A great work on missions

After spending more than 20 years as a missionary in India, Lesslie Newbigin returned to England to discover himself a stranger in a strange land.

Things he had never seen before in his own culture stood out now like a sore thumb--and sorely in need of change.

Coming particularly from the point of view of a Christian missionary, Newbigin's culture shock brought him to some discoveries about missions and the nature of the Gospel that shaped much of his writing.

Most of his books focus on subjects related to culture and kingdom. In fact, Newbigin's insights have influenced me a great deal, even to the naming of this blog--but that's another story.

I'm working on two of Newbigin's books: The Gospel in a Pluralist Society and Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture.

Both of these works give excellent insights into the true nature of a 21st century missionary. I was first turned on to Newbigin by a network of church planting churches I am a part of, called Acts 29. I've since seen threads of Newbigin's ideas running backwards into teachers and pastors I respect and admire, which I take as confirmation of being "on the right track."

For example, for anyone who has heard of Van Til's presuppositionalism, Newbigin does a very solid job of laying out the principles of the transcendental argument, and an apologetic that both engages, and challenges, significant non-biblical ideologies.

What makes Newbigin worth reading, though, is that he challenges significant so-called biblical ideologies as well.

There are a lot of us that need coverting to Jesus, in the end, aren't there?

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More from Newbigin, on the occasion of Easter:

The truths which Buddhism teaches would (as Buddhists understand them) be true whether or not Gautama had discovered and promulgated them. But the whole of Christian teaching would fall to the ground if it were the case that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were not real events in history but stories told to illustrate truths which are valid apart from these happenings. (the Gospel in a Pluralist Society)

The Christian message--what is radical about the Message of the Gospel--is that it is not, as with other faiths, other religions, about "truth for life." It is about Truth in History.

The Gospel is not a myth in the sense that it communicates principles or generic notions of truth. Newbigin shows that it is true in the sense that  it relates to Events Which Took Place in History.

So, this connects to what a friend said to me yesterday: "I believe all people in all cultures are good." I agreed, and added: some people in some cultures are decidedly better than many professing Christians. Still, something else must be said: it isn't about whether or not I am good or not...or you are good or not.

It is about whether He was dead and rose again. That makes all the difference.

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Juno's Soundtrack Artist Kimya Dawson

I loved the movie Juno. It was simple. It was authentic. It was a glimpse of broken folks getting better. It had great music. (I kick myself for missing Kimya Dawson's concert a couple of weeks ago here in town.)

Still, the movie was troubling--as all good movies are, at some level. What about having babies out of wedlock? The movie addresses the complications, but not the convictions, of this notion--leaving the rest of us to pick up the conversation.

In a profound article in Slate, columnist Emily Yoffe writes here about the dangerous trend that de-links procreation and marriage. Citing one letter she's received along these lines:

My boyfriend and I have a 4-year-old son. We've broken up but realized that we truly are meant for one another. My father was diagnosed with stage four cancer last year, and I've made it known to my boyfriend how important it is for me to have my father with me when I get married. When I bring up marriage to my boyfriend his reply is we will get married, I promise, but he has not asked me.

And then, towards the end, she describes a scene from the movie and concludes with a significant challenge:

There is a scene in the teen pregnancy movie Juno in which the title character, a 16-year-old who has decided not to abort her unplanned baby but to give it up for adoption, is having an ultrasound. The technician, thinking she has on the examining table another knocked-up teenager planning to raise her child, makes disparaging remarks about children born into those circumstances. We are supposed to loathe this character and cheer when Juno's stepmother puts her in her place. But I found myself sympathetic to the technician. Why is it verboten to express the truth that growing up with a lonely, overwhelmed mother and a missing father is a recipe for childhood pain?

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An unusual documentary

Of all the documentaries you'd imagine a person making, would you imagine a documentary about this? I suppose there's a point to be made. After all, if we see the architecture of our dwellings as social commentary, why not the architecture of our typefaces?

Regardless, typefaces are big business. I love my Linotype font manager, which I downloaded for free. And as cool as the different fonts are there, to buy them..sheesh!

Reading here, I discovered that the Wall Street Journal has a special font designed for their stock pages. Their Retina typeface was designed to keep ink from blurring the tiny agate type of stock tables. Now, did you know that?

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)

At this fascinating website, we learn the definitions of stuff we knew existed but didn't know it. For example, that empty feeling I'm told comes over someone after he finishes the seventh, and last, volume of the Potter series, realizing that...there...are...no...more.

(Tear drop.)

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Crash Test Dummies - At My Funeral

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Jesus' Seamless Robe

The church is largely misunderstood in today's world. Most folks who are not part of the Church don't wake up Sunday mornings thinking, "Gosh, I think I really should go to church today!" This reality is part of what leads many to conclude that evangelism has as its heart the building of relationships.

Along with this relational orientation of the average unbeliever, or "spiritual but not religious individual," it should go without saying that distinctions among different flavors of Christianity are difficult to grasp. Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism--seem like odd, intramural debates to the average person.

