Wedding stress is over! Im married, and loving it.
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Author Archive for Cultural Savage
22
Jul
Self 365
what is one word to describe/found/explain you’re theology? And if you just say “Jesus” or “Christ” I’m gonna ask “what about him” 
Ready… go!
How do we see the future? Are we looking forward to an escape to finally get to our true “spiritual” home? Waiting for an existence that is finally free from this earth and these bodies? Or, do we look forward to the progress that is happening? We continue to advance in science, medicine, government and these movements are out steps towards what we as a race and a planet are destined to become.
Both of these lines of thinking are myths.
“The early Christians did not believe in progress. They did not think the world was getting better and better under it’s own steam- or even under the steady influence of God. They knew God had to do something fresh to put it to rights.
But neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse and theat their task was to escape it all together. They were not dualists.
…They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter” (pg93)
But neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse and theat their task was to escape it all together. They were not dualists.
…They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter” (pg93)
Wright spends chapter 5 sketching out the two “myth” views of the future and chapter 6 walking through Paul and Revelation laying out what the Christian hope really is and how it answers both of the “myths”.
Three themes that keep popping up in Paul’s letters and Revelation are the goodness of creation, the nature of evil, and the plan of redemption. Several images in the New Testament fill out these themes, and paint for us the picture of Christian Hope:
- The victorious battle (1 Cor.)
- Citizens of Heaven colonizing Earth
- God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15, Philippians)
- New Birth (Romans 8 )
- The marriage of Heaven and Earth (Revelation 21-22)
What I am proposing is that the New Testament image of the future hope of the whole cosmos, grounded in the resurrection of Jesus, gives us as coherent a picture as we need or could have of the future that is promised to the whole world, a future in which, under the sovereign and wise rule of the creator God, decay and death will be done away with and a new creation born, to which the present one will stand as a mother to child… What creation needs is neither abandonment nor evolution but rather redemption and renewal; and this is both promised and guaranteed by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.” (pg 107)
I have heard this doctrine my whole life in various places, both in books and from some pulpits. Jesus is coming to set everything right. But, in daily conversation, Christian Bible and book studies, funerals, songs, and in the general assumption of pop-theology, I hear talk that suggests we are really refugees, waiting for rescue and judgment to fall on this evil place we have been hostages in.
Thoughts like this are not hope. It’s something else entirely.
If our hope truly is redemption then living as people who are bing redeemed and are part of the redeeming work of God (rather than hiding out as refugees) is what we are freed to do.
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Tags: Suprised By Hope, Books, Christian, Hope, NT Wright, flock
01
Jul
100000 Words
Some day i would like to possible make some money off of photography and design. This is my first step in that direction. Plus, it’s a cool way to share my favorite photos.
01
Jul
Self 365
01
Jul
Self 365
Sporting a beard/thinking It's time for a shave
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Some translations read “Happy are those…”
Others read “Blessed is the one…”
The Message says, “How well God must like you…”
My joy in life rests on God’s opinion of me.
He rejoices in/over me because I am like a tree that he planted in his garden, in Eden, not cavorting with and trying to claim worth from the wicked, the foolish, the out of step with God. Disjointed and craving their way is death.
But, I deep your word close, chewing in it for my nourishment. I am sustained and I bloom, bearing fruit time and tome again.
So, you enjoy me. Not because of what I do or refrain from doing, but because I am on the road you have charted out and called good… because I am growing into/being what you have had in mind all along: I am happy, I am blessed, I am rooted in you
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18
Jun
Beer!
Henry Weinhard’s belgian style wheat. It’s a nice, lighter beer. Similer to a hefewizen, and having coriander orange flavor, It’s and easy drink. One of my summer fav’s.
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16
Jun
Self 365
It's one in the afternoon, sunny, and i just finished work. Time to start my day.
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14
Jun
Mini pine cones
Mini pine cones, originally uploaded by Cultural Savage.
14
Jun
Chimney’s
Chimney’s, originally uploaded by Cultural Savage.
14
Jun
Self 365
“This then is the more of less universal witness of the early Christians: that they are who they are, they do what they do, they tell the stories they tell not because of a new religious experience or insight but because of something that happened; something that happened to the crucified Jesus; something that they at once interpreted as meaning that he was after all the Messiah, that God’s new age had broken into the present time, and that they were charged with a new commission; something that made them reaffirm the Jewish belief in resurrection, not swap it for a pagan alternative, but introduce several distinctive but consistent modification within it.” ( pg 58 )
Chapter four deals with the question “what can we say about the resurrection of Jesus it’s self?” Write deals with arguments and dismissals of the resurrection, first dealing with the arguments against the gospel narratives as valid sources for the resurrection story then addressing what a historian can or cannot say about the resurrection event.
The last half of this chapter has allot of good stuff in it, especially Wright’s dive into the epistomoligies of faith, hope, and love. (I pray that I may have an epistemology of love)
The conclusions is this: “…the totalitarianism of the last century (speaking of the Enlightenment) were simply among the varied manifestations of a larger totalitarianism of thought and culture against which postmodernity has now, and rightly in my view, rebelled. Who, after all, was it who didn’t want the dead to be raised?… It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Ceasers who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant’s last weapon, death it’s self; the Herods who would be horrified at the postmortem validation of the true King of the Jews. <i>And this is the point where believing in the resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century.</i> Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not have the last word, The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.”
These first four chapters form part one of the book. Wright has brought the resurrection to the front of the stage, swept away some wrong thinking about it, shown us that you can believe in resurrection, and that the resurrection of Jesus matters and changes the way we view everything. From here, he jumps into the second part of the book, dealing with the question “…what then is the ultimate Christian hope for the whole world and for ourselves?” ( pg28 )
11
Jun
Self 365
After work, my shoes usually look like an abstract painting
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