This Present Darkness

no, not my 3 month absence from blogging (however dark that might seem), but the 1986 bestseller (2.5mil sold) by Frank E. Peretti.

it's the book i chose to take on my honeymoon, mainly because it was a paperback and Calvin's Institutes was a hardback. but the recommendation for the book actually came from one of my lecturers, who billed it as:

"before there was Left Behind, there was Frank E. Peretti".

what i most enjoyed about this novel was the way it tried to minimise (erase) the distance between the earthly and the spiritual. it offers an example for anyone who's struggled to understand the biblical ideas of e.g. Ephesians 6:12; "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

on the earthly, we see the godly pastor Hank (yes, it is American) with his small yet faithful flock, but also the popular megachurch pastor Oliver Young - perhaps so named because of his involvement with new-age stuff - who is part of a group who are taking over town after town to turn them into centres for their deeper spirituality.

but on the spiritual, we see this deeper spirituality is only what the demons convince their people it is - the reader knows better. the reader sees the demons with their talons stuck into people's heads, whispering lies to them. the saints of Hank's church we see are those who give power to the angels; as they gather more prayer support, the energy of the angels increases accordingly.


now, there are already some questionable things here, such as how reliant God is on our prayers to accomplish his work, but it's just so engrossing! as demons are defeated we see people released from their grip, freed from the prince of the air, and putting their life into God's hands. people become Christians, the wicked are struck down, God's saints are vindicated even though they are broken.

yes, the "new age spiritualities" are very caricatured, and the spiritual cause of things is realised in a way with no basis whatsoever (as when the car conks out because an angel has thrust their sword through the engine), but it is a novel.

it was a ripping yarn, a good holiday read. i'm still not sure whether i'll make it to the sequels (piercing the darkness and prophet). perhaps i now need to try one of the left behind series for a bit of comparison.

on introductions and headings

i don't like introductions. i don't like headings.

i've been reading and writing so much of late, and i've worked out how much i dislike overly structured writing. i actually find it quite disconcerting to read these little paragraphs between headings.

i'm not sure why, but it could be how disjointed it is, but i think more, how disjointed it is. i feel like i'm reading a microwave oven instruction manual.

particularly considering how difficult i find some material to understand, i think the vibe of what is written can be more helpful than the specifics. after all, someone who takes a couple of hundred (or thousand!) pages to say something surely can't expect you to read every single word and sentence equally, but to let it wash over you, taking you inside their thought processes.

but an introduction telling you exactly what is what, and then explaining those things exactly and specifically, point by point, is not taking me on a journey, it's not sharing their thoughts with me. it's just telling me a bunch of stuff.

if you read any of my essays (see post below) you might get what i mean. yes, there is an introduction (it's mandatory), and sure, there's a progression, but that's the journey. i'm happy if there's a few pointers on the way, but they should be signposts on the journey, not compartment labels.

read my essays?

you may've listened to my sermons

you may have read the blog posts as i thought through Isaiah 26 here and here

you may have read the blog posts thinking through the historical fall here, here, here and here

well, thanks to jay-z and earngey, you can now read in full the essays that resulted, isaiah (with formatting errors - hebrew and spacing doesn't work so well across platforms it seems), and historical fall.

for other nerdy essays, you can look further at the filing cabinet, on the same topics (OT & doctrine), as well as church history and NT.

but do bear in mind, it's quite nerdy. read with due caution.

i hear mtc has relaunched but i don't believe it

not sure if this counts as irony, but still haven't been able to load up the new moore college website since it's launch yesterday (and yes, using moore college's network)

i realise this isn't a glorious return to blogging, but exams were pretty full on, and getting married this weekend will probably keep me busy for a little while to come.

Mark 2 Chiasm

not sure if this post will work - blogger's doing some funky things tonight - if it starts behaving again i'll remove this and maybe add a picture if any buttons appear to allow me to do so!

this sunday at GBC* we're doing Mark 2.1-12, and believe it or not - i've realised it's a chiasm.

A 2.1-2a - the big picture, a crowd astonished at Jesus

      B 2.2b-5 - movement to Jesus, Jesus speaks

                  C 2.6-10 - opposition's negative reaction, Jesus' positive reaction

      B' 2.11-12a - Jesus speaks, movement away from Jesus

A' 2.12b - the big picture, a crowd astonished at Jesus

mark does this a heap, or at the very least sandwiches (A B A' - cf Mark 5.21-24a; 24b-34; 35-43)

it's not so much a theological comment as a narrative device, guiding you into and then out and onwards.

* if you're a german speaker, you may be interested in coming along to german bible cafe - check out our facebook or blog if you're keen.

wishlist updated

in the sidebar, or just click here!

any suggestions i should add to the list?

what would you have in yours?

cocktail church?

wow. crazy.
a weeknight, food, drinks - and church?
what will they think of next!

anyway, you may be free on Tuesday 27 and Wednesday 28 October from 7.30 pm, and live somewhere near st albans lindfield - if so, get along, bring a friend or two.

apart from food and drink, there will be a talk each night:
27th :: A hell of a Life
28th :: A hell of a Death

get into to it!

