And so it comes, and so it goes.
September 19, 2005 was a day that fits the context of my poem I posted last week. A day of the tragedy of ordinary fate. Nothing that seems especially terrible happened that day in the light of what goes on in the world, and yet what did never left me either. That's pretty much how I expected it to be when I wrote my entry two years ago. It was a capstone on a year journey that included the day covered in my little Nameless series (part I, part II) and miscellaneous other posts along the way.
So what shall I say today? Well, the day is now past. On to another year to see what will happen with this day's memory. Perhaps by next year it shall be a little fainter.
Jesus Camp
I saw the film Jesus Camp yesterday at an open discussion held at my alma mater, Lindenwood. The film is… disturbing. It follows a particular “Evangelical” children's camp (which is heavily Pentecostal and, I would assert, more properly labeled Fundamentalist), following the director and several kids during the time before, during and after the camp. The camp presents many truths, but at the same time was truly disturbing. What tactics are proper for a camp to use to get children to “accept” the Gospel? For that matter, do they really accept a personal relationship with Christ if they are scared into it, or do they merely assent to propositions?
The video also raised some questions about the fundamental debate between the camp and its so-called “enemies,” the “liberal relativists.” I wrote the following in an e-mail discussing the film; the comments are somewhat stream-of-consciousness in form, but hopefully they are intelligible:
I've been mulling over “Jesus Camp” some more. I'm not sure if anything I came up with is worthwhile, and they aren't really unique, but for what its worth…It was really very interesting, if a bit nauseating. Perhaps it is because I've been busy deconstructing my theology since Dr. Schnellmann's Criticism got me thinking about deconstruction, or perhaps my “Covenant Theology” class is emphasizing a “post-modern critique” aware “narrative theology,” or maybe all that is apropos to nothing, but I was thinking: isn't the whole debate essentially yet another airing of two ugly heads of the Enlightenment Project's (dying) beast? Maybe it is time I try to make a reference to Foucault. In fact, perhaps this is where Prof. Stevens was heading with his Foucault reference…
After all, the fundamentalist movement, and many of the “enemies” that Fischer worries about […] are products of the Enlightenment/modernist perspective.
While the homeschool mom, for instance, was busy attacking evolution, she was doing so with the assumption that the Bible speaks in essentially scientific propositions. That reminds me of Dr. Meyers's discussion on category errors with Genesis, and the “walk to work or eat your lunch” example. The “offensiveness” of evolution exists largely among Christians who buy into such a reductionistic, modernist worldview that the only thing that matters is the physical creation and hence see a creation viewpoint and evolution as necessarily opposed. For that matter, the pressure Fischer felt that she must use whatever rhetoric necessary to gain converts would seem to be taking a very naturalistic view of what is required for true conversion (what happened to God in this picture?).
The whole lack of grace among the Christians of the video would seem
Perhaps the (seemingly ever increasing) antagonism between modernist factions will lead to their eventual collapse? Maybe I am overly optimistic there. Of course, then that would mean one thing (logically) in theology: a second wave of Neo-Orthodoxy! I can only imagine all the new books on St. Karl of Basel that would be written…
to come from the fact that they are primarily reading the Bible as propositions of law rather than a story of grace (to sound all deconstructionist again, they seemed to lack a sense of a redemptive
meta-narrative). Despite the “manifestations of the Spirit” there was little real sense of a relational understanding of Christianity.
Anyone here see this film? What did you think?
September Moon
Oh, blood red moon, what fates do you observe,
And behind your cloudy curtain dare to speak?
Illumined now, illumine those who seek!
Your words — strike would they a tender nerve?
No, I do not ask about some famous quest,
Of tragic heroes or of noble paths —
No journey here, and no fate deeméd deaths —
A simple matter really, my only test,
The tragical matter is naught but this:
The suffering of the ordinary fate,
Too plain to be marked by one or all,
No matter of lost Troy, fall'n unto abyss,
But of a worm placed on a hook as bait,
Before his life was spent or fulfilled his call.
Pradis
Just so y'all know, if you happen to be a Windows user (unlike me), Zondervan is being very nice and offering $25 worth of free modules for its Pradis Bible software. No purchase seems to be necessary, so you can pick up a couple of resources to use without actually spending a dime.
You can read all about it here.
A Musing on Deconstruction
I was at the bookstore the other day, and I found myself flipping through several books by Jacques Derrida, trying to figure out if I felt up to the task of reading more of that most interesting and difficult of fellows just now. Though I am not entirely comfortable with every place Deconstructionism will go, the basics of it seem to fit the way things really work. I've spoken mostly of Deconstructionism in the sense of the hermeneutical spiral, but let's consider it somehow other than that.
Consider faith. We accept Christ. We try to make Him the center of our lives, and to that end Christians start and continue churches to be used by Him. The churches are meant to be centered around Christ with the aim to spread the Good News. But, our attempt is futile. In as much as we attempt to pursue “His goals” on our terms, we find that our churches are not so much accomplishing the spread of the Good News, but rather maintaining their self-perpetuating existence as organizations and finding ways to amuse our members with ever increasingly spectacular displays.
It isn't malicious intent, but rather the complete inability of humans to be centered. We are constantly slipping away from that which we most aim to do, and, in fact, our attempts in and of themselves are as effective as is the effort of pulling one's fingers out of a Chinese finger trap. It simply does not work.
The key of course, and the place where the Christian parts way with the agnostic Deconstructionist thinker is that something I hinted at above. The problem appears inasmuch as we depend on our terms. God certainly is powerful enough to do what needs to be done, but if He is going to use us, we need to quit thinking we can escape the gravitational force exerted by the phenomena we call Deconstruction and allow God to deconstruct our frameworks for us.
