safe to have a worldview without all of these complications.

But my limited experience with those things, about which I won’t elaborate here, has taught me 2 things:

1. the standard evangelical demonology might not be completely accurate, but there is something that can’t be denied and that is affraid of the name of Jesus, how weird such a thing may sound even to the more modern materialistic liberal part of myself that feels comfortable in not having to think outside of the boxes of this world.
2. I’m not at all prepared to have such an encounter.

I know that this kind of things will be easily explained away as psychological disease, and whatever more, but there’s more than meets the eye, and it is not at all either/or, it can be very well an both/and situation. There is the danger to over-spiritualise everything and see demons and devils where they are not, like some Christians tend to do, but we have to be open and not explain it away if we bump on it.

I also tend to think that some ‘powers’ are less personal than others, but that doesn’t mean they’re less dangerous. Even if ‘mammon’ would be totally not personal, it’s still a strong power that enslaves people, and destroys the planet.

(I still need to read Walter Wink, anyone who wants to buy me his powers trilogy? And anyone has some amount of time in a box to share?)

Another problem is the unbalanced way some charismatics and other weird people seem to handle all of the supernatural, which has done a lot of work to discredit all of it, and makes it look all fake.

But it’s a subject we need to take serious, like Andrew Jones says in his post:

I think that a vigorous study of the Scriptures on how to deal with the demonic should be an integral part of any ministerial training, especially cross-cultural and global missions training. Otherwise we might sending out an army of spiritual wimps into an arena where they will get their ass kicked.

Right now I don’t have much ‘demonology’, except that I know there is something, and that we better take it serious, but that we need to take even more serious the fact that Christ is stronger. Christus Victor!!!

And then there’s the discussion -mainly semantic- about if Christians can be possesed or not. Possesed may be too strong a word, but surely they can be influenced. A theology about such things is not a question of theory we can make out of vague bible verse interpretations, we also have to look at the real world. And it’s true that Christians can be totally distracted by some kind of ‘religious spirit’, and that there can be an active oppressive power present in that. Or, like Mike Morell says in the comments on andrews blog, if you do consider ‘Religion’ one of the oppressive Powers, and Christendom as a particularly nasty manifestation of said Power…well, it makes sense.

It’s a topic I don’t know much about, and that I’m affraid of, also because it’s very ridicule to even believe in it in this world. And still….

shalom

Bram

 

Holy saturday meditation (from Peter Rollins)

Let us imagine that we have died and are waiting to stand before the judgement seat of God … Try to imagine how it feels to look over your life – what you are happy about and what you regret… Now imagine being brought into a magnificent room within which there is a great white throne. Upon this throne is a breath-taking being who shines as if full of light…
After a moment the one who sits on the throne begins to speak: ‘My name is Lucifer and I am the angel of light. I have cast your God from his throne and banished Christ to the realm of eternal death. It is I who hold the keys to this kingdom. I am the gatekeeper of paradise and it is for me to decide who shall enter and who shall be forsaken.’
Now imagine that this angel stretches out his vast arms and says, ‘In my right hand I hold eternal life and in my left I hold death. For those who would bow down and acknowledge me as Lord, I shall grant them safe passage into paradise, but those who refuse I will vanquish to death with their Christ.’
After this the devil rnoves his arms so that each of his hands is placed before you and asks, ‘What do you choose?’

It is only as we experience Holy Saturday that we can ask whether we would follow Christ regardless of heaven or heil, regardless of pain or pleasure, whether we would follow in the midst of the uncertainty that Holy Saturday brings to our lives. It is only here that we can ask if we have truly offered ourselves to God for no reason other than the desire to offer ourselves as a gift. Faith does not die here, rather it is forged here.

(from the book ‘How (not) to speak of God’ by PeterRollins)

Would you still follow Jesus? Would I?

Do we follow Jesus for Jesus, or would we just take any way to eternal life available? whatever it would involve?