Free to be... hateful?

I found this image in a New York Times article on an exhibit in Florida in which several artists re-thought  Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” wartime paintings.

What idiots we are as Christians when we think that our freedom of speech and religion in this country, and the freedom we have in Christ, gives us license to hate others.  What part of "May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else" allows for hate-mongering?  (1 Thessalonians 3:12)

When I read through the Bible at the people Jesus got upset with, it was the Pharisees and Scribes (whom he called snakes and vipers) and the Lawyers (because they were taking God's law and adding to it their own rules).  He certainly met up with many Gentiles, but he never said he hated them.  In fact, he had very little negative to say to them at all.  Rather, he told them to repent and follow him and by and large they did -- leaving the Pharisees, Scribes and Lawyers unrepenting in their wake.

Personality (Temperament) Types and the Emergent Church Movement

I've embarked upon a brief exploration into the world of the Emergent Church Movement.  Though the Wikipedia article sucks, imo, the book by Dan Kimball, the Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations is actually pretty good.  Dan explains not only some of the "distinctives" of the Emergent Church (not that he'd ever use that word), but he also explains why it's called Emerging in the first place. 

What struck me, though, as I read about this Emerging (or Postmodern) generation (characterized by a lack of belief in absolutes, an interest in the spiritual and mysterious, a strong distaste for institutionalized Christianity, a longing for authenticity and a need to experience a relationship with God rather than sitting back and being told about it) is that is sounds very much like the NF personality temperament type.

An NF: "searches for meaning and authenticity, empathetic, highly responsive to interpersonal transactions, keeps in close contact with others, highly personalized, gives and needs strokes freely."  (from Type Talk at Work, How the 16 personality types determine your success on the job by Otto Kroeger with Janet M. Thuesen and Hile Rutledge.)

While on the other hand, what Dan refers to as the Modern generation (characterized by adherence to absolutes as guide-stones in life (absolutes either from religion or science), a preference for structure, systems and institutions, and putting a high value on knowledge and formal education) sounds very much like the SJ personality temperament type.

An SJ: "strives to belong and contribute, prizes harmony and service, orderly, dependable, realistic, understands and conserves institutional values, expects other to be realistic, supplies stability and structure, more likely to reward institutionally than personally (trophies, letters, etc), can be critical of mistakes more easily than rewarding expected duties." (also from Type Talk at Work, How the 16 personality types determine your success on the job by Otto Kroeger with Janet M. Thuesen and Hile Rutledge.)

Is it just that NF's often lead the way into new movements and eventually SJ's take over and institutionalize the movement?  Or is Dan thinking that he's reaching a new and emerging generation when all he's really doing is reaching a specific subset of people that have been with us from time immemorial?

- - - - - - - - - -

Another good page on NFs.
Another good page on SJs.

Modernism - a comparison

Dan Kimball, in his book The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations, describes modernism as follows:

"Pure modernism held to a single, universal worldview and moral standard, a belief that all knowledge is good and certain, truth is absolute, individualism is valued, and thinking, learning, and beliefs should be determined systematically and logically."

He then contrasts that with postmodernism:

"Postmodernism, then, holds there is no single universal worldview.  All truth is not absolute, community is valued over individualism, and thinking, learning, and beliefs can be determined nonlinearly."

To summarize -- modernism is concrete, certain and logical; postmodernism is flexible, uncertain and is more feeling or experience oriented.

I finished reading Kimball's book about a week ago and have been thinking quite a bit about it ever since.   So when I saw a mention of Modernist authors (such as Joseph Conrad and Henry James) in the Great Courses sale catalog, I took note.  I love the catalogs because they often include long excerpts from various classes.  The lesson I was reading was on "The Year that Changed Literature: Defining Modernism -- Beyond Impressionism" by David Thorburn.  Thorburn summarizes these early modern writers as follows:

"Part of the reason [modern narrators are no longer omniscient as their predecessors had been] is that they live in this skeptical, pessimistic, problematic, disorderly environment.  They are the heirs to uncertainty.  They are the heirs to instability.  They are the heirs to a notion of the fluidity and immense complexity of a world that no longer has the kind of stabilizing coherences that earlier religious, moral, and institutional dispensations created for people. And the beginnings of Modern novels, therefore, reflect this much more problematic, much more fluid, much more uncertain environment. ...In the problematic and uncertain universe of Modern fiction there are other compensations and other virtues, but the certainty and the self-confidence of the older-tradition are gone."

I was taken aback because everything I read sounded almost word for word something that I would have read in Dan Kimball's book -- only he would have been using those phrases to describe Postmodernism, which he finds almost antithetical to organized, fact driven, systematized Modernism.)

What gives?  Is this a case of "what goes around comes around"?  Or is something else at play?

I think the key has far more to do with personality types than defining social movements.

South Carolina plans license plate for Christians

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/24/2409.asp
If they can't tell we're Christians by our love, perhaps this license plate will do the trick.

Snakes and Vipers

Jesus had some harsh words for the spiritual leaders of his time.  He called them snakes and vipers.

It's interesting to note that though he interacts with disobedient Jews and unbelieving Gentiles, he never calls them names.  Rather, he seems to save such choice words for the Jewish leaders of Israel -- the Pharisees, Sadducees and Scribes.

So why is it today that Christians feel justified calling Muslims and atheists, among others, all sorts of names?  What got lost in the translation there?  

Politics and Christianity

This article was originally posted in the Christian Community group here on Multiply. I started that group back in September 2004, but I've decided to remove myself from there and focus on my DandelionWine site instead. So I'm reposting several posts that I had made over to there.

I'm rather overwhelmed by the degree to which Christians ally themselves with certain parties here in the U.S. In fact, a member of the church I attend recently compared the choices in this election to Christ vs. Satan. I can understand the fact that in the US we are free to choose our leader and free to tell others our reason for doing so. But when they suppose they know God's will on the matter I get a little disgruntled.

We can't know the minds of the candidates, only God does. Moreover, who we *think* might be the best for the position, may not be. I'm sure the Romans never would have chosen Nero if they had the choice, and yet God allowed him to take office. But God has plans that reach far beyond our own. He makes political choices based on his will, not our concept of what his will might be in this moment in history.

If we believe that God is sovereign, then why do we get so hung up on elections? Why do we put our hope in "our guy" winning?  

Adam and the Garden

This article was originally posted in the Christian Community group here on Multiply. I started that group back in September 2004, but I've decided to remove myself from there and focus on my DandelionWine site instead. So I'm reposting several posts that I had made over to there.

God Formed the Man from the Dust of the Ground

...the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. -- Genesis 2:7

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. -- Genesis 2:15

God formed Adam from the dust of the ground. Therefore, Adam's relationship to the earth was more than intimate, it was integral. When the New Ager's and mystics croon on about our "oneness" with Gaia (or Mother Earth), in a sense, they're right. We were formed from the very stuff of earth. God certainly could have poofed us into existence, and yet he chose to use a substance that he had already formed, and to remake it and breathe life into it.

It is interesting to note that after the rather short description of Adam's creation in Genesis 2:7, there is a rather longer description of where he was put. It seems that some sense of "place" was important. Adam was made, and then he was given a place to be. In our modern day where we can communicate with people on the underbelly of the earth with only a few clicks on the computer, and where we move from job to job, city to city, with relative ease, we seem to have lost