My first minor setback occurred during my freshman year, when the morons on Princeton’s English faculty inexplicably failed to be dazzled by my freshman essay. (“You show a hint of promise, but you need to work much harder on your writing.”) …

Until that point, I had never really appreciated what a liberal education is all about. An essayist inThe Chronicle has put it this way: “A liberal-arts education … is about the recognition, ultimately, of how little one really knows, or can know. A liberal-arts education, most of all, fights unmerited pride by asking students to recognize the smallness of their ambitions in the context of human history ….”

Head over to the Chronicle of Higher Education to read this wonderful piece about the need for humility in the Academy.

Also, shout out to liberal-arts education.

The medieval church, and in large measure the later Reformation churches, preserved the canon of the Old Testament but largely subsumed its theological voice to categories taken from systematic or dogmatic theology. The result was, in considerable measure, a monochromatic view of the canonical witness. The polyphonic voices of the Old Testament with their unsettled diversity of witness were often pressed into artificial unity through systematic categories brought from outside the text itself. Attempts to describe the Old Testament’s theological witness often used the categories common to systematic theology. Elements deemed inconsistent with church doctrine were ignored or treated as marginal to the theological understanding of the Old Testament.

Did the reformation overly systematize the Old Testament narrative?

With family income shrinking, and tax revenues dwindling, choices had to be made. One of the first places looked at was those costly ivory-tower humanities scholars. How could one justify paying salaries to people who spent years studying minutiae but not producing anything of measurable economic value?

Research in computer science, engineering, finance, and hard sciences that led to technological and medical discoveries was preserved. Humanities research in fields such as history, religion, philosophy, and literature was cut. Eventually humanities research slowed to a trickle. Departments shrank and then collapsed. The university became a technology lab and trade school.

Read the rest from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

To be more explicit: first-century Jews, like all other peoples, perceived the world, and events within the world, within a grid of interpretation and expectation. Their particular grid consisted at its heart of their belief that the world was made by a good, wise and omnipotent god, who had chosen Israel as his special people; they believed that their national history, their communal and traditional story, supplied them with lenses through which they could perceive events in the world, through which they could make some sense of them and order their lives accordingly. They told stories which embodied, exemplified and so reinforced their worldview, and in so doing threw down a particularly subversive challenge to alternative worldviews. Those who wished to encourage their fellow-Jews to think differently told the same stories, but with a twist in the tail. The Essenes told a story about the secret beginning of the new covenant; Josephus, a story about Israel’s god going over to the Romans; Jesus, a story about vineyard-tenants whose infidelity would cause the death of the owner’s son and their own expulsion; the early Christians, stories about the kingdom of god and its inauguration through Jesus. But one thing they never did. They never expressed a worldview in which the god in question was uninterested in, or uninvolved with, the created world in general, or the historical fortunes of his people in particular.

The New Testament and the People of God, N.T. Wright

God does not abandon the earth, but restores and glorifies it. Resurrection enables humanity to participate in the victory of God’s own purposes for creation.

From his book Unlocking Romans

This first volume, then, in one sense introduces the entire project at hand, but in another stands by itself. It argues for a particular way of doing history, theology, and literary study in relation to the questions of the first century; it argues for a particular way of understanding first-century Judaism and first-century Christianity; and it offers a preliminary discussion of the meaning of the word ‘god’ within the thought-forms of these groups, and the ways in which such historical and theological study might be of relevance for the modern world.

Exciting isn’t it?

How Jewish is Christianity? What role does one’s answer to that question play in how much emphasis is placed on Systematic (vs. Biblical or Historical) Theology? Were the Hebrew Scriptures or those who read/wrote them concerned with a systematic approach to what they were presenting?

In exploring various historical works on heaven from theologians within the Reformed tradition, it is those of Jonathan Edwards that most often resonate with many of Bell’s claims. Specifically, both Jonathan Edwards and Rob Bell present a heaven that is progressive in nature. While room is left for variance between the two as to the degree of the progressive nature of heaven, Edwards and Bell agree that the state of those in heaven is not static. Instead, both present heaven as a place of continued personal growth in knowledge and understanding of the Triune God. A brief word on to the current state of popular Christian thought regarding heaven, followed by a look at both Bell and Edwards’ progressive heavens will lead to concluding thoughts that provide a possible harmony of the two views.

Thoughts?

(click for full version)

This first chapter focuses on the phrase “Our Father,” with a specific emphasis on the communal aspect of opening the prayer with “Our”:

Some people are offended that we are taught to address God as Father. The greater offense may be the little word Our. In this prayer we are taught to pray, not as individuals, but as the church.

When we speak of God as “Father,” we are not talking about the way each of us has a biological father. Rather we are saying that, through Christ, all biological fatherhood is relativized by our lifelong learning that God alone is our true Father. We do not call God “Father” because we have had certain positive experiences with our biological fathers and therefore project those experiences upon God. Rather all human fathers are measured, judged, and fall short on the basis of our experiences of God as Father.

God is the Father. Family is the church. Christianity teaches us to look beyond our families and see our membership, through baptism, in the family that has been evoked from all families, nations, races, and cultures-the church.

In this chapter the authors begin to make their case that Christianity requires a complete shift of perspective. Do you think their emphasis on our “new family” is too strong?