Graduation and the Future

Well it finally happened...I graduated from college. After a stint of 5 and half years I am now the proud owner of a Bachelor of Arts in Biblical and Theological Studies. When I say that I own it I really mean it, after paying a crap ton of money I do consider it a good that I have bought. Graduating for me is really bitter sweet, I have really wanted to be done for a while and after transferring to my third school it was time to get 'er' done. At the same time school is all I have known for over the last half a the decade. So while I am glad to be done I really miss going to class and having deadlines and theological conversations with other students and professors. I had a great time at Bethel and my education there was great.

Now for something completely different...

For the past 2 years the plan was to get my BA and then head straight into my MDiv program or MAT program. School was the logical next step as I head towards my goals of being a pastor or a professor. If you know me this plan has been thought over and over and over again, where to go to school, whether to academic or more evangelical, and where to move to. These questions would haunt me, keeping me up at night and in the way of being able to make a decision. This inability to answer these questions and find a program that I really was sold on was driving me mad. But even more was driving Sarah mad. So after a few conversations, some might call them arguments, we decided that it would be a good idea for me to take a break from school. While I was reluctant to make this decision I do feel that it is the best thing for Sarah and my marriage. So with that decision made we still had the problem of not knowing what we were going to do and wanting to get out of Minnesota. So, in a strike of brillance my wife suggested that me move to a ski town out west. At frist I thought she was joking and the objections started to pile up in my head. So after some conversation I realized that we really dont have anything holding us back and no debt, children or anything like that and that Sarah and I could make this work.

So in 3 week Sarah and I will be taking a ski trip to Park City UT and while we are there hopefully find a place to live. The plan as of now, is that when our lease is up in August here in Eden Prairie we will move out to Park City for a few years, get jobs and spend time together. I am very excited to spend time with my wife in a new place and lets not kid ourselves skiing is a huge draw. I do plan on going back to school but I dont know where and hopefully this time will give me time to figure out if I want to be a pastor or a professor.

TIme off

Well I am in my last semester at Bethel University in St Paul. I have not been able to blog as much as i would like so, I will be taking an intentional break from blogging and hopefully thinking about this site. After graduation i will return and be more committed to posting. I am currently writing my senior paper which is a paper of at least 30 pages, it has been consuming much of my free time. I am writing on Kenotic Christology and its effects on the way we talk about the Trinity with attention paid to Karl Barth's Doctrine of Reconciliation in CD IV.I. I will post a short summary of the paper when I return.

What a season!

So, this summer has been super busy. I Moved, got married, went to Mexico, played a lot of golf, lead a group of junior highers at MUUUCE. Sarah and my wedding was more that we both could have ever dreamed of. Starting our lives together has been fun and exciting. We went to Mexico where we had a blast. When we came back we both got sick so that was a bummer and Sarah ended up having to go to the ER. But after seeing the doc and getting some medications she was better. We have both been working and this summer. This summer has also been full of fun times with family and friends.

But like all seasons this one is drawing to a close. With the waning of summer and the dawn of school on the horizon it appears that life will soon change. While the start of summer does not bring a huge change it does bring a different pace and flow. I feel the need to simplify my life a bit, I feel as if I have been running at 156 mph and I really need to slow down and take in what is around me.

I believe that a healthy rhythm of life is important. I would give myself a D- on that aspect of my life. Our small group, who I am blessed to have in my life, are making prayer ropes this week and I hope that this will help kick off this new season of life in an intentionally contemplative way. My hope is that these ropes can help foster a continual posture of prayer as we go about our days. As we feel more connected to God I pray that we will be in tune to what He is saying in our lives.

I think that we will be working though "The Sacred Way" by Tony Jones this semester as a group and I am looking forward to having contemplative practices as a part of my regular worship.

The Shack (part 3)

Ok, time to me honest. I almost cried in Caribou as I read the next three chapters of "The Shack." I do not want to give away the premise of the book so all I will say is that the author has an unbelievable way of drawing you in emotionally (this may be due to my lack of exposure to fiction writing over the last year).

I found myself relating to Mack's pain after his "Great Sadness." The questions that Mack asked and the anger he felt struck a cord with me because this last year and a half. But that is not my focus of this post.

