Quote of the Month about Jesus

Brennan Manning, The Furious Longing of God

The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creation. Not to make people with better morals but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love. This, my friend, is what it really means to be a Christian.

Can "The Wrath of God" and "God is Love" Be Reconciled?

This is a post for people who are curious about the core teachings of the Christian faith.  I'm not one to claim that I've got everything figured out, but I want to get you thinking.  Oh, and I changed the title of this blog because of a conversation with a friend today.

Over at The Blog for InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network I have been writing a review series on J.I. Packer's Knowing God, which is a collection of short articles on the nature of God and humankind.  Here I want to revise the series, but I'm going to do it backwards, starting with the final installment and ending with the first.


The Problem

There's a common thought among many outside observers of those following the Way of Jesus.  I've overheard people talk about Jesus' death as a strange act of cosmic child abuse, employed to change the mind of the angry God of the Old Testament.  But this, as J.I. Packer puts it, is a polytheistic misunderstanding of the gospel. Jesus is the same in character as the God of the Old Testament.  Jesus and the God of the Old Testament have the same essence.

Far from being cosmic child abuse, the death of Jesus was a self-sacrificial death.

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Best Christian Books of All Time Review Series: Knowing God Pt. III

Over at InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Blog I just finished the last of a three part review series on J.I. Packer's Knowing God.  Click here to read it.  

"Packer moves seamlessly from a discussion of judgment and anger to one of propitiation. Propitiation is a fancy word used to deliver the message that an entirely holy, all powerful God can hang out in intimacy with people who, having rejected his help, are anything but holy and powerful."

Quote of the Month about Jesus

The Word we study has to be the Word we pray. My personal experience of the relentless tenderness of God came not from exegetes, theologians, and spiritual writers, but from sitting still in the presence of the living Word and beseeching Him to help me understand with my head and heart His written Word. Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of knowing Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited.

~Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

Note:  I really recommend this book, even for those who are not Christians.  It awakens the heart of our truest humanity.

Developing a Study of New Testament Greek: A Very Brief Introduction

If you're interested in the scholarly study of the New Testament and its language, this article is for you.  If not, you may as well go read something about whaling off the coast of Japan or the politics of abortion.

The following article attempts to set up an argument for a particular method of the study of the Greek of the New Testament. In order to reach my conclusion I’ve made use of several arguments which build upon one another, ending eventually with the examination of Relevance Theory, a tool employed by linguists in the study of language and its cognition. I begin with an analysis of a classic argument put forth by Adolf Deissmann on the commonality of New Testament Greek in first century Roman Palestine. Then, building upon that, I analyze James Moulton’s argument for the spoken value of the New Testament, especially with regard to Paul’s epistles. Finally, I examine a recent thesis put forward by a University of Edinburgh scholar of Hellenistic Greek (κοινή) for the value of the linguistic tool of Relevance Theory as it relates to the particle ἵνα ("hina"). This paper is a very brief introduction and therefore moves rather quickly through the arguments here employed. I hope to continue this project as I move forward with my study of the New Testament and its language and social setting.

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Hellenistic Greek: Voice of the Empires, Sound of the Gospels

You never know what you'll find while reading through an article that a lettered Cambridge reverend wrote more than a hundred years ago.  I'm working on a final paper for my studies of Hellenistic Greek, the language disseminated by Alexander the Great, which the sages and the emperors and the peasants alike understood well for nearly a millennia--probably the most widely-known language ever (until the recent explosion of English).  Here's what James Hope Moulton said in 1909 about this language--the language of the New Testament--in a Cambridge publication, Essays on Some Biblical Questions of the Day: By Members of the University of Cambridge.

Literature that could inspire Shakespeare's creations, philosophy instinct with fervour and life, science and history that in faithful search for truth rivalled the masterpieces of antiquity, humour and satire that Aristophanes might be proud to own—all these we see in the books of the Hellenistic age. And then we find that this wonderful language, which we knew once as the refined dialect of a brilliant people inhabiting a mere corner of a small country, had become the world-speech of civilization. For one (and this one) period in history only, the curse of Babel seemed undone. Exhausted by generations of bloodshed, the world rested in peace under one firm government, and spoke one tongue, current even in Imperial Rome. And the Christian thinker looks on all this, and sees the finger of God. It was no blind chance that ordained the time of the Birth at Bethlehem. The ages had long been preparing for that royal visitation. The world was ready to understand those who came to speak in its own tongue the mighty works of God. So with the time came the message, and God's heralds went forth to their work, "having an eternal gospel, proclaim unto them that dwell on the earth, and unto every nation and tribe and tongue and people." 

Dallas Willard: One Who Knows His God.

Dallas Willard 

Dallas Willard died this morning after announcing Stage 4 Cancer on Monday.

Dallas--a USC Professor of Philosophy, a man whose writing has greatly magnified my view of beauty and goodness and hope in this life, and a lover and beloved of God--awakened early this morning into the full experience of the brilliantly abundant life with God.  His last two words were,

“Thank you.”

This morning, as his life-light dawned into full day, I think Dallas was welcomed into rest and love and praise by the voice of God; a voice which he once described as recognizable through its "spirit of exalted peacefulness and confidence, of joy, of sweet reasonableness and of goodwill."

And I think the voice sounded something like this: "Well done, good and faithful servant."


Here's something he wrote about the intersection of God and love and death, from Hearing God, 1984:

"Thomas à Kempis speaks for all the ages when he represents Jesus as saying to him, 'A wise lover regards not so much the gift of him who loves, as the love of him who gives. He esteems affection rather than valuables, and sets all gifts below the Beloved. A noble-minded lover rests not in the gift, but in Me above every gift.' The sustaining power of the Beloved Presence has through the ages made the sickbed sweet and the graveside triumphant; transformed broken hearts and relations; brought glory to drudgery, poverty and old age; and turned the martyr's stake or noose into a place of coronation.

As Saint Augustine has written, when we come to our final home, 'there we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise.  This is what shall be in the end without end.'  It is this for which the human soul was made."

Thank you, Dallas.