BookmarksUniversalism and the BibleHighlights and Sticky Notes: Some read many of these passages as Jesus predicting the suffering incurred during the destruction of Jerusalem. It was apparently a big issue in the Jewish community around the time of the writing of the book of Matthew whether this truly horrible and gruesome event was due to the Christians following a false Messiah (as some non-Christians claimed) or rather because the non-Christian Jews had failed to recognize the hour of their visitation (as some Christians held). Consider Romans 16:25-26, which, as our translations have it, speaks of "the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed." Here, the Greek that gets translated as "for long ages" includes the very Greek work that is translated as "eternal" or "everlasting" elsewhere, including the "eternal" punishment passages. But in this Romans passage, Paul seems not to mean "eternal" by this word, for he immediately goes on to say the secret "is now disclosed", so of course it wasn't kept secret eternally. That's why our translations don't translate it as "eternally" here. Tags: hell universalism theology bible Posted by: tdway Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop - TIMEHighlights and Sticky Notes: It has, originally, to do with the translation of Jewish ideas into Greek. The New Testament is deeply, deeply Jewish, and the Jews had for some time been intuiting a final, physical resurrection. They believed that the world of space and time and matter is messed up, but remains basically good, and God will eventually sort it out and put it right again. Belief in that goodness is absolutely essential to Christianity, both theologically and morally. But Greek-speaking Christians influenced by Plato saw our cosmos as shabby and misshapen and full of lies, and the idea was not to make it right, but to escape it and leave behind our material bodies Never at any point do the Gospels or Paul say Jesus has been raised, therefore we are we are all going to heaven. They all say, Jesus is raised, therefore the new creation has begun, and we have a job to do. Much of "traditional" Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won't be going up there to him, he'll be coming down here. Posted by: tdway MindTouch Deki Enterprise - Social Enterprise Collaboration & Integration PlatformTags: software free collaboration Posted by: tdway What Would Yoder Do?Highlights and Sticky Notes: democracy, while certainly superior to more coercive forms of government, is nonetheless still a system in which “some men exercise power over others.” If we refuse the mythological explanation of democracy as a fundamentally new kind of social order, we can rejoice in the immensely increased possibilities which it provides of speaking to those who exercise power; the decentralization of authority, the election of legislators by a local constituency, and the constitutional and judicial controls on abuse of authority are all factors which oblige the men in power to listen to criticism with a greater degree of seriousness than in the age of absolutist monarchs. To go to the polls is then not, as the Hutterite and the hippie on one side and the superpatriot on the other contend, a ritual affirmation of moral solidarity with the system. It is one way, one of the weaker and vaguer ways, to speak truth to power. We may do well to support this channel with our low-key participation, since a regime where it functions is a lesser evil (all other things being equal) than one where it does not, but our discharge of this civil duty will be more morally serious if we take it less seriously. A related misunderstanding is the notion that it might be possible for Christians to avoid or withdraw from the political realm simply and entirely. … It is possible to avoid having an outspoken political witness or to avoid criticizing existing structures, but then that silence is also a positive political action, accepting things as they are. Tags: yoder politics democracy Posted by: tdway Why Sectarianism is Required « Inhabitatio DeiHighlights and Sticky Notes: Hauerwas has consistently denied that he is sectarian. “I do not see why the position for which I have argued forces the church to withdraw from public policy matters”, Hauerwas consistently claims. For him, there is no reason to assume that the church’s priority as a polis of peaceableness should prohibit Christians from participating in the machinations of states “unless you think that public policy always involves questions of violence and/or coercion.” Tags: hauerwas Posted by: tdway The Hauerwasian Mafia « Tony JonesTony talks about the Hauerwas mafia and the Constantinian dilemma of being a police chaplin. Highlights and Sticky Notes: the Christian faith is a self-enclosed system of language and practice—one that cannot necessarily be understood by those who stand outside of the system. Aristotle was the granddaddy of this thinking when he said that those who live inside of one polis (city-state) cannot pass judgment on the laws and morals of those inside another polis. That’s because the moral system in a polis has developed around a certain set of virtues that is intrinsic to that polis. MacIntyre’s solution is a return to a virtue-bound society, one in which we come to consensus on the virtues that bind us and then work out a group of practices that facilitate those virtues Yoder continued in this pacifist tradition and argued that the church itself is a political stance in society. The church’s problems, he argued, are a result of “Constantianism,” a reference to the Roman emperor who made Christianity the de facto religion of the Empire in 313. A church in bed with government, according to Yoder, is a church that’s lost its nerve and forgotten who it’s supposed to be Don Stanley saw this and marshaled the forces of Don Yoder and Don MacIntyre to develop a new way forward for the liberal tradition. Instead of watering down their distinctives to the point of meaninglessness, the church should close ranks and develop an internal coherency that would serve as an example to the world. I think it’s these very experiences that have led me to appreciate philosophical pragmatism more than the neo-Artistotelianism of the HM (although pragmatism is also rooted in the thought of Aristotle). The pragmatists argue that there can be no uniform rule that dictates actions in all endeavors. Instead, we must become as wise as possible and then make the best decisions that we can. don’t have any grand strategy to protect my Christian particularity. I know who I am. Tags: hauerwas pragmatism Posted by: tdway USATODAY.com - Transcript: Bono remarks at the National Prayer BreakfastHighlights and Sticky Notes: God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. Posted by: tdway WiZiQ Free Online Teaching and E-Learning with Web ConferencingFree, hosted, virtual classroom with social features for teachers and students. live audio/video, text chat, document/whiteboard sharing, and session recording capabilities, this web conferencing tool is available for unlimited free use. Tags: elearning conferencing free hosted software Posted by: tdway CourseLab - free e-Learning authoring toolHighlights and Sticky Notes: CourseLab is a powerful, yet easy-to-use, e-learning authoring tool that offers programming-free WYSIWYG environment for creating high-quality interactive e-learning content which can be published on the Internet, Learning Management Systems (LMS), CD-ROMS and other devices. And it is FREE! Tags: elearning free download software Posted by: tdway |
Subscribe by emailLibraryThingRandom books from my library... |
•••
Copyright © 2008 Todd Way. All rights reserved.XHTML, CSS. Powered by Drupal. Hosted by NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.