Time

The church calendar reminds us that time itself has been redeemed and sanctified. Time is not a passive, empty entity whose content we shape. It comes to us as a gift; as a moment that stands in some relation to the moment when God became man in time. We live in a time whose past, present, and future has been determined by Jesus. The church calendar as well as its practices exist to help us remember this reality in the face of the dominant definition of reality that speaks of time as if it is something we possess and control and get to make.

Into this dominant definition steps the voice of Lent. The time that Jesus spent in the wilderness recapitulating Israel's time is now recapitulated by the church. The world's definition of reality is exchanged for a definition of reality that is constituted by God and his gifts and his ways. The things thought necessary for life are forsaken for the things that really are necessary.

In light of this, I intend to give up some of the things that I think constitute my life as I now live it. I don't know exactly the shape this will take, but the reason I'm writing this now is that the internet is being chopped, save for declanjk@gmail.com and anything necessary for college. Life without the internet has become unintelligible. Lent is the time to remember that my life is only unintelligible without Jesus.

I haven't really thought this through, but I know I need to get away from this space and be elsewhere. In the word, in prayer, in communion with friends and family, in silence, in reality as defined by God and dependent on God.

What Is Creationism?

On the surface, it sounds as if it is the belief that a god created all things, which is both the first proclamation in Christian scripture and part of the first line of the Apostle's Creed. Yet there are numerous Christians who believe in a god who is creator but who are not creationists. Why is this possible? I don't ask because I doubt it's possibility, but because I just don't have a very clear understanding about what creationism is and isn't.

While I'm at it: Intelligent Design. What is it, and why should Christians who believe in a god who "fearfully and wonderfully made" us dismiss it as nonsense?

I ask these questions in light of viewing Conor Cunningham's documentary Did Darwin Kill God? One of his books -- Darwin's Pious Idea -- received praise from the likes of Charles Taylor, Slavoj Zizek, David Bentley Hart and Stanley Hauerwas, so he's clearly worth listening to.

The Mortal Danger of the Exclusive Eucharist

According to Zizioulas....[a]ny church excluding Christians at a given place is not merely a bad church, but rather is no church at all, since a Eucharist to which not all the Christians at a given place might gather would not be merely a morally deficient Eucharist, but rather no Eucharist at all. That is, it could not be the body of him who encompasses everyone into himself.

- Miroslav Volf

Three Film Reviews For the Price of One

Blade Runner

This is an example of the ideas behind a film overshadowing the story of the film. That the ideas are interesting -- what is a human? do we need to kill god in order to be free? what are we to do in the face of our mortality? -- means forgiving the mediocre story isn't as hard as it ought to be. Still, while acknowledged as a postmodern work, the film commits the very modern sin of making the story a vehicle for some big ideas, rather than making the story the idea. A film like The Matrix accomplishes the latter with much more success, as does the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and they are all the better for it.

Still, cult classic, and all that.

The Mill & The Cross

This is not so much a film about a painting as it is a painting come to life. It is, quite literally, a moving picture that intends to capture Bruegel's The Way to Calvary on the big screen. The film/painting is set in 16th century Belgium, with the persecution of reformers at the hand of Spanish Catholics providing the context for a re-showing of the passion narrative of the gospels. But as Bruegel (played by Rutger Hauer, famous for appearing as Metropolis crime boss Morgan Edge on television's Smallville) tells us, the significance of the passion is lost on the crowds, who go about their daily lives as if the suffering portrayed in front of them is irrelevant for putting bread on the table. That, after all, is what the mill is for.

Though lacking subtlety, the beauty of the film is in showing, during a moment of complete pause, that these two objects -- the mill and the cross -- are not so different.

The Apostle

While Blade Runner is a film that uses the story as a vehicle for ideas, The Apostle is a film that provides a vehicle for a quite magnificent performance from Robert Duvall. He plays a charismatic (in every sense of the word) preacher in the south, whose broken marriage and criminal acts force him to start over with a new identity as self-appointed apostle "E.F." whose mission it is to plant a church and find again what he had lost. It should come as no surprise that a film about a pentecostal preacher is fraught with theological missteps and idiosyncrasies. Some are endearing, some are not. But given the over all picture of pentecostalism that Duvall creates, I was left with the feeling that the only real way for E.F. to achieve redemption was for him to abandon his pentecostal heritage. That may say more about me than about this film, which is worth seeing for the performance alone.

Worlds

His birth was hers. Before him she was not what she is today. His new life has transformed the shape of her old one. It continues to do so. She was always near him, attached as if he was an extension of her. She reached levels of care she never thought possible. It's a strange thing to be absolutely depended on for life. The greatness of providence is thrust on someone so unprepared and ill-equipped for a role most fitting for a god. But she has been faithful. She has fed him, cleaned him, held him, sung to him, created a world with him in which they both dwell as its sole interpreters, its language and its customs often remaining  inscrutable to outsiders. Yet dependence in this world is not only his but hers also. These two that were created on the same day -- a mother and a son -- cannot be transported into bigger worlds without feeling the loss of the smaller one on which they have come to rely. She didn't realise it until now, but as she sees him climb over the fence into the neighbour's back garden and as she moves right against the window to catch sight of him hopping into a car destined for some place outside of home, she is left in a world that is empty and unintelligible without its co-creator. She cries into the freezing windowpane, and as the tears run down she wipes her eyes and begins imagining what the new world might look like.

Justice And Love: A Valentine's Day Message

The best argument against the church engaging in social justice is that there ought to be no such justice that needs to be modified by the word "social". As Hauerwas said (somewhere) "Justice is justice". In other words, something is either just or it isn't. The language of "restorative justice" or "retributive justice" or "social justice" pits justice against itself. If retribution is just, then it is not "retributive justice" that has been carried out, but simply justice. If retribution is unjust, then justice has not been done no matter what modifier we put on it.

As for social justice, if there is a form of justice that is not social then there is no triune god.

Something similar holds true for love. Christians -- including myself -- have a habit of talking about "self-giving love". But what other kind of love is there between persons? Because of the story of God's relation to humanity, love is self-giving. Talking about "self-giving love" prolongs our illusion that love can also be something other than self-giving. It can't, and the sooner our language reflects this the sooner we will realise that we live lives that have very little use for the word "love".

And on that note, an early Happy Valentine's Day to everyone!

ps - This phenomenon is also true of the gospel. In a recent blog post, Scot McKnight pitted the "soterian gospel" against the "story gospel". But in the letter to the Galatians -- the letter that was excluded from McKnight's list of gospel sources -- Paul says that there is only one gospel, though others have distorted it and thus have turned it into no gospel at all. Again, the point is simple. Something is either the gospel, or it is not. If the "soterian gospel" is not the gospel, then it is no gospel at all. If the "story gospel" is the gospel, then it does not need the word "story" before it. That's simply a kind of re-branding; a marketing trick that has no place in the work of theology.

Imagination Defined

"The capacity to host a reality or a world other than the one that is in front of us."- Walter Brueggemann

Tolerance Kills Us

Julian knew that toleration of the Christians would intensify their divisions...experience had thought him that no wild beasts are such dangerous enemies to man as Christians are to one another. 

- Ammianus Marcellinus, The Roman History

The Madman

Since I'm picking on a particular brand of atheism, bellow is a video that empirically proves that atheists are just as lame as Christians. Perhaps in this we find our common ground.

I honestly thought that something called the Reason Rally must be a joke. It isn't. It is, rather, "the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history." Larger than Stalin's? Until I see those numbers, call me skeptical.

I'm reminded of a wonderful Chesterton quote that I would love to print on t-shirts to be handed out to all embarking on the Reason Rally: