emergent

http://gatheringinlight.com/2008/01/13/the-four-models-of-emerging-churches/

the above article is by a guy called C. Wess Daniels, who gives a brief description of the four general 'emergent' strands that have 'emerged' in the past few years in church circles..

i must admit to having a mixed view of the whole emerging/emergent church movement (or 'conversation' or whatever non-dogmatic term you want to use).. on the one hand i can see a need for 'doing' church in the face our so-called postmodern society/culture in fresh ways.. on the other hand i pretty much can't stand (or even really understand the point of) theological liberalism and the soppy political liberalism that often goes with it, especially the sort that uses Jesus as some kind of proto-hippie who, to paraphrase Mark Driscoll, wears a dress and has peroxide in his hair.. alot of the emerging church appears to be such a theological and political liberalism just dressed up in a new package.. it also often seems to be Christian kids rebelling against their evangelical/religious right parents and trying to be 'relevant' to the culture they live in.. but lets face it they're very often not, no matter what they do.. i haven't read up as much as i'd like on many of the strands but, of the four movements he mentions, i think i'd lean more towards the fourth - the Driscoll/missional thing.. for me the first (Brian McLaren/postmodern theology) is way off target - it seems to compromise too much with the culture.. the second (what appears to be the so-called 'Radical Orthodoxy') looks quite interesting but, again, i haven't read anything much by the theologians behind it (i.e. James K.A. Smith) - though the little i have read seems highly abstract and arcane (but hey after Hegel nothing can be that bad eh?).. and the third seems to be more for left wing Christian hippies (i.e. Shane Claiborne/the New Monastics), which unfortunately i'm not one of (can't imagine driving a bus run on vegetable oil anytime soon) - though i can understand the pull of a more contemplative Christian life (which explains why figures like Dallas Willard are becoming increasingly popular in the movement)..

a second article is from Christianity Today and is written by New Testament theologian Scot McKnight:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/february/11.35.html

this article is overall less descriptive, though there is alot of that, and more supportive of the movement as a whole.. he outlines some of the aspects which identify 'emergent' - one of which is to be poilitically left leaning.. again i think this is because of a conscious rebellion against the Christian Right stance of many of the emergent kids' parents - either that or it just seems abit more hip and cool to be a left winger these days.. i think this is generally one of the reasons why alot of Christians are becoming more and more anti-Israel (and anti-America and anti-capitalist etc.) - because its part of the left wing position to be so and the left wing position has almost become the default cultural position for 'sophisticated' and 'intelligent' people (at least it has in post-Christian, seculaist/socialist Europe and a good portion of the States too)..
he also says that one thing Evangelicals are wary of is the fact that emergents often do theology as postmoderns rather than with or to postmoderns (which they also do and which is perfectly fine).. the part about worship and the questions it asks is also interesting.. is the sermon the most important thing on a Sunday? i would answer probably yes but i think fellowship is also highly important as well as worship.. i like the part about our deeds being as important as our theology which, it's true, alot of Christians forget, despite paying lip service to (which i'm often guilty of myself).. the section on missional living is also good, if brief.. then there's the bit on being 'post-evangelical' (where did all this 'post' crap come from? i first heard it with post-rock, then every music genre became 'post', then postmodern this and that, now post-postmodern.. when will it end?)..
to quote McKnight here at length:

'Post-systematic theology: The emerging movement tends to be suspicious of systematic theology. Why? Not because we don't read systematics, but because the diversity of theologies alarms us, no genuine consensus has been achieved, God didn't reveal a systematic theology but a storied narrative, and no language is capable of capturing the Absolute Truth who alone is God. Frankly, the emerging movement loves ideas and theology. It just doesn't have an airtight system or statement of faith. We believe the Great Tradition offers various ways for telling the truth about God's redemption in Christ, but we don't believe any one theology gets it absolutely right.'