I found the portrayal of God at the shack to be very interesting. Mack meets "God" in his Triune nature; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are represented as a large African American woman (father), a Middle Eastern carpenter (Son, Jesus), and an Oriental Women (Holy Spirit). At first glance these characters probably do not fit into the picture that people have of God. The ethnicity of the characters is important because the author is intentionally pushing our concept of God. The idea that God would appear in these different beings for some maybe a hard or even uncomfortable idea, but the manifestations are not the point. The point here is the nature of each character. So far Mack has had the most interaction with the African American woman (father), who is loving, compassionate, and good. She displays foreknowledge and also affirms the free will of humanity.

I am looking forward to seeing the interaction between Mack and God and the dialogue about the "Great Sadness."

The Shack (Part 2)

For out Meal Group last week we were responsible for reading the first three chapters of "The Shack." I found them engaging, but I feel that the author uses too many words. This is probably do to the fact that for the past year I have been reading non-fiction, theology in particular, where the object of the writing is to get to the point and less about painting a picture for the reader. This is one struggle that may be a prevalent theme as I work though "The Shack."

There is one aspect of the this section that jumped out at me. The main character's wife calls God Papa. It is because of her deep relationship with God that she feels that God is her Papa. The idea of calling God Papa for me is foreign because I do not feel that I have a relationship with God like one of a Papa. Its not because I do not feel God's love or anything like that but it is just hard for me to think of God that way. It almost seem irreverent to me. I do think that there is something to be said for having a faith where you can see God as a Papa character. The word papa brings a picture of gentleness and love to my mind. But what about people who do not have that positive picture of a "papa" figure.

At the core of this issue is our picture of God. I am not talking about the pictures of Jesus hanging in our Churches with his long flowing hair and white robe. I mean when I say the word 'God' that do you see in your mind. Each of our conceptions of God is different. This is very apparent when we start to give attributes to this God. When we talk about 'God the Father' there are mental images that immediately enter out minds. For those who have a loving and caring father this is not a problem because that makes sense. But, for the person who's father was abusive or addicted or just not around what does that say about God? I would argue that this picture of God is one of the most important aspects of our faith. It is important that our view of God is congruent with the nature of God in the Bible. One of Satan's best ways of distorting our relationship with God is by distorting our picture of God. I pray that we all can spend some time thinking about what our image of God looks like and if that picture is a 'healthy' picture of God that is congruent with Scripture.

The Shack

Yesterday at the Upper Room the author of "The Shack" William P. Young was interviewed by Kurt the teaching pastor. This was the kick-off to the spring Meal Groups (the Upper Room small groups) season. In these Meal Groups we will be reading and discussing The Shack. I have heard a lot about this book both positive and negative so I am looking forward to reading it. I went into the interview skeptical of the author because I feel that sometimes authors of Christian fiction make up unreal situations to play on the emotions of the reader. But after hearing the story of how "The Shack" came into being and the story of the author I am looking forward to the journey through the book. The author had a pretty crazy life and if you have a chance I encourage you to see him talk. "The Shack" comes out of him working though things in his life. He says that the shack represents our soul and that is where we confront the "crap" in our lives (past or present). He said that we as humans cannot go around the shack but we all must go though the shack if we want to be healed and we must do this with God and others in our lives. The premise of the book is that this guy works through losing his daughter through encounters with the Triune God. One of the main themes in the book is how does forgiveness work in situations of great pain. I hope that the journey through this book will help me through my shack and that healing will come. Looking back at the last year and a half I know that I have a lot of things to work through, and I hope that reading and dialoging with others about "The Shack" over the next 3 months will help to heal my heart and that I will be able to forgive.

So along the way I will be posting my thoughts on the book and how I am processing my past. I look forward to this journey.

