Teaching How to Interpret the Book of Revelation

This is one of our Redeemer banners,
designed and made by our Worship Arts Ministry

In Redeemer Ministry School this week I'm teaching on the Book of Revelation in our Bible Study Methods class. Our students are working on exegetical papers on texts they have chosen from Revelation. In the Winter Trimester they will teach their chosen Revelation-text, and then preach 20-miute sermons on their text.

Our class textbook is Grasping God's Word: A Hands-On Approach to Reading, Interpreting, and Applying the Bible. This is an excellent intermediate-level text on how to study the Bible.

Here's a nice quote on the main idea in Revelation:

"God uses this prophetic-apocalyptic letter to pull back the curtain in his cosmic drama and show his people how things will turn out in the end. The main message of Revelation is "God will win!" Those who are compromising should be shocked out of their spiritual slumber and warned to repent. As the "last chapter" of the story of salvation, Revelation gives people a foretaste of God's ultimate victory and offers them the perspective and the encouragement they need to overcome." (316)

Worship at Redeemer This Morning

I brought my camera to worship at Redeemer this morning. (11/4/12)

The False Self Is the Disconnected Self

Monroe County

Will Hernandez states Henri Nouwen's idea of what a true "minister" of Jesus is. Hernandez writes:

"Nouwen has described ministry in terms of a willingness to lay down one’s life for others— not necessarily in a literal way but as a matter of identity. He has stressed that if a person is to lay down his or her life, that person must have a real “life” to lay down. This correlates directly to the most concise definition of ministry Nouwen has ever articulated in his writings: ministry is all about “the giving of self” (G!: 85). The big question is: “What ‘self’ do we give to others— our true self or our false self?” The reality is, we can only minister out of who we genuinely are. What enables us to minister with real depth and effectiveness is living out of our center, where our core identity is deeply lodged." (Hernandez, Henri Nouwen and Spiritual Polarities: A Life of Tension, Kindle Locations 792-798)

Here's a creepy thought: ministering to others out of a persona, out of a false self.

How can we avoid this? Primordially, abide in Christ. Stay experientially connected to Christ, the Head.

The false self is the disconnected self.

A Worldview Shapes How We Grieve

Bedroom window in East Lansing, MI,
where Linda and I slept together for 11 years.

Today I dared to read some more of Jerry Sittser's A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss. There is no better book written on grief and help for grieving people than this. To read this book is to enter into grief and come out on the other side. Re. the book, I haven't come out on the other side yet. Perhaps I should read Sittser's new book - A Grace Revealed: How God Redeems the Story of Your Life.  

How one grieves and responds to suffering and loss is greatly and inexorably a function of one's worldview. I share Sittser's worldview. So, I quote him:

"I have often imagined my own story fitting into some greater scheme, the half of which I will never fathom. I simply do not see the bigger picture, but I choose to believe that there is a bigger picture and that my loss is part of some wonderful story authored by God himself. Sometimes I wonder about how my own experience of loss will someday serve a greater purpose that I do not yet see or understand." (118)

We don't have epistemic access to the mind of an all-knowing God. We can and will say, "I see no purpose in this suffering." But we cannot logically conclude from that, "Therefore there is no purpose in this suffering." To do that is to commit Stephen Wyckstra's "no-seeum" fallacy, where the condition of reasonable epistemic access is unmet.

Standing on a 50-story building I look down and say, "I see no caterpillars in the garden 50 stories below." That is correct. But I cannot conclude: "Therefore there are no caterpillars in the garden 50 stories below." I can't conclude this because I don't have epistemic access to the claim. I remain unable to see them, whether they are there or not.

Richard Dawkins, Rowan Williams, Anthony Kenny: Objective Truth Exists

I'm listening to Richard Dawkins debate Rowan Williams on "Human Beings and Ultimate Origins." This debate took place last february at Oxford, and was moderated by Oxford philosophy Anthony Kenny.

I just stopped the video to give thanks for something Kenny said: "All three of us agree that there is such a thing as objective truth." We're not, Kenny added, postmodernists.

Yes, and bravo! No scientist, for example, is a postmodernist who thinks truth is relative to persons or cultures. All are after truth. Is, e.g., Dawkins's belief that God does not exist true.?If it is, then it is true for everyone (to include theists) past, present, and future. Is Williams's belief that God exists true? If it is, then it is true for everyone (to include atheists) past, present, and future.

Teaching Spiritual Formation at Payne Theological Seminary - Jan. 7-12, 2012

Payne Spiritual Formation Jan. 2012

I'll be teaching my Spiritual Formation class to M.Div. students at

Payne Theological Seminary the week of Jan 7, 2012.

 

If you are interested in taking this class please contact Payne Seminary - 937-376-2946.

Payne Spiritual Formation July 2012

Self-obsessiveness Is the Enemy of Authenticity

Boat on Lake Michigan

Thomas Merton writes: "All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered." (Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 34-35)

What sense can we make of this?

1. "Sin" is: missing the target.
2. The target is: God and God's will and desires, God's honor and glory and majesty. (Note: sans God there is no target, not at all.)
3. Pride and shame are obsessiveness about the wrong target; viz., the self.
4. To live life as if the universe was ordered around one's self is to live a false life; is to live the life of the false self.
5. Self-obsessiveness is the enemy of authenticity.

Jesus Existed (But of Course...)

See Craig Keener's "Jesus Existed."

See also some posts I've made on this:

Say Farewell to the "Mythicist Jesus"

On the Existence of the Water Walking Jesus

Bart Ehrman On the Mythicist Myth That Jesus Never Existed

Ehrman: Only "Internet Kooks" Think Jesus Never Existed

Flat-earthing After the Non-Existent Jesus

Taking Communion with Deeper Understanding

This Sunday at Redeemer our founding pastor Joe Atkinson will preach on the subject of The Lord's Table. When Joe gave this message last summer at our annual HSRM conference it blew me away. I've asked him to share it with our people. After hearing this we'll all take communion together in a new way with a deeper understanding!

Some Men Claim to Be Ex-Gay

Like it or not, politically incorrect as it may be, there exist men who claim they are ex-gay. See today's nytimes - "‘Ex-Gay’ Men Fight Back Against View That Homosexuality Can’t Be Changed." Why argue against their testimony?

You could get hurt if you come out of the closet with this. "Ex-gay men are often closeted, fearing ridicule from gay advocates who accuse them of self-deception and, at the same time, fearing rejection by their church communities as tainted oddities. Here in California, their sense of siege grew more intense in September when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law banning use of widely discredited sexual “conversion therapies” for minors — an assault on their own validity, some ex-gay men feel."

Cameron Michael Swain "said he is in the early stages of his struggle to overcome homosexual desires. Mr. Swaim is unemployed and lives with his parents in Orange County, Calif., where his father is a pastor of the Evangelical Friends Church of the Southwest. He tried the gay life, but “it just doesn’t settle with me,” he said, and ultimately decided “there’s got to be a way to heal this affliction.”"

Note that. Anyone who is a Jesus-follower must admit that God could do this.