i'd generally agree with this at the minute.. i was thinking the other day that the more theology i've come across the more i've taken parts from some and mixed it with parts from others, without every wholly agreeing with one theologian or theological position (for instance i've been heavily influenced by Reformed theology, Jewish Roots, premillennialism, the pentecostal/charismatic movement, philosophy of religion etc. without holding up one of them and saying theyve got it all spot on).. the only thing i'd say here is that i dont believe this means we can't and shouldn't agree on some fundamentals of the faith which it is pivitol for a Christian to believe i.e. the obvious ones like the Trinity, the Incarnation, penal substitution etc. (i.e. the doctrines that basically seperate Christianity from any other world-faith)..

the part about in-versus-out is where McKnight seems to become critical of the emergent movement i.e. the universalism some of its followers adhere to.. McKnight also has a warning for the emergent's left-leaning political position i.e. not to forget the spiritual gospel at the expense of the social gospel, as many liberals once did..

again, because i'd like to remain both politically and theologically conservative whilst remaining conscious of the fact the gospel needs to be contextualized for a postmodern culture, i'm more drawn to the missional/Driscoll model than the other three outlined by Daniels in the first article..

and again, overall, i'm still mixed about the movement as a whole but its obvious that it is a multi-faceted thing, much like Christianity itself, and can't be generalized as some monolithic entity with such and such characteristics.. i think there are aspects to be wary of but also some potentially interesting ideas.. as McKnight observes at the end of his article it seems like emergent movement will leave its mark on evangelicalism somehow or other, much as the Charismatic and Jesus People movements did in the 60's.. hopefully i'll post some more about this topic in the future..

double standards

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3630461/a-lethal-double-standard.thtml

A great piece by Melanie Phillips (as always) in the article above comparing the, frankly hypocritical, response of the Western media/intelligensia to the recent Sri Lanka-Tamil Tigers conflict and their treatment of Israel in the recent 'seige' of Gaza.

List of 100+ Living Philosophers of Religion

http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=1294

C.S. Lewis, Naturalism & Idealism

After spending a good part of the past two years studying Idealism in one form or another (Kant, Hegel etc.), here are a couple of article i've read recently:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/04/its-just-so-obvious.html

http://www.stanford.edu/group/ww1/spring2000/Glenn/Lewis.htm

Edward Feser's piece is about how at the turn of the last (20th) century Idealism in some form was considered in academia as fairly obvious - so obvious, in fact, that no real argument was needed to be given for its truth.. interestingly Feser then goes on to compare this dogmatic attitude to present day naturalism - most academic philosophers (and academics in general) would today take the same stance: naturalism is so obvious it doesn't even need to be argued for anymore..

The second article is about C.S. Lewis' intellectual journey from atheism to theism, a significant part of which was his adherence to the Absolute Idealism of Hegel (and before that Berkeley and Plato), as a kind of stop-gap between the two worldviews.. it's interesting to note that Lewis was educated around the time that Feser is referring to in which Idealism was just 'taken for granted' as a worldview.. after studying Kant and Hegel myself, despite how impressive they are intellectually, i've found it extremely hard to see how anyone could really take their views seriously (and obviously most don't anymore, due to naturalism being the reigning academic paradigm)..

Interesting stuff.

GIG HISTORY

there was a devil sold his soul gig on tonight at the freebutt to which i was going to go but passed at the last minute (no particular reason).. anyway it got me thinking of all the notable bands ive seen live recently, so i compiled a list - i'm not sure if this'll cover all of them (probably not) but these are all the ones that i can remember i've seen over the past few years.. ive also seen quite a few of them (i.e. isis, norma jean, phi-life) more than once.. so in no real chronological order:

meshuggah
cult of luna
*shels
devil sold his soul
bossk
rinoa
latitudes
ghost of a thousand
dillinger escape plan
the ascent of everest
sons of noel and adrian
envy
boredoms
phi-life cypher
task force
ghostface killah
anthem of the century
the mars volta
thursday
hot cross
my awesome compilation
coheed and cambria
murcof
poison the well
beecher
killswitch engage
twelve tribes
all that remains
boy sets fire
death by stereo
johnny truant
earth
thrones
sikth
architects
dying fetus
zombi
isis
jesu
bloc party
mystery jets
norma jean
delirious?
send more paramedics
gallows
aped-bi-sapien
the icarus line
hondo maclean
nine
morgan heritage (reggae)
maylene and the sons of disaster
i am legend
the showdown
will haven
cat on form
unwed sailor
toboggan