Oops... Nameless was Postless.
In case you tried to follow the links in the last post to go read “Nameless,” you may have been driven crazy by the fact that the links simply came back to the front page. Not that I have a terribly good reason you should want to go read it and if you are a long time reader, you've already seen the posts anyway. But, I've fixed the links, in case anyone did want to read the posts.
Chart Topper: Taking Over Me
Well, I had an event of historic proportions occur today. I had a song cross over the 100 play count threshold in iTunes for the first time. The song with that honor was “Taking Over Me” by Evanescence (from the album Fallen ). For those not familiar with iTune's play counter, it tallies one play for each complete playing of a song in iTunes or on any iPod that is sync'ed through that copy of iTunes. I've been using iTunes primarily since May 2004 when I became a full time Mac user, but most of those plays on this particular song come from September 2004 and beyond.
I really took note of the song, which may be my favorite from Evanescence, in Fall '04. It just seemed to fit for a variety of reasons, and so I listened more closely and became rather attached to it. It actually has some associations with the picturesque day in October of that year I felt compelled to write about last fall in my series “Nameless” (I never did finish the series, but the first parts were here and here).
At any rate, I digress. it's a good song. In general, Evanescence is a bit “harder” rock than I typically like, however, it is this hardness juxtaposed with Amy Hartzler's (nee Lee) voice, the orchestra scores and sometimes a pretty impressive choir that really makes the band interesting. Sometimes the choirs sing in Latin even, such as in “Whisper” from Fallen or “Lacrymosa” from the Open Door, the latter of which draws on the Requiem Mass/_Dies Irae_ by way of Mozart. Even in quieter pieces such as “My Immortal,” there is a contrast of the softness of the piano and the hardness of the guitars that take over at the end of the “Band Version.”
But, “Taking Over Me,” is something different. I cannot objectively define a reason, but I tend to think it is my favorite song from Evanescence. It is haunting and has a unique lead in. An earnestness to it makes it easy to relate to. Perhaps most importantly, there is something especially appealing about the movement from sorrow to hope in it. So, it is not entirely without merit that it was the song to take the 100 play honor.
In Other News: I noticed my post archive is messed up at the moment. It has long had a “known issue” that I've meant to resolve that makes it so that you can only see the last 20 posts in any given category, however SAFARI (my homebrewed CMS/blogware, not the web browser) now has a bug that makes it sort by something other than date, and a lot of old posts are showing up in the categories at the cost of hiding newer posts. I need to fix both issues, but in the mean time, here's your chance to (turn on booming announcer voice) relive favorite classic asisaid moments today! Yes, that's right, you can enjoy posts from as early as 2002 from the convenience of your own home. Call — ahem, I mean click — over in the category box today!
Digital or Paper?
One of my big dilemmas is that I'm a gadget geek and a book buyer. I love the feel of a new book, the smell of a new book, and the joy of laying in bed reading a book. But, I also love highly searchable, cross reference-able digital texts.
I'm debating whether to buy BDAG — the premier Greek-English lexicon — in its impressive print form or to buy it in its less impressive, but perhaps more convenient digital form for Accordance. I've been using Accordance for a few weeks while preparing to review it at OFB and have found it sufficiently impressive that I've been considering the option of buying modules for it.
In fact, I did invest in a handful of modules. I bought the Scholar's Core to compliment the Library Premier package that I received to review. The Library Premier is a superb package that hits a bit of everything so that one has a nice start to a library (two good modern translations, a voucher good for three more modern translations worth up to $30 each, a boatload of commentaries, Thayer's lexicon and some other nice things), but Scholar's rounded it out with a few essential items: a Nestle-Aland 27th edition (as opposed to the Library's Textus Receptus), the UBS Lexicon, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Louw and Nida Semantic Domain Lexicon. The NA27, BHS and Louw and Nida were the primary items of interest to me. Using the digital Louw and Nida reminds me of why I should probably buy the digital BDAG: it is just so much easier to look things up using Accordance's triple click “Amplify” to my lexicons than it is to flip through a giant lexicon looking for the word I want.
Nevertheless, my inner bookworm wishes I could buy the printed version combined with a license to a digital copy… now that would be nice! Then again, I may hold off on BDAG completely, if I can — what has me really intrigued is the CNTTS Greek Apparatus which should be extremely useful once they get the Pauline epistles included in it. Reading the article about it that is attached to that link makes it sound like just about the perfect apparatus. I hope it stays at $100 in its final form.
And So It Beings. Again.
Tomorrow I have my first class of my second normal semester at CTS. The class tomorrow is “Preparation and Delivery of Sermons” (a.k.a. “Prep and Del”). I'm rather excited about the course, for it will be my first opportunity to be in a class taught by the seminary's president, Dr. Bryan Chapell (we will read his book, Christ Centered Preaching as part of the course). This should be interesting!
The rest of my classes are on Wednesdays and Fridays, so I shall post more on them later.
Reflection and a Moth
My reflection stares back at me in the glass,
A green bug and a moth sit on the pane,
My thoughts run wild and wonder what I've done,
The thoughts and things that I have left unsaid.
O Moth, what thoughts run in your head tonight,
You silent winged creature in dim twilight?
Unlock the stories that remain untold
In the unblinking eyes of the reflected man
Who looks about the darkened window pane.
Do you know where you'll go in the morrow?
What insight can you give of the reflected's fate?
What grieves the eyes that look back in the glass?
As you flutter, impart some wisdom now.
Do you know the balance of time you borrow?
