Land Dispute

I bought ThouShaltNot’s latest album last night, and I’m absolutely addicted. It has a lot more guitar and drum presence than their immediately prior album, The White Beyond, I think, and it works. ThouShaltNot is my favorite contemporary band, so check them out on Itunes if you can. And if you know me just ask me and I’ll let you hear my ipod.

I wonder how many weeks it’ll take before I stop listening to this. I know I couldn’t stop listening to The White Beyond for a while.

Here are the lyrics for one of the catchiest songs, React:

My reaction, my response
I’m a function in need of x
Ask me questions and I reply
I’m never first but I’m always next
And we stare in our eyes
Never blinking and going dry
Do you care more than I
Who will get the last word?
And if we trace back the time
Who began with the first line?
In any case it’s not mine
Because these days I can only react

I’ll never speak without your lead
And I’m your shadow; I react
I’ll be the gear between your teeth
When you’re spinning, I react
You are the neutron at lightspeed
Spring me open, I react
But can I find the zero point I need?
Can I change it all and then take it back?

It’s so easy to shrink an inch
Or is this room growing even more?
And it’s so easy to light a match
When you’ve been burned once or twice before
And when I swing blind in rage
I’m in search of the first page
And when I sing from the stage
Who will get the last word?
You’re the one who creates
All to which I retaliate
But can I ever navigate
Another path than to react?

I’ll find where aggression hides away
Where my own two hands hold sway
It’s a bright and beautiful new day
I will act, I will act
Your reaction, your relapse
Out of love will grow collapse
Something somewhere finally snaps
And I will act, I will act

 

 

 

Emo

I’m feeling quite emo today. Various bad things spotting an overall good day. But hey, that’s life, eh? Anyway, just felt like being girl-with-a-diaryish and writing about that.

Be blessed, all!

What does it mean to be God?

Let me preface this post by making it clear that I’m not challenging a trinitarian understanding of God. I am a trinitarian. I am simply asking a question to further understand who God is.

Today in philosophy class we were going over God’s “communicable” and “incommunicable” attributes. Among the former were love, mercy, compassion and those kinds of things. In the latter were omnipotence, omniscience, ominpresence, and immutability. Eventually the conversation steered into the incarnation and hypostatic union. I suggesting that if we take God’s “incommunicable” attributes as the category by which we say “this is God”, we end up disproving the trinity.

If Jesus is 100% God even incarnate, and omnipresence defines deity, then how can Jesus be God? And if not being omnipresent defines man, how can Jesus be 100% man if he really was in some sense omnipresent. The same thinking can be applied to omniscience and omnipotence.

So my question becomes: why do we use these categories as the way to define God? It seems that the Bible doesn’t seem too concerned to make clear God’s omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. Following Bauckham’s reasoning, the Bible is mostly focused on asserting God’s sole role in creating, and his sole sovereign rule over the cosmos as demonstrating to the Israelites who God is.

So, why do we use these categories to define God, and how do we explain the Incarnation? Should I just be content with the “it’s a mystery” answer?

Ben Myers is at it again…

Check out this post here. Not saying I’d sign up for everything on it, but I did find this paragraph particularly edifying:

“To put it another way, in the single life-history of Jesus, two distinct events take place: the event of authentic humanness, and the event of God’s deity. In every particular aspect of Jesus’ existence, both these events are unfolding. There is no switching back and forth between deity and humanity – as though Jesus sometimes acted in his capacity as God and sometimes in his capacity as a human. Since Jesus is the man wholly dedicated to God, in all that he does he reveals true humanness and true deity. In all that he does, deity happens and humanity happens.”

Futility

I was recently discussing the resurrection with an agnostic friend of mine. I presented what I considered to be the best historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus, but it of course obviously failed to be convincing because there is no room in her worldview for the possibility of a dead man coming back to life. Is debating such things actually futile? Can a person’s worldview be changed apart from the Holy Spirit? And why do I allow the possibility within my worldview?

Behold!

A shameless plug for Lynlea! We await thy blogging.

Mike, give me money.

Post-mortem destination, or poverty?

Chris links to a great post here. Here’s an excerpt:

“During the course of the century, liberal churches experienced substantial decline while conservative evangelical and pentecostal movements, focused on local church growth and preaching a message concerned with the eternal state of the soul, grew rapidly.  Various elements of traditional theology fed their preoccupation with the eternal and their prevailing indifference to the situation of the poor.  Developing premillennialist eschatology’s, conservative Christians read world events through literalistic interpretations of biblical apocalyptic literature, looking forward to the immanent return of Jesus which was to be accompanied by the rapture of the saints and subsequent global devastation.  While acting as a motivating force for missionary activity, premillennial pessimism has been blamed for the tendency of evangelical and pentecostal churches to ignore the social responsibility of the church.“

I know I rail on this often, but when the premillenialism escapism gets so deeply rooted in the church, the result is an unbalanced focus on the eternal plight of the individual, and not on the basic necessities of mankind that God desires all men should have, such as food and shelter and so forth.
Let us not forget what the Lord asked us to pray for:

“Give us this day our daily bread.” While many of us are prone to read this as a sort of spiritual nourishment (not discounting that interpretation), the original audience would have heard this as referring to actual food, the stuff on which we survive. And while we in America and other prosperous nations don’t have this particular need often because we are so blessed with food, other nations are not. And we as Christians must be doing our job to feed the poor and demand justice from our leadership and governments.

Anyway that’s my premillenial abuse rant for the day. While I’m on that, let me plug The Hunger Site again. Please try to visit daily and contribute to the number of sources there.

Good link, Chris, and have a blessed weekend, everyone.

God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Bible*

Lately I’ve been thinking a little (since I’ve been reading about the topic on the blogsphere) about the question of which is more supreme and decisive: bibliology or christology. On the one hand, Christ is the ultimate revelation of God to use. It is through Christ that we learn that God is intimately involved in sending the Son and Spirit to bring us to the Father looking more and more like the Son (the complete transformation to be accomplished at the resurrection. And yes, that was me talking for you, Senora Happy!).

But on the other hand, how could we know of this climactic revelation if it were not for the Scriptures themselves? Of course, for those living in the first century the gospels weren’t necessary to learn of the life of Jesus. Instead, they relied on their own presence at the miraculous acts of Christ and the sight of the empty tomb, or on the oral proclamation of the gospel. But now we who are detached from that time are presented with the above question, which I’m sure has been rehashed plenty of times.
Any thoughts or further reading would be appreciated.

I read the phrase I used as a title somewhere on the blogsphere, not sure where.

Sadness

I’m sure everyone has been inundated with countless images and commentary on the terrorist attacks that occured five years ago. Yesterday I watched a powerpoint on it in church, and I saw the same one again today in school chapel. Tonight on the news the spanish station was broadcasting the same sort of thing.

On the news I saw one thing that just broke my heart. A woman, standing at the podium thing where numerous people said the names of their lost loved ones, began to say something and then just got so emotional. In her spanish accent she said “I love you”, and just began kissing the picture of her husband (I believe) whom she had lost. It makes me want to cry.

I wonder what it is like for those Christians who are mourning their lost ones who were believers. Paul tells us that we should not mourn as the world does, but it seems like such a thing would be difficult in situations such as these when the ones whom you love are torn from you so quickly and suddenly.

May God bless and comfort the families of those who lost loved ones.

I’m still alive

Yes, I’m still alive, and I love you all. I’ve been busy these days, and I’m trying to think of something interesting for all of you to read, so, give me some time will ya?