StephenBarkley.com

Chapter 8: Christ and Power

Summary

1972: Some have argued that Jesus’ radical personalism makes him irrelevant to questions of power and structure. When the post-Constantine Christians found themselves in positions of social responsibility, they had to look outside the New Testament for their ethical guidelines because Jesus had nothing to say about the subject. We need to examine the New Testament understanding of powers and see how it relates to modern views of the topic.

Read more

• Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons © 2006
• Harper Collins: HarperOne
• xvi+303 pages

Buechner’s writing is just plan beautiful. At times it has the potential to take your breath away. He combines deep spiritual insight—something only acquired through years of living with God—with a poet’s flair for prose.

Secrets in the Dark is a collection of sermons (with a couple addresses thrown in for good measure) spoken over the course of his life. As you read through them, you can see how God has led his life.

Here’s an example of the sort of beautiful insight I mentioned:

If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to be born both within ourselves and within the world; we would know that the Kingdom of God is what we all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don’t know its name or realize that it’s what we’re starving to death for. (“The Church” 149)

As a pastor, I don’t get to sit and take in many sermons. When I do have the opportunity, I have a tendency to pick apart the homily to see how it was constructed and what I would change. It’s been very healthy for me to hear these sermons. They’ve cut through my professional defenses and left a mark.

Herein lies my greatest fears for the Emergent Church: in its attempt to start where the culture is, it rarely stops and asks, “Is this where the culture should be?”

—Calvin Miller, Life is Mostly Edges, 286.

Chapter 7: The Disciple of Christ and the Way of Jesus

Summary

1972: Since it’s possible to posit a gap between the kingdom Jesus announced (as recorded in the Gospels) and the shape of the early Christian church, we will now reflect on the apostolic ethical tradition. One of the strongest themes that relate apostolic ethics to Jesus is the idea of participation/correspondence which is described primarily by two overlapping metaphors: discipleship and imitation. This theme is based on the doctrine of imago dei, given new reality by in the New Testament by the Spirit.

Read more

• The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives © 2008
• Vintage (Random House)
• xi+252

The Drunkard’s Walk is science writing at its best.

You start with someone who knows what their talking about. Mlodinow has a PhD in physics from the Berkeley and teaches at Caltech. If that’s not enough for you, he co-wrote A Briefer History of Time with Stephen Hawking.

The second element in good science writing is an interesting topic. Randomness fits the bill perfectly since it permeates every area of our lives. This allows Mlodinow to tell interesting stories about everything from Let’s Make A Deal to the track record of investment bankers.

This book is well structured, too. Rather than follow some text-book method of teaching, Mlodinow has organized the chapters around the history of this field of study. As you continue through the chapters, you encounter all the major theorists who have led the study of randomness.

The last element in a good science book is simply good writing. The quality of Mlodinow’s prose is excellent. Don’t expect flat technical writing here—he composes his sentences artfully.

This was the first book I’ve read by Mlodinow but it won’t be the last.

I had always disliked anonymous gifts. They force you to be nice to everyone, because you just never know.

—Calvin Miller, Life is Mostly Edges, 119.

Chapter 6: Trial Balance

Summary

1972: We agree that Jesus had a ethical-social vision of the Kingdom. Does that vision as recorded in the gospels translate into the rest of the New Testament? Again, we will not be exhaustive, but prove that Jesus’ ethical-social vision didn’t end with the ascension.

When Paul speaks about imitating Jesus, he focuses exclusively on his suffering—his cross. That cross is “the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to come” (96). Jesus suffered because he didn’t give in to the temptations of quietism, establishment responsibility, or crusade. He modeled Kingdom life with all its ethical-social aspects. We are to suffer like Jesus. Read more

• The Fantastic Imagination: An Anthology of High Fantasy © 1977
• Avon
• ix+325 pages

This is the good stuff. While I admit enjoying the odd swords & sorcerers style of pop-fantasy, it’s work like this that really inspires me. This is more than mere genre-fantasy—it’s literature in its own right.

Boyer & Zahorski’s collection is broad. It covers work from the 19th century as well as the 20th. It’s fascinating to watch the evolution of imaginative ideas from Johann Ludwig Tieck to George MacDonald to C. S. Lewis. The themes were broad as well. You get to read everything from fairy tales to stories about a princess who lost her gravity to an aristocrat who threw a ball and invited Lady Death.

What I found most compelling about this collection was the ability to read a satisfying work of high fantasy in less than 30 pages. I always assumed you had to construct the mythical world before you start working in it. These authors prove that all it takes is a skilled turn of phrase to evoke the feeling of otherness so necessary in high fantasy.

This collection is out of print but it’s well worth tracking down second hand.

People are so ready to think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed! Those who are good-tempered because it is a fine day, will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in the one case, the fine weather has got into them, in the other the rainy.

—George MacDonald, The Wise Woman  and Other Fantasy Stories, 23.

Chapter 5: The Possibility of Nonviolent Resistance

Summary

Chapter five is a mere three pages long with one page consisting of a lengthy quote from Josephus. In it Yoder demonstrates that there were ways the Jewish people of Jesus’ day could resist Rome without turning to violent Zealotry. Using Josephus, he showed how the Jews would rather die than accept Caesar’s effigies in their holy city. Pilate was moved by their passion as they laid bare their necks to his judgment. The second time they tried this Pilate massacred them. Read more