of all these gigs which ones stand out the most? well i think as far as live acts go ISIS and the mars volta were by far the best - the epic kind-of sound they both have is much better experienced live than on cd.. unwed sailor & toboggan was notable for the fact that i set the gig up (that was about '02 at the freebutt in brighton).. i was at johnny truant's last ever show at the engine rooms.. i saw earth at the barfly mainly because i really wanted to see kurt cobain's best friend dylan carson in the flesh - and he spoke in the most high pitched voice i'd ever heard, twas like he'd inhaled some helium before coming on stage.. meshuggah were probably the most technically intense live act (closely followed by dillinger escape plan).. murcof was live in a cinema..

anyway i made another list of bands i would really like (or at least would have really liked) to see:
led zeppelin (back in the day)
metallica (anytime before 1990 and the black album)
mahumodo
at the drive-in (the greatest live show ever - or at least they looked that way)
texas is the reason
orphaned land
tool
nirvana
nick drake (even though he never did gigs)
jimi hendrix
mastodon
aphex twin
the gza
refused

A.N. Wilson reverts to theism

Famous ex-theist and now, it seems, ex-atheist A.N. Wilson explains his return to faith here:

http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/conversion-experience-atheism

I remember reading Wilson's highly negative biography of C.S. Lewis about 10 or so years ago.. as a youngster who was obsessed with Tolkien, Lewis & all things Inklings and without much critical apparatus I don't think I really grasped how atrociously bad the biography was.. but, as Victor Reppert remarks on Dangerous Idea, hopefully now he'll rethink some of it..

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/the_two_state_solution_is_87_y.html

a brief article by victor sharpe on the proposed two state solution and the history of the conflict over israel, with an emphasis on britain's role.. well worth a read

schopenhauer + post-metal

last term i was studying Hegel (and i've nearly finished writing my dissertation about Hegel's Absolute - Aristotle or Fichte or something like that).. anyway after the genius of Immanuel Kant last year and beginning to get into Fichte (the bridge, along with Schelling, between Kant & Hegel), i figured i probably needed to complete my education in German Idealism by reading some Schopenhauer over the Christmas holiday.. wow.. Schopenhauer blew my mind (but note: along with Fredrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx, I've found myself unconvinced by pretty much everything almost every single one of these great Germany philosophers of the 19th century said, as well as being able to see some of the deeply destructive consequences of their thought in the world around me - but hey)..
anyway the main thing I want to comment on is Schopenhauer's philosophy of music.. really the point needs to be made against the background of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, so briefly:

Schopenhauer is easier to understand if you first take a crash course in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.. essentially Kant thinks the human subject constructs the world of experience around him by applying space and time as well as certain categories (substance, causality etc.) to the matter of objects in an a priori manner (i.e. we do so before we have had any experience of the external world).. in effect it's an Idealistic version of Aristotle's Form/Matter divide - the Form of an object being, simply, its shape/nature and its Matter the part of the object that sensibly affects us (i'm pretty sure Kant would rather his philosophy of been called Formal Idealism, as opposed to the Transcendental Idealism it has since become labelled).. an easy analogy is to think of our a priori subjective activity as a kind of 'cookie cutter' in which dough (ie an object's matter) is placed and given a certain shape by the cutter (in this case a spatial-temporal/causal shape).. Kant thinks that we cannot know objects as they are 'in-themselves' i.e. stripped of these subjective conditions we bring to bear on them a priori.. this divide means that there are almost two objects to consider when contemplating reality - the object as it is for us (or 'phenomena') in space and time and subject to causality and the object as it is 'in-itself' (or 'noumena'), stripped of space, time and the categories we apply to them.. for Kant we can know nothing of this realm of noumena, or objects as they are in-themselves - agnosticism is the default position here..

