jakebelder.com

Sin is not merely an intellectual problem

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:56:00 -0400

In his book, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, James K.A. Smith challenges what he calls an 'intellectualist' understanding of sin, arguing instead that sin is rooted in something that goes much deeper. I find this to be particularly helpful:

We [need to] resist merely 'intellectualist' accounts of sin, temptation, and malformation, which are problematic on two levels. First, intellectualist accounts of sin mistakenly see all action as the outcome of conscious, deliberative choices, unaware of the dynamics of formation and habituation... For the intellectualist, every sin is a deliberate choice based on either false beliefs or a lack of knowledge. To be 'tempted', on this account, is always to believe a lie. So the corrective for sinful action would be knowledge: true beliefs and adequate knowledge to equip the person to make better choices. Second, and as a result, intellectualist accounts tend to be blithely unaware of the social forces and systemic factors that prime and shape our imaginations, creating dispositions and tendencies within us toward unjust action and sinful behavior. This is why intellectualist accounts also tend to be highly individualist accounts. We might say that an intellectualist model is able to register only discrete sinful actions but is unable to account for a sinful way of life – the rhythms and habits and routines that disorder a people or a culture in ways that run counter to what God envisions for creation.

...Much of our action is not the fruit of conscious deliberation but is rather the outcome of an acquired, habituated disposition. So the same must be true of our sinful, disordered action. That doesn't mean we're not responsible...rather, the point is that we become habituated to ways of life that run counter to what God envisions for the flourishing of creation. By the quiet, unconscious operation of liturgical formation, we are unwittingly conscripted into stories that are rival tellings of what's in store for the world. These narratives and their metaphorical power seep into our bones in such a way that they come to dominate our 'background' and thus begin to shape our very perception of the world – which, in turn, orients and governs our (habitual) action. We absorb rival gospels as habitus, and thus act 'toward' them, as it were – pulled toward a different telos that rivals the coming kingdom of God. (140-141)

The corrective, as Smith suggests, is not merely the acquisition of knowledge, but it is a deep-seated transformation at the level of the heart. We need to have our loves and desires re-formed and rightly ordered, shaped by the true story of Scripture. And the way to do that, he argues, is through worship.

Miscellanées (Week 19, 2013)

Sat, 11 May 2013 14:29:00 -0400

Every week I use Twitter to share a variety of articles and posts and other interesting things I have seen and read across the web. For those who don't use Twitter but are interested in reading or perusing the links, they are collected here and posted at the end of the week.

I have missed the past month due to holidays and moving this blog over to the new host, but I am ready to pick up this weekly series again.

Here are the links from 05-11 May 2013.

Trinity Project Flythrough – Some students from the Hull School or Art and Design put together this great animation and mock-up of what they imagine Trinity Square, Hull, to have looked like in AD 1349. Holy Trinity Church is being constructed at the time. They really did an excellent job.
In Battle Over Christianity, Orthodoxy Is Winning – An interesting piece on how, though it doesn't always look like it to us, orthodox Christianity is the only variant of Christianity that is growing. You just need to look to the South.
Bread & Wine as a covenant meal – On his blog, Phil Whittall has intriguing post on how the Lord's Supper is foreshadowed in Genesis.
The New Legalism: Missional, Radical, Narcissistic, and Shamed – Anthony Bradley has quite a thought-provoking post on some of the problems he perceives with the 'missional' movement. Not least is the observation that in many ways, all it really ends up being is another form of legalism.
The Myth of “The Great Call” – This is such a helpful article, and links in with some of the things Anthony writes about above. The author's point is simple: just get on with the business of glorifying God in every area of life. That's the great call we all have.
Why Tim Keller Wants You to Stay in That Job You Hate – Here's a great interview Andy Crouch had with Tim Keller on the subject of vocation. Keller's recent book is one of the best on the subject, and the things he says in the interview are a bit of a taster if you haven't had a chance to read the book yet.
Working gun made with 3D printer – It's more than a little disheartening that this is one of the first things someone decided to do with a 3D printer.
7 benefits of having a church office – Neil Robbie, a vicar in West Bromwich, writes about the benefits of their newly-constructed church office. There are some good points and tips here on why a church office is a beneficial thing.

Feel free to comment on any of these items or recommend further articles or posts related to the content above using the space below.

Ignoring Ascension Day

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:38:00 -0400

With the exception of days like Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter, most evangelicals are wont to largely ignore the church calendar. And that means that today, of course, many will not be celebrating Ascension Day.

