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Welcome to StephenBarkley.com. This is where I post all the stuff I've been thinking, praying, speaking, and writing about. Thanks for reading.
The gospel message is precisely an invitation and authorization to be freed from all … distorting, coercive pressures: to be freely and completely Yahweh’s own people, freed to live a life of unfettered worship, assured not only of safety from threat but assured of Yahweh’s own person, who is the true joy of life.
—Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66, 140.
I have been curious about Christian pacifism since the aftermath of 9/11. “Just war theory” had always been my official view, although I had no real idea what that meant.
A few years ago the documentary, God of War, Prince of Peace was produced. (You can grab it for free on TheMovieBlog.com.) In it, Tony Campolo’s story about his inability to drop bombs while asking, “what would Jesus do” really struck me. Lately I’ve been reading Hauerwas, a pacifist theologian. (I didn’t know they made pacifists in Texas!) It turns out Hauerwas was a student of J. H. Yoder, a Mennonite theologian and popular thinker in the 20th century pacifist tradition
I’ll be honest: I want to be a pacifist. I can’t believe Jesus wants us to kill other people created in his image. Still, when I think of the rise of Hitler and the abuse of innocent people, I wonder whether Christian love doesn’t compel us to act violently against oppression. I’ve decided to study The Politics of Jesus and really consider what Yoder had to say on the topic. I’m using the second edition (1994), which is an update of the 1972 classic. Each chapter (12 total) will have its own post as I try my best to respond to Yoder’s logic and, with the help of the Spirit, form my own perspective on Christianity and war. I welcome any constructive—surely I can’t be the only Christian wrestling with this topic!
An now, on to “the simple rebound of a Christian pacifist commitment as it responds to the ways in which mainstream Christian theology has set aside the pacifist implications of the New Testament message” (x).
. . .
There’s nothing like a good word study to drill down to the underlying meaning of a text. BibleWorks 9 facilitates these studies in predictable and unusual ways.
First, the predictable. There are 3 Hebrew (including my go-to, TWOT) and 6 Greek lexicons (including Friberg and Thayer) built in to BW9. To look up a Hebrew or Greek word, just right-click on it and choose “Lookup Lemma in Lexicon Browser”. It’s that easy. (Of course, if the word is a Hebrew compound word, BW9 lets you select which lemma you want to search for.) You can quickly switch between lexicons in the lexicon browser by using the drop-down list at the top.
Many times while studying I pass over a common word to save time. If you don’t want the depth of the Lexicon Browser, you can hover over the word and see the lexicon entry immediately in the analysis tab. Seriously, you can look up every word of a verse in seconds using this method. I’ve found this to be a great way to give your teaching creativity a boost. Read more
At the end of Kubric’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Commander David Bowman left the ship to explore a massive black monolith stationed between Jupiter and Io. This monolith represented mystery and higher intelligence in the universe. As he stared full into the mystery, he gave his final transmission:
My God, it’s full of stars!
In All Is Grace, a timeworn Brennan Manning, who has spent his entire life staring full in the face of the ultimate mystery of the universe, gave his final transmission:
My God, He’s full of grace!
Memoirs of Christians are important because they chronicle how God reaches people. We have scripture to read how God reached Israel and the early church. We have memoir to help discern his actions today.
Manning was very flawed man. He was a priest who got married. He was a drunk for most of his life. (Indeed, he resembles biblical heroes more than he does modern ‘saints’.) A couple things make Manning more unique than your average run-of-the-mill sinner:
God’s grace is more powerful than Manning’s sin or our own. That’s his message and it’s well worth reading.
God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in his image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by him, his mark is deep within us. We have God’s joy in our blood.
—Frederick Buechner, “The Great Dance” in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, 240.
Reading 50 year old science fiction is an entertaining experience. Not only do you have to envision the future with the author, you have to view it through a dated lens.
Asimov’s The End of Eternity is a great example of classic science fiction. You get an archetypal mystery/love story mix set in a world of time-travel.