Not that the things which distinguish these three great Christian traditions are irrelevant or meaningless. But, it presents a credibility issue. And we're not even talking about different strands within Protestantism, or, dare I mention, strands within the reformed movement of the Protestant world.

All this paints a giant canvas of unintelligibility for many in our society, one in which traditional Christian and Protestant assumptions are no longer valid.

This leads some thinkers and strategists in the church planting world to think and talk in terms of Christians in this country being forced to live more like missionaries than like people at home. As individual Christians live like missionaries, the churches they are a part of become less part of the establishment, and more like missionary outposts in the midst of an alien culture. Such churches are MISSIONAL.

Van Til is famous for articulating a robust viewpoint of common grace; that is, non-saving goodness of God that reflects the Father's orientation of the mercy "of delay" in this season when the People of God await the final consummation of the Ages. Judgement is coming, but this is an age when the rain "falls on the just and on the unjust."

So, when gathering together a new faith community--when church planting--it is important that the stout theology reformed Christians are known for is more like the skeleton of a beautiful figure than the armor on a warrior. It is what gives form and structure to our whole beings, rather than what people have to penetrate in order to find out who we really are as persons.

I think of this as Calvinism without the seams. That being so, let's get dressed!

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Spider Man

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Images

It was a revelation for me (little "r") when I realized as a young believer that heaven isn't just the sky. Heaven is in fact the created realm in which God has condescended to dwell. Furthermore, this created realm is characterized less by vacuous and cottony clouds and more by mysterious metaphors like sapphire walls, golden streets, and nightless skies. (The image to the left is from a Chinese photoblog website.)

What is heaven really like anyway?

Belinda Carlisle's famous 1987 hit, "Heaven," was the song my Turnabout date, Lisa, and I danced to when I was a junior in high school.

I mention it is because the song was mentioned by my friend who led a group of university friends in a discussion about what heaven is like. My friend started out by asking, "What would you want heaven to be like?"

Good question.

One of my favorite movies, in the "disturbing" movie category, is The Black Robe. There's a great line from that movie where a First Nation Canadian Native was asked by a Catholic priest if he wanted to go to heaven. His answer went something like this: "Why would I want to go to a place where there is no sex, no earth, no trees, and sit on a white cloud and play a harp?"

My answer to the question, "What do I wish heaven to be like?" would fall out along these lines: feasting without fat, work without toil, love without regret, intimacy without danger, female companionship without fear of sin--true sisterly companionship, that is--and something like sex.

I add something like sex because I'm not prepared to say there is sex in heaven, though like the golden streets, if there is, its beyond whatever we can imagine here.

I was surprised in my friend's discussion that no one mentioned the seventy virgins of the Muslim hope. Martyrs, according to the Qu'ran, get the blessed hope of seventy black-eyed virgins in the great heaven. (Joking, I heard one woman say recently that seventy virgins would hardly be heaven--but that's a bit off topic.)

Back to Belinda. She says heaven is a place we make. There are two ways to make heaven, as I see it: either to get the good stuff now (as she implies) or to push the good stuff off into the future.

As an example of the latter, have you ever noticed how every hope, every aspiration, every dream, every wish gets stuffed into heaven like a messy closet? Heaven is after all where we'll see our dead goldfish and beloved Fido again, where we'll be reunited again with friends and loved ones, where we'll get the equivalent to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's rivers of chocolate milk and whipped cream daisies (that was my friend's childhood fantasy).

Other, less noble, thoughts of heaven have been promoted through the years. Mark Twain once wrote that you go to Heaven for the climate, and Hell for the company. Neitzsche said something similarly interesting: "Hell is where all the interesting people are."

Christians have deserved this with their often strict, and even gnostic, expressions of the Faith. Immanence falling prey to Transcendence. Basically, we push everything good into heaven; one wonders, are we afraid?

Sting took a potshot at the Beatitudes somewhere in the early nineties with his song that suggested that the inheritance of the earth was not that great a reward for the meek. But, seeing Heaven with a wider, more comprehensive view, being meek sounds like a good investment to me.

Be that as it may, it was observed in our discussion that we too easily forget that the chief delight of heaven is the companionship and intimacy with God. Heaven is supremely about the unhindered, unimpeded presence of Almighty God, our Triune Creator: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Of course, the key, or, in line with Charlie's Chocolate Factory--the "golden ticket"--is Jesus. Jesus is the key to heaven; His perfect life exchanged for my wretched and twisted one. His perfect reward becomes mine by believing the unseen and impossible truth: God is and can only be my Companion through the death of His Perfect Son.

Belinda Carlisle is correct that we "make" heaven a place on earth, but it isn't by losing ourselves in a "wave of love" but it is as we receive, by faith, the life and joys of the Coming Age here and now with a transcendent, immanent faith in Jesus. Then it is really true: "ooh, heaven is a place on earth." But this place is a foretaste, the foyer, of the Real Heaven, when what we know now in part, whether wine, women, or song, is then Fully Experienced.

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