I have often wondered why this is the case, because Christ's ascension into heaven is no insignificant thing. Perhaps it is because Ascension Day falls on a Thursday, and it is not a holiday like Good Friday. Or maybe they do not have a deep enough appreciation for what Ascension Day means. In that case, it is worth being reminded of the profound significance of Christ's ascension. The Heidelberg Catechism asks in question 49, 'How does Christ's ascension into heaven benefit us?' And it offers this answer:

First, he pleads our cause
in heaven
in the presence of the Father.

Second, we have our own flesh in heaven –
a guarantee that Christ our head
will take us, his members,
to himself in heaven.

Third, he sends his Spirit to us on earth
as a further guarantee.
By the Spirit's power
we make the goal of our lives,
not earthly things,
but the things above where Christ is,
sitting at God's right hand.

Add to this the incredible promise Jesus makes in Acts 1:1-11 that the sending of the Spirit will empower us, the church, with all that we need to carry out our task to bear witness to his rule as King to the ends of the earth, and you have to wonder how we could possibly justify not celebrating this day. Our very life as God's people depends on the ascension.

I leave you with a relatively unknown, but entirely appropriate stanza of that great ascension hymn, 'Crown Him with Many Crowns':

Crown Him the Lord of lords, who over all doth reign,
Who once on earth, the incarnate Word, for ransomed sinners slain,
Now lives in realms of light, where saints with angels sing
Their songs before Him day and night, their God, Redeemer, King.

The numbers tell us there is lots of work to be done

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:00:00 -0400

The Church of England released a bunch of statistics this morning on church attendance in 2011. As a mainline denomination, the Church of England is quite liberal, and as you would expect, this means that numbers have been falling steadily for some time now. However, the data released this morning showed that 2011 did not see the same steady decline of previous years. It was interesting to observe the response to the data for 2011, which was largely greeted with excitement, heralding this as a turning point.

That kind of reaction is a bit presumptuous, of course. As Peter Ould helpfully stated in a tweet earlier this morning, ‘Dear CofE friends. One year's rise after 10 years decline doth not a change in trend make.’ In reality, the numbers do not really tell us that much, and it would be a mistake to try and read anything too significant into them. Most notably, they don't tell us anything about the faith of the individuals who attend each week, since church attendance is not necessarily an indication of a living and active faith, nor does it tell us anything about the faithfulness of each local church.

There is one thing that the numbers do tell us, however: there is a lot of work to be done. I do not know the total population of all the areas covered by the Church of England, but if we take England’s population alone, which was 53,012,456 in the 2011 census, and the average weekly attendance of 1,091,484, that means that only 2.05% of the population attends an Anglican church each week (in reality the percentage will be less because the Church of England operates outside of England as well, such as in the Diocese of Europe). Now, the Church of England is not the only denomination in England, of course, so there is more than just 2.05% of the population in a church each Sunday. But the numbers won’t be anything significantly greater; I’d be surprised if the total amounted to more than 5%.

In the end, it is this statistic that deserves the most attention. On any given Sunday, the vast majority of the population is not in a church, not hearing the gospel proclaimed, not hearing the call to confess Christ as Lord and Saviour. Don't focus on the slowing decline; focus on the massive need that remains in every single parish around the country.

David Foster Wallace on how everybody worships

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:46:00 -0400

Over the past two weeks, while I've been on holiday, I have been reading James K.A. Smith's books, Desiring the Kingdom, and the follow-up, Imagining the Kingdom. One of the main points he makes in both books is that human beings order their lives according to the things they love and desire, and what is particularly interesting is that he observes this line of thinking in various non-Christian thinkers as well. For instance, in Imagining the Kingdom, he quotes the late novelist David Foster Wallace, from a speech he gave at Kenyon College's graduation ceremony in 2005:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already – it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, you will need more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

Christians will argue with some of Wallace's observations, of course, but there is a crucial point here that we cannot escape: worship is a matter of life and death.

O'Donovan on Jesus as the Son of Man and Son of God

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:41:00 -0400

Christians are well acquainted with the titles 'Son of Man' and 'Son of God' being applied to Jesus, but Oliver O'Donovan, in his book, On the Thirty-Nine Articles: Conversations with Tudor Christianity, makes an interesting observation on how these Christological titles are no longer used as they originally were:

We need only think, for example, of how the title 'Son of Man' lost its apocalyptic, eschatological significance, central to its use in the recorded teaching of Jesus, and was misunderstood as though it represented one half of the two-natures doctrine; and of how the title 'Son of God' was taken to represent the other half, losing all echoes of Messianic kingship from which it sprang.