Asimov’s science-fiction creativity is superb. How, for example, did he think up a time-travel system energized by the power of our sun in the distant future as it goes nova? The paradoxes that are always explored in time-travel books are well worked into the mystery.
Unfortunately, the character development is as bad as the science-fiction is good. These people feel like little more than artificial devices invented to carry the plot forward—which, of course, they are.
If you’re feeling nostalgic, this book provides a few interesting hours of escape.
Faith is the engagement ring which betroths us to Christ.
—Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 1-4, 334.
Chuck over at Terrible Minds threw down a challenge. Write a sub-500 word short story inspired by a randomly selected song title. Here’s my 481 word entry entitled, “Nothing (Without You)”.
…
I watch the drops of water arc perfectly off the tip of my ashen paddle as I swing the blade forward for another stroke. After a week of paddling, my blade returns to the water without making a sound. As the concentric circles spawned by each droplet create elegant interference patterns on the surface of the river I realize: this is what I’ve always wanted.
Every time life got too busy—too noisy—I would lose myself in the map. While my coworkers would try everything from massage therapy to sleeping pills to manage their stress, my eyes drifted along the topographical lines that marked the contours around this riverbank. I swear that I could feel my systolic pressure dropping as each rapid, portage and campsite flickered through my mind.
At first the dream was too distant to be real. The river was too wild, too other, to be approached. It belonged to the journal entries of the classic voyageurs and National Film Board of Canada educational videos. Then, with each decision (authorizing vacation time, booking the flight, renting gear, planning food, etc.) the river became more tangible.
Now, I’m here. The near-deafening white noise of the class three rapids behind me fade into the ever-present background music of wind on pine needles. As the decibels drop, each paddle stroke offers an incrementally deeper state of awareness. A whisky-jack notes my progress by flitting from tree to tree, hoping for food scraps from my evening meal. A school of minnows dart away from my paddle which they perceive as a predator. Aquatic flora less than a foot below me bends to the will of the current, pointing the way to the sea.
I’m not ready to come home. The juvenile homesickness that tested me on those early excursions into the wild has long passed. I know that this is where I belong. The worst this trip has to offer—the water that’s soaked into the foam straps of my pack from a too-close encounter with a watery haystack, the dark-grey hordes of blackflies that seem genetically impervious to DEET, the ache of shoulder muscles called back into action after a winter of disuse—holds more inherent life than any day at the office. No, I don’t want to be home. This is better than home.
I’m trying desperately to seize every moment of this trip. My camera’s safe and sound back home—no LCD screen will mediate this journey. Gone, too, is my watch. The artificial convention of hours, minutes and seconds seem trite against the ancient rhythms of sunrise and sunset.
The sun is approaching the southwestern treetops so I need to find a relatively level spot to live for a night. I’ll pitch my bivy sack, light a fire, rehydrate some food and crawl into my mummy bag for the night … and think about you.
This book is a godsend for those of us who don’t live close to a theological library. Patrick Miller has collected 15 different articles Brueggemann has written for various theological journals between 1978 and 1990 and organized them loosely into two categories.
The first articles discuss theological method. Brueggemann interacts with the major figures in Old Testament studies from Von Rad to Terrien to Childs while pushing their insights to new heights. He spends a lot of time working out the implications of Childs’ canonical criticism. It’s next to impossible to summarize a collection of essays, but Bruggemann’s main thought is this: there’s no one thing at the core of the Old Testament: there a dialectic. You can call it “Structure Legitimization” meets “Embrace of Pain” or “Hurt” meets “Hope”. This is what gives Old Testament faith its vibrancy and drive.
The second category of articles are examples of his method worked out exegetically. He tackles Genesis, Samuel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah all in his distinctive voice.
Whether you agree with everything he has to say or not (and what thinking person ever agrees with everything someone else has to say?), Bruggemann has been a steadfast voice of Christ-centred Old Testament scholarship for decades. This set of essays was invigorating to read.
Right belief is the necessary condition for right action, not the other way round.
—Robert Barron, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith, 22.
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