Batman the Musical

been oddly talking about musicals a bit lately. my parents took us to see the very fun wicked the other day, which fits in between the wizard of oz and return to oz - surely one of the scariest movies ever. i guess sort of like the sarah connor chronicles in between the terminator and T2. the interesting thing about wicked was the not just the freudian analysis of the wicked witch of the west - what made her the 'wicked' witch, why was glinda the 'good' witch. but if people talk about good and wicked, do we need to rethink what those titles mean; who gave them the titles; are we just buying into the hype?

and for some strange reason people are still banging on about buffy the musical which i pray i will never have to see.

anyway, this is a little more my taste. complete with the music meister and the black canary.

praxis vs theology

chatting about evil again. reading david bentley hart's doors of the sea again.

but this time it's with others, including mark and steve, who have been interviewing christian counsellors for their pilgrims podcast.

the reason i mention this is not to promote them (they do enough self-promotion as it is), but to raise the question of how what we say to people relates to what we think - and particularly in the context of suffering.

if we believe evil is evil, an affront to God, an absurdity, then let us say this.

however, if we believe in a divine, universal harmony, where nothing happens but by the hand of God, and we are talking to someone suffering - why can we not say this? is this not the gospel of comfort to the suffering, the poor, the bound? but we realise that saying 'it's all a part of God's plan' is no comfort, and not pastorally appropriate.

my question is, if what we believe does not match with what we are willing and comfortable to say, are we too weak to say the truth that might hurt, or is our theology profoundly impersonal and thus leaving us in a schizophrenic state as we try to comfort the suffering?

what do counsellors do? what do you do?

can we in a clear conscience preach one thing from the pulpit and say another in the hospital room?

if evil is evil, it is evil. let us proclaim the goodness of God despite that evil.

no fall put to the test

last night at bible study we did the final in our series based on Tim Keller's "The Reason For God". we looked at Sin, through the lens of Genesis 3:1-13, Romans 1:18-32, Romans 3:21-26.

as you would know, i've just finished an essay on the consequences of denying an historical fall (here, here, and here). the position i finished at was that the idea of "the fall" is not what Genesis 3, nor the rest of the testimony of the bible, is trying to get across.

rather, as Karl Barth agreed with me, "the first man was immediately the first sinner." (CD IV.1 §508)


so as we discussed the idea of the fall, we didn't use the terminology of "fall", but analysed what the story said. and it said that sin consists of disobedience, selfishness, disrespect, but primarily trusting Satan's lies. we agreed that none of us would have been different, and that this grasping against God is something we all continue.

i can perhaps post some of the best bits of my essay a little later, but i just thought it would be helpful to show where this thinking has ended me up (if that sentence makes sense!).

Markus Evangelium

Übernächstewoche fangen wir bei German Bible Cafe eine neue Serie an. Hier ist meine entwurf der Werbung:

if you know any German-speakers who may be interested in studying the Bible in German, please bring them along.
if you're one of my German-speaking friends reading this, you know I'd love you to come along.

spread the word!

Historical Fall in the key of B

so far i've narrowed my doctrine essay down to the following points:

• Babes or bound (the historical debate - Pelagius vs Augustine)
  
  
• Blocher or Barth (the current debate)
  
  
• (Bavinck and Bloesch - minnows, relatively, yet helpfully starting with a B)
  
  
• Bible (Romans 5 and Genesis 3)

and finally, inevitably, painfully:

• Bibliography

i'll probably talk about Ricoeur also, but i may have to deliberately rename him Bicoeur for the purposes of this essay.

check here and also here for the background.

don't know why all this matters? this is why.

temporary new blog address

for the special period of the AFL final series, in homage to the very important MTV awards, my blog has been moved to here. for a limited time only. this blog will return to the regular location after then.

(it only makes sense if you click)


h/t John

Naked. living in the past.

Naked (1993, by Mike Leigh) is one of my favourite films ever, despite N, S, D, L, A, and any other warnings you can think of appropriately being on the video cover.

in other words, not a date movie.

but the following clip is from a section of the movie where Johnny (David Thewlis) is given a tour by Brian (Peter Wight) around the building he guards. their conversation reminds me both of conversations i've had with people who are not so well mentally, or alternatively of very very late-night chats that just get weird.
i think the only warning for this clip is L.


a great line from Johnny:

"So you think you can make the present palatable by projecting into the future. you're living in the past, pal. it's the future that f***s you up, Brian. it's the maggot in the apple."

the myth of the fall

i've been thinking this week through the question of the theological consequences of denying an historical fall. one thing that has been growing on me today is the question of where the idea of the Edenic sinless perfectionism comes from. i'm sure everyone's seen the first two boxes of 2WTL (click on the link if you are unaware), the first one being the one where everything's perfect, sort of like the island the Phantom puts all his animals, after he's taught them to be piscetarians (is that what people who eat no meat except for fish call themselves?).

now the whole point of showing that everything was tops was to explain

1. why life isn't always tops now, despite a good God, and
2. to give a picture of what we're looking forward to.

however, on 2/, despite the line in the otherwise great Rob Smith song 'Worthy of All Praise' back to the garden, we don't really want to go back to the garden, but look forward to the new creation. so now i'm trying to work out the importance of 1/ - why do we need to say there was something perfect that humanity "fell" from?

it sort of smacks of platonism, and i have this vibe that it promotes a dualistic view of things. so can we read the account of "the Fall" in Genesis 3:1-13 differently? not that it doesn't depict perhaps the first direct transgression of God's law, but is it such a great "fall" as all that? where does our eschatology fit with a fall?

and yes, this is linked to my previous post!

[apologies for my absence. exegetical to hebrew to greek to doctrine has made for a busy period of time.]