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Weekly Meanderings, 16 May 2015

Weekly Meanderings, 16 May 2015

Last updated on: May 16, 2015 at 3:54 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 16 May 2015 2015-05-16T03:54:05-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Hello from Assisi, our home for a few weeks while I’m working on a writing project on sabbatical.

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I can think of no place on earth where I’d rather spend free blocks of time for reading, praying, and pondering great texts of the New Testament.

My project this sabbatical has focused on Colossians — a commentary for Eerdmans in the NICNT.

We’ll be watching carefully our pasta intake, but a morning coffee overlooking the Umbrian plain is a glorious way to begin.

Wow, the President who fired Tom Oord has quit.

Update (May 14): Evolution was not the only issue that led to the attempted firing of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) theology professor Tom Oord, says a biology professor at the Idaho Christian school.

Jennifer Chase said that no NNU administrators have criticized the biology or chemistry department regarding its perspectives on evolution.

“I think that it is too easy to find the simple (evolution) story that fits with others who have faced censure,” Chase wrote in an email to CT. “Even in those situations, I think there is a more important and subtle story: the expansion of orthodoxy far beyond creeds or even the official statements of denominations to be ‘everything that I believe is the exact right set of requirements for the title Christian.’”….

The embattled president of a Christian college in Idaho has resigned following a campus crisis caused by the attempted layoff of a popular, pro-evolution tenured faculty member.

President David Alexander of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) and the school’s board of trustees announced the move Tuesday. It comes a few weeks after three-quarters of the faculty voted that they had no confidence in him.

Mark Moore on Ascension Day:

[Notice the focus here: the rule of Christ. That’s the gospel itself: Jesus, who was crucified, has been raised and now rules. The soterian gospel, which displaces christology with soteriology, does not have the same need to see the focus of Ascension Day.]

The disciples believed that when Jesus was lifted up in Acts 1 that he was taken on a cloud fromthem and to the Ancient One. That means that Acts 1 is the fulfillment of Daniel 7. In Acts 1 Jesus is given dominion and glory and kingship…that shall not pass away. We know this because in the very next chapter of Acts we read of Peter preaching that Jesus has been exalted at the right hand of God and that God has made Jesus both Lord and Messiah.

As I stated earlier, this is breathtaking!

Ascension Day is HUGE!!!

Today we are celebrating the dominion of Jesus! Today we are celebrating the glory of Jesus! Today we are celebrating the kingship of Jesus! Today we are celebrating the fact that the dominion of Jesus is everlasting and his kingship shall never be destroyed!

Ascension Day is HUGE!!!

Today is a reminder to tyrants, to oppressors, and to the empires of the earth — your dominion has been taken away; don’t get cocky because your lives have been prolonged for a season!

Ascension Day is HUGE!!!

Today is a reminder to the terrorized, to the oppressed, and to the captives of the earth — your king is coming and you will never suffer again!

Today is not just any old Thursday. It is Ascension Day…the Thursday that calls the world to remember.

Good article by Sarah Pulliam Bailey about Kenton Lee:

Kenton Lee thought he was supposed to be a missionary, but he decided against the idea when he missed his home in Idaho.

But within a decade of abandoning his earlier plan, Lee connected back to it by creating a shoe that can grow five sizes and last for five years. The idea is that groups going on missions can take a duffle bag with the shoes, made of compressed rubber, leather, buckles and snaps.

The shoes stemmed from an experience he had when he was initially considering becoming a missionary. Lee hadn’t been out of the country for more than two weeks in his life. So, after college, from 2007 to 2008, he decided to test out international life before becoming a missionary. While his time overseas was short lived, his experience in Kenya at an orphanage for children whose parents had died from HIV/AIDS stuck with him.

Carl Trueman:

Of course, totalitarianisms do a tremendous amount of damage, both as they rise to power and as they disintegrate. And they can last for a terribly long time. But we heretics should not despair. Our task is to work hard, master the arguments (scientific, ethical, philosophical, social), understand the history of how we arrived here, defy the temptation to give up through boredom, build a coherent movement of defiance, and thereby prepare if not ourselves, then at least the next generation, for the moment when the revolution collapses under the weight of its own delusions and contradictions. Marginality is uncomfortable but our response to it is key. I will not engage in the lazy arrogance of claiming history is on our side; but I will go so far as to say that in the long term all past evidence suggests that it is certainly not on the side of those who brook no dissent, ignore all counter-evidence, and demonize all opposition.

What new college grads expect (and what will be the reality), by Jena McGregor:

The survey, released Tuesday, asked 1,002 students graduating from college this year what they want as they enter the workforce and their confidence about what lies ahead. It also surveyed students who graduated in the past two years about their initial experiences in the working world — and found that the responses of about-to-be grads and recent grads often contrasted starkly.