in essence this is the background Schopenhauer inherits and, with a few modifications, he remains a Kantian Idealist - the twist being that he thinks we can know the thing-in-itself.. he thinks this because all of our representations are in space, time etc. but at least one part of our experience is non-spatial and not subject to the categories - namely our own subjective existence - our existence as will.. this is in essence the idea of his most famous philosophical work The World as Will & Representation.. he agrees with Kant that the thing-in-itself cannot be in space or time or subject to the categories and if one of these categories is substance and through it we divide the world into many discrete individual substances then the thing-in-itself must be a non-plural undifferentiated spaceless, timeless unity.. so the thing-in-itself thus becomes in effect a monistic Will, which at root we are all manifestations of in some way.. the Will is also a purely objectless striving because, as a thing-in-itself, it has no object to will or desire (due to there being no seperate individual substances for it to aim at), but due to the spatio-temporal world of our creation the objectless striving becomes a ceaseless striving for the objects of the phenomenal world..

this means that we are almost condemned to will incessently for things that will never ultimately satisfy us - because the Will constantly strives for its desires to be satisfied and, once they are satisfied, it will begin desiring a new object once again and so on indefinately..

as you can probably guess this is the root cause of all our suffering in the world and schopenhauer thinks that the reason there is pain and suffering is because our transcendentally constructing intellect imposes division and multiplicity on the thing-in-itself when there is nothing but the absolute unity of the Will.. once this division is imposed upon it the Will, in effect, turns upon itself with its conflicting desires and strivings and causes the strife and suffering we see in the world around us. essentially it is we humans who are responsible for all the pain that is in the world because it is we who, through our a priori construction of the phenomenal world, fragment the Will and set it against itself by creating discrete individual substances which act in such a selfish manner..

as you can probably see his philosophy has somethings in common with certain strands of eastern thought - Hinduism and Buddhism especially, though it appears he arrived at these somewhat similair conclusions independently.
Schopenhauer's ultimate answer to the escape of suffering is to deny the Will via ascetic living and self-denial. we should all recognize that as we are all at root identical, nothing but manifestations of the Universal Will, we should have compassion on those suffering around us as if it was we ourselves who were suffering. but before all that he suggests that temporary release from the Will is to be found in aesthetic appreciation which allows the individual to leave behind his desires and enter a state of disinterested contemplation. Schopenhauer sees music as the highest form of aesthetic experience because music allows us to, as it were, see our emotions in an objectified form which then allows us to reflect upon the very nature of the Will without having to experience it directly and, thus, experience the suffering that comes with it.

now suffice to say i don't agree with much of Schopenhauer's metaphysics as obviously it implies atheism (actually i think alot of what he says is somewhat contradictory - but thats another matter), but the scope and sweep on his ideas are breathtaking and his idea of music objectifying our emotions as a temporary release of our suffering has always struck a chord with me (no musical pun intended)..
he would have been referring to classical music and i believe Richard Wagner took alot of inspiration from Schopenhauer's writings on this point and, indeed, Nietzsche's first great work The Birth of Tragedy is based around his love of Schopenhauer and Wagner..
for me this point has resonated mostly when listening to the genre known as post-metal.. ive also found something similair in some post-rock and also some classical music.. i'm sure the experience has probably come to me from other forms of music too, but it seems especially to originate in that kind of epic, intense and emotional music.. for me it is emotion objectified pure and simple: it is dense, crushing and beautiful all at once (who'd of thought beautiful and metal would of gone in the same sentence?)..
for me Isis' two albums Oceanic and Panopticon embody this more than anything else.. its as close as i've come to having a spiritual experience whilst listening to music and, it goes without saying, is impossible to truly capture in words.. i know alot of people, even those that are into metal, won't get what the whole Isis/post-metal thing is about - boring, too repetitive etc. but thats ok, not everyone's perfect :)