Christianity and Social Networking (Facebook)

As J term comes to an end, my group has to give a presentation on postmodernism and Facebook. My contribution to this project along with sharing my wicked awesome ideas was to interact with two of the essays from our book Christianity and the Postmodern Turn Edited by Myron B. Penner. This book has six different views of the effect of postmodernism on Christianity and how Christianity should respond to postmodernism. Each of the six views are different, there are two that argue that postmodernism is not a good thing for Christianity and that it should be avoided the third is buy Kevin J. Vanhoozer and is a very interesting view on how postmodernism is positive in the fact that it reminds us of our finitude and our limitations as humans, while he argues that Scripture needs to be exempt from deconstruction because it is a sacred text. Of all the essays he seems to want to find a middle ground. The second three theorist argue that postmodernism is a positive thing for Christianity. I really enjoyed reading this book and I feel that the question, what is the role of postmodernism for Christianity and theology? is a very important question as we venture further into postmodernity.

For the sake of the project I am going to take R. Douglas Geivett’s and Merold Westphal’s essays and try to determine how they would think that Christians should respond to a network like Facebook. I caution any reader who is not part of my class that this is a very small picture of the work and beliefs of these theorists and further reading and thought may be needed (by myself as well) on this subject.

In his Essay Is God a Story? Postmodernity and the Task of Theology R. Douglas Geivett talks about how postmodernism rejects metanarratives (overarching worldviews) but at the same time he focus on the importance of story. Each person has their own micronarrative or contextual story. These stories are important to the individual and can be based on fact or they can be fabricated.

“The world of make-believe then, provides an avenue for insight into the pathways of the actual world.”

This quote is important as we look at Facebook. Every time someone logs on to a Facebook account she/he sees an incredible amount of stories all of them different. Each profile is a story in itself, a person’s name, status, sex, interests, political and religious beliefs, etc. make up the story of that person. Now you as the viewer of the page have the decision to accept what you see as true, to reject what you see as false or to withhold your judgment on who that person is. This is the interesting thing about Facebook, you can put pretty much whatever you like on your profile. But this needs to be understood because what is put on your profile or friends’ profiles can be seen by others and sometimes by people you don’t even know.

Another theme of Geivett is his strong feeling about how Christians need to be set apart and different from culture at large. He argues that a foundation is needed in order to build one’s faith on and that the foundation should be rigid and unquestioned. I agree with this to some extent but I do think that as Christians we take it too far. Are we to create our own little Christian world so that we do not need to interact with anything Non-Christian? Are we to delve into the wilderness as it were to follow the Essen’s in some 21 century way? I think that this is one of the possible reactions that some Christians could have to Facebook, because it has the ability to deceive us and raises some concern about safety on the internet, Christians could reject it all together and not take part in it. Also there are Christian social networking sites, that are for “real Christians” one of these is 101 Christian Spaces. There are also different versions of board games and the popular dace game DDR. The Christian version of DDR is called Dace Praise and I think it’s unneeded. So we are confronted with a question how do we embody being in the world but not of the world as it pertains to Facebook? I understand there are some negative things about Facebook but I think that the ability to network and communicate with people far outweigh the negative things. I also think that the idea that if something is successful Christians need to make a "Christian" version of it is ridiculous, in some ways this may give not yet Christians an idea that if they become Christians they will have to trade in all of their activities for the "Christian endorsed ones."

Onto-theology, Metanarrative, Perspectivism, and the Gospel by Merold Westphal is the second essay that I will look at. Westphal is much more open to the ideas of postmodernism with Christianity and theology. He confronts Lyotard's definition of postmodernism as; incredulity towards metanarratives, Westphal questions what Lyotard means by metanarratives and interprets Lyotard to mean any overarching worldview that is used to enact injustice and tribalism. So then, is the Gospel a metanarrative? Yes, but is it the kind of metanarrative that Lyotard would seem to be incredulous towards? Westphal would argue that it is not. I seem to agree with Westphal on this point because I do think that being a Christ follower calls for a metanarrative and that the gospel should be what we live out in our lives. Westphal also values prespectivism. “In short, perspectivism is the relativism that insists that we are not God, that only God is absolute.” This gives us (Christians) the ability to live our lives and share out stories. So from this point of view Facebook can be a great place for us to share out stories. If our responsibility is to engage a broken world and show love, hope, and compassion like our Savior Jesus Christ we should use whatever interaction we have with others as a chance to share our stories, because though our stories hopefully people will see His story.