For one, this new class of employees may very well end up getting paid less than they think. Twenty-seven percent of 2015 grads expect to make more than $50,000 in annual income. Yet while the job market has improved somewhat recently, very few of their slightly older peers hit that bar even now, a year or two into their careers. Only 17 percent of the 2013 and 2014 grads currently make more than $50,000. (Accenture noted that its numbers include part-time workers.)

Similarly, just 15 percent of college seniors said they think they’ll be earning $25,000 a year or less. Among the recent grads, 41 percent said their pay is still less than that.

Lest these students come off as totally naive, Katherine LaVelle, managing director of Accenture Strategy, noted that they do appear to be more pragmatic than their slightly older peers. They were more likely to have looked at the job market before deciding on an academic major, for instance, and more likely to have had an internship.

Fitbit has a problem.

Fatal flaw in new atheism? By Sean Illing:

Atheism has a storied history in the West. From the irreverent Voltaire to the iconoclastic Nietzsche, the godless have always had a voice. But the New Atheists are different. Religion, they argue, isn’t just wrong; it’s positively corrosive. If you’ve heard people like Bill Maher or Lawrence Krauss speak in recent years, you’re familiar with this approach.

New Atheism emerged in 2004 as a kind of literary and social movement. Led by such luminaries as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, New Atheism became part of the zeitgeist, a well-timed reaction against religious fundamentalism. The New Atheists are notoriously pugilistic. In print or on stage, they never run from a fight. Whatever you think of their tactics, they’ve succeeded at putting fanatics and moralizers on the defensive – and that’s a good thing.

But there’s something missing in their critiques, something fundamental. For all their eloquence, their arguments are often banal. Regrettably, they’ve shown little interest in understanding the religious compulsion. They talk incessantly about the untruth of religion because they assume truth is what matters most to religious people. And perhaps it does for many, but certainly not all – at least not in the conventional sense of that term. Religious convictions, in many cases, are held not because they’re true but because they’re meaningful, because they’re personally transformative. New Atheists are blind to this brand of belief.

It’s perfectly rational to reject faith as a matter of principle. Many people (myself included) find no practical advantage in believing things without evidence. But what about those who do? If a belief is held because of its effects, not its truth content, why should its falsity matter to the believer? Of course, most religious people consider their beliefs true in some sense, but that’s to be expected: the consolation derived from a belief is greater if its illusory origins are concealed. The point is that such beliefs aren’t held because they’re true as such; they’re accepted on faith because they’re meaningful.

The problem is that the New Atheists think of God only in epistemological terms. Consequently, they have nothing to say to those who affirm God for existential reasons.

A good series on kingdom in the Bible by Ben Dunson — though we don’t line up on each issue raised, he constructs kingdom theology on the basis of the Bible’s kingdom story.

Potent discussion … or more, by Rod Dreher.

Juliet Eilperin:

Every detail of the recent state dinner for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was carefully orchestrated and touched with the kind of sophistication one would expect from the White House — from the table arrangements with cherry blossoms and orchids to the perfectly chilled sake guests sipped during the opening toast.

But just before the dessert course, waiters executed an extraordinary maneuver: They deftly removed all the vermeil eagle place-card holders from the tables so that guests would not be tempted to swipe them on the way out.

Such is the reality of entertaining in the White House: Despite the elegant setting, or maybe because of it, there’s always a risk items might disappear into visitors’ pockets, purses and other hiding places. After all, how often does one get invited to a state dinner, an awards luncheon or a medal ceremony at the White House, and who does not want a souvenir, a memento from their brush with power? The result is that White House events sometimes produce small outbreaks of petty thievery.

Most of the pilfering is minor: plush towels embossed with the presidential seal from the washroom, or cheap spoons the White House rents from a caterer for large parties. But other items are pricier, including the place-card holders, small silver spoons and cut-glass pieces dangling from sconces in the women’s washroom.

Which, I suppose, is fine but it is not theology but politics (not that it doesn’t have theological underpinnings) — Julian Dobbs defending Christian Zionism:

How then can I be a bishop of the Anglican Church and support and defend Israel in 2015?

When a more comprehensive and thorough examination is made of the Anglican Church, her theology, history and involvement, both socially and religiously, past and present, with the Jewish people and more latterly the State of Israel, another position emerges, one that is less regularly articulated and not so widely known, yet a position which is embraced by thousands of faithful Anglicans across the globe.

[It is officially fashionable to be pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel, but the Christian posture is to be pro-Jesus, pro-church, and pro-humans, not least those who are oppressed — taking sides on the Israel or Palestine issue attenuates witness to both Jesus and church.]

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