new perspective articles

just a couple of brief summaries of the NPP for anyone not familiar:

http://www.thepaulpage.com/Summary.html
http://www.thepaulpage.com/What.html

works righteousness and the NPP

a few years ago i was heavily into the teaching of men like n.t. wright and dwight pryor and, as a result, came to be an adherent of the so-called 'new perspective on paul'.. at the time i sort of brushed over the controversy surrounding it simply because i wasn't reformed and i could never understand some of their doctrines (like predestination etc. - which especially abhorred me).. since that time i have found a massive respect for the reformed tradition and would now consider myself a calvinist - john piper being instrumental in my mini-conversion (his work on romans 9 especially) as well as jonathan edwards, who i consider to be one of the greatest theological and philosophical minds to have ever lived.. there is a beauty and a glorious nature to the reformed doctrines of grace and it has a very systematic way of approaching the scriptures which appeals to a mind like mine.. but since that time the whole new perspective controversy has reared its head again with john piper writing a book in response to n.t. wright's theory of justification and, now wright is in turn writing a response to piper/carson etc., i've started looking at some of the issues again in light of what i've learned since i originally came across the new perspective..

at the moment i just want to look at the question of legalism and the way the reformed tradition considers paul to be attacking 'works righteousness' in his letters (especially romans & galatians).. i have to admit i still find it hard to accept that jews in the first century had a 'works righteousness' mentality and i still think its a caricature of judaism in general.. personally i think e.p. sanders' covenental nomism is still more or less correct - that jews were in the covenant by God's grace and mercy alone and they didn't have to 'earn their salvation'..

just looking at the old testament (or the tanakh) it seems obvious that jews never saw the law (hereafter Torah, due to 'Law's' somewhat negative connotations) as some kind of burdensome task that the Lord had made them accept (see Psalm 119: 'O how i love your Torah, i meditate on it all day''), nor does it make sense to say that God rescued Israel out of slavery in Egypt and took them to Mount Sinai in order to once again enslave them, this time to the 'Law' and its onerous requirements which they needed to keep in order to remain in covenant with the Lord.. it makes God look like a harsh taskmaster and makes his relationship to Israel look like a kind of abusive marriage..
according to Sanders convenental nomism says that Jews were already in the covenant with the Lord by his mercy and grace and the precepts of the Torah were supposed to be a joyful response to this grace.. they weren't earning their place in the covenant by doing any works, they were simply responding as any thankful Jew would to God's saving acts of the past..

this now leads to the question as to what Paul was referring to by 'works of the law' in his letters.. James Dunn's study of second temple Judaism lead him to the conclusion that 'works of the law' doesn't mean good deeds done to earn your salvation.. instead it means more or less covenental 'boundary markers' that show who was 'in' the covenant of Israel (kashrut/dietrary laws, sabbath observance and circumcision were the three main things that seperated Jews from their pagan neighbours).. these boundary markers had become something of an issue of pride for Jews of the first century, who used them as a kind of corporate boasting against the pagan nations..

Paul, then, is objecting to Jews (both believing and, according to scholars like Mark Nanos, also non-believing) requiring Gentile believer to take up these 'works of the law' in order to be considered a part of the covenant.. instead, as far as Paul is concerned, all they need to be a part of the covenant of Israel is faith in Jesus the Messiah of Israel - they don't have to become ethnic Jews..

the interesting thing is as far as i can tell John Piper more or less actually agrees with all of this - he doesn't believe God asked for works righteousness from the Jews.. he seems to think that, though the Law wasn't about earing your own salvation through works, it had nevertheless been turned into such a thing by the first century and so, in effect, Paul was talking about works-righteousness after all and so 'works of the law' does refer to such legalistic acts of righteousness trying to earn covenant.. what piper seems to be responding to mostly, however, is n.t. wright's reformulation of what righteousness and justification are.. wright has a more eschatological and corporately minded/ecclesiological view of it, while piper has in mind the more traditionally reformed individualistic and soteriological reading..
i'll try and look at this issue in more depth in another post..