I honestly think that somewhere along the way we got it terribly wrong. I recently read Revelations 14:10 which says:

The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb.

So here we have this picture of Jesus & the angels watching the proceedings of “eternal punishment”. I wonder if they prefer this with popcorn or maybe with just a glass of wine like Jeremy does. I make light of a serious issue, yet if we have been able to make the leap mentioned above I don’t think that the leap to having Jesus getting a sense of enjoyment from watching his justice at work is nearly as far. How then do we reconcile this with his desire “that none should perish”?

I recently commented on another blog about this sort of idea, you can check it out here. As I said earlier I’m just not so sure anymore.

Anyway, I saw this animal show a while back about these giant hornets in Japan. They are like 2-3 inches long & can be deadly. I thought to my self, “that is not cool”. I wondered what I would do in a situation faced by one of them. It has bothered me so much that I still search the internet to find a safe way to kill them if I ever find myself in a wooded area of Japan that may have a really big mouse hole in a pile of old grass clippings…Well you get the idea. Yesterday I stumbled across an awesome video proving to me that nature itself is on my side when it comes to wasps. This is a great day & will be one of my fondest memories.

Wasp Killers

“This kind of problem, though, is endemic in many disciplines, & we ought to be grown-up enough to cope with it. Slogans & cliches are often shorthand ways of making more complex statements. In Christian theology, such phrases regularly act as “portable stories”-that is, ways of packing up longer narratives about God, Jesus, the church & the world, folding them away into convenient suitcases, & then carrying them about with us…. Shorthand, in other words, are useful in the same way that suitcases are. They enable us to pick up lots of complicated things & carry them around all together. But we should never forget that the point of doing so, like the point of carrying belongings in a suitcase, is that what has been packed away can then be unpacked & put to use in the new location…It is time to unpack our shorthand doctrines, to lay them out & inspect them. Long years in a suitcase may have made some of the content go moldy. They will benefit from some fresh air, & perhaps a hot iron.”

We must be committed to a totally contextual reading of scripture. Each word must be understood within its own verse, each verse within its own chapter, each chapter within its own book, & each book within its own historical, cultural & indeed canonical setting. All scripture is "culturally conditioned". It is naive to pretend that some parts are not, & can therefore be treated as in some sense "primary" or "universal", while other parts are, & can therefore safely be set aside. The doctrine of Jesus' divinity is culturally conditioned: as Paul says, the incarnation happened "when the time had fully come" (Galatians 4:4), & part of that fullness was precisely a culture that would resonate with the new events. The doctrine of justification by faith is culturally conditioned: only within a world already accustomed to notions of God's justice, of the Jewish law, & of the promises to Abraham could such a thing have been conceived. We must read the Bible with as full & clear an understanding of these contexts as we can.

In the next study we are going to be looking at the "Kingdom of God" in light of the above. What was life like when Christ came to introduce a new way of living that made him describe it in the context that he did? What did "kingdom" mean to them? Why was it introduced the way that it was?

From that retreat a guys Bible study began. We started meeting weekly at Brewsters Pub where those of us who enjoyed a smoke or cigar while studying the Bible could do so. During the summer we moved from the pub to my garage where we had couches, a fridge & an ash tray. That was the beginning of the "Outer Room".

When we started we decided to go through a discipleship course called "Design for Discipleship" put out by Navpress. It was a good way to start with the basics, as it went a little deeper than "Alpha". I think that there are 8 books with 4-5 studies in each one. We made it to book 6. At that point we made the decision to stop the books & head in a different direction for 2 reasons, the main being boredom & the other being the desire to make our time together a little more personal. We began to take turns leading the study on things that were relevant to our daily lives or trying to answer questions that we had or taking advantage of your week to be the leader to slam somebody else's beliefs on a particular theology (protestant vs catholic, orthodoxy vs orthopraxy, humans vs animals, heaven vs kingdom, hell vs well…no hell, "Left Behind" vs anybody with a half way sensible opinion). Ah, those were good times.

A couple of weeks ago I asked the group about changing the direction once again for 2 reasons, the main being that a leader has to change things up once in a while because they can & the second being that I wanted to be able to work on my teaching skills & there were some guys, who for some reason, wanted to see what happens when a leader fudges his way through a study because he's married, has 2 kids, serves on too may committees at church, works full time, is a part of 2 Bible studies & didn't have time to prepare.

Ya, real funny guys.

So, we had our first "new & improved?" study last week. I think it went alright. I made a few changes in the format in an attempt to make it easier on myself. We meet every other week now instead of weekly & I e-mail out homework, that's the best part. I find related articles & send them to the guys to read in order to be able to add to the discussion. Everybody is sent different reading to do which allowed for the discussion to come from a few different angles & view points.

Thinking that I had now saved myself a lot of work I decided to start with a 3 part series on "orthodoxy". How do I talk myself into these things?(Luckily I managed to shoot myself through the heel bone with a 3 1/4 spike & earned a 3 1/2 week holiday.) Through it all I've learned some things about being a leader, the biggest one is that if you find yourself taking on too much & start to fudge your way through things make exciting changes to lessen your work load even if you have to shoot yourself with a nail gun. I've also decided to bring in a great guest speaker which is both exciting & makes less work for me.

The reason for this long post is ultimately to ask the question, do you have any more ideas on how I can keep this exciting while doing less work? Let me know what you think.

Alan Jones in his book Re-imagining Christianity says concerning this “You do have to begin somewhere, & promising not to kill each other isn’t a bad place to start. Once we’ve agreed to that, we might be liberated to look at some of our strange beliefs-beliefs that lead some of us to the conclusion that it’s legitimate if not to kill then to condemn & excommunicate others.” He writes of a celebrated couplet by William Blake that sums up for him much that is disturbing about exclusionary versions of Christianity: “That vision of Christ which thou dost see Is my vision’s greatest enemy.” Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, wrote, “People who say to one another, ‘if you think that, you shouldn’t be here, ‘are….implicitly echoing Blake’s horrifying couplet.”

Old Testament teacher & writer Walter Brueggemann talks about Hebrew, the language that both Judaism & Christianity depend on, & how it is endlessly imprecise & unclear. Because it lacks connecting words; “it points & opens & suggests, but it does not conclude & define.” No one has the last word. Bruggemann says the language is “a wondrous vehicle for what is suggested but hidden, what is filled with imprecision & inference & innuendo, a vehicle for contradiction, hyperbole, incongruency, disputation. Now the reason this may be important is that in a society of technological control & precision, we are seduced into thinking that if we know the codes, we can pin all the meaning down, get all the mysteries right & have our own way without surprise, without deception, without amazement, without gift, with miracle, without address, without absence, without anything that signals mystery or risk.” Alan Jones writes, “What Christians (& to be fair, people in general) can’t stand is not being able to pin things down. We resist having to negotiate what Bruggemann calls ‘endless zones of contradiction…[and] endless layers of interpretation-no one of which can be ever more than provisional.” The irony for literalists is that the Bible doesn’t lend itself to literal, single-voice interpretation. There is always more to learn, another layer of meaning. To this many a Christian might respond “no thank-you. This doesn’t sound like true religion. It sounds like fuzziness, compromise, lack of faith. I want it to be absolutely clear.’ It’s a short step from this to hating one another.”