What can be done to begin to reclaim their proper usage?

Welcome to the new blog

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:27:00 -0400

In some ways, the title of this post is a bit of a misnomer, because it’s just the continuation of an existing blog. If you followed me while I was blogging on Posterous, you know that I first thought about switching to Wordpress, but I just wasn't happy with that idea. Thankfully, I found Scriptogram, which is a really cool Dropbox-based host. Yes, that means this blog is coming to you directly from my Dropbox. The best thing about this? My blog is always backed up.

You will notice that the url of this blog has changed, and that just has to do with how Scriptogram handles custom domains. jakebelder.com still exists, but now acts as a sort of 'start page' with links to this blog and things like my Twitter and Facebook profiles.

I am working on importing all the posts from my Posterous blog, which is a bit of work, but soon everything will be available at this site. Unfortunately, the links for individual posts have all changed, and so any links within my posts linking to other posts will be broken for now, as well as any links from outside sites. I’m not settled on the template or design yet, so expect some changes in appearance too. I've given up any hope of importing comments from the Posterous blog, since their API seems to be broken. So, if you commented on anything on the old blog, I'm sorry.

But it's good to have everything up and running again. I'm off on holiday in a few days, though, so don't expect much new posting in the next couple of weeks yet.

Thanks for visiting, and be sure to subscribe.

Miscellanées (Week 14, 2013)

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 08:07:00 -0400

Here are the links from 31 March-06 April 2013.

No April Fool - For April Fools' Day (which fell on Easter Monday this year), Jennie Pollock has some good thoughts on how the resurrection of Jesus was no joke. It is the greatest triumph ever.
Work: What is it Good For? - Here is a video of a conversation with Tim Keller and Katherine Alsdorf on work. I haven't had the chance to watch it yet, but these two are some of the most helpful thinkers on a Christian perspectives of work.
Christians in a Postmodern Culture - I ran across another great video, this time with Anthony Bradley talking about how Abraham Kuyper can inform our cultural engagement today. This is eight minutes well worth watching.
Time-Lapse | Earth - Here is a time-lapse video of earth as seen from the International Space Station. This is absolutely incredible, and will take your breath away. The heavens certainly do declare the glory of God!
Pastors and Their Critics: Pastors - A good post here on how to handle criticism as a pastor.
Pastors and Their Critics: Critics - And here is a follow-up on how those who bring criticism to their pastor should do it.

Feel free to comment on any of these items or recommend further articles or posts related to the content above using the space below.

Miscellanées (Week 13, 2013)

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 15:40:00 -0400

Here are the links from 24-30 March 2013.

The Case for Getting Married Young - I've been a proponent of the idea of getting married young for some time, and this article sums up some of the reasons why. Among other things, the author observes, "Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed... The greatest gift of marriage...is the formation that occurs through the give and take of living in lifelong communion with another."
Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Raphael and a Yellow Polar Bear - Makoto Fujimura makes some very interesting observations on what the artwork on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel actually communicates. Far from drawing us up into the worship of Christ, he writes, it is actually one of the most awkward worship spaces one will ever enter.
What now for the Archbishop of Canterbury? Reflections on Rowan Williams and Justin Welby - Collected here are a number of different opinion pieces reflecting on the ministries of the two most recent Archbishops of Canterbury. All agree that there is quite a marked difference between Williams and Welby.

Feel free to comment on any of these items or recommend further articles or posts related to the content above using the space below.

Miscellanées (Week 12, 2013)

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 15:38:00 -0400

Here are the links from 17-23 March 2013.

The need for evangelical courage - Pete Myers writes an interesting and thought-provoking article on how evangelicals should engage in the Church of England. Far from withdrawing, Myers offers a number of suggestions as to why we should be more involved.
Rick Warren's 5 tips for talking to anyone - I often find these sorts of things helpful. Warren's suggestions here will help foster more robust conversations.
Archbishop Justin - An Evangelical and No Mistake - It was, of course, a big week for the Church of England as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was installed. Following the installation service, Peter Ould writes about why Welby's appointment makes him hopeful for the future of the Church of England.
Welby's Enthronement, Cranmer's Legacy? - However, Peter's brother, David Ould, is more sceptical about the appointment, and here gives a few reasons why.

Feel free to comment on any of these items or recommend further articles or posts related to the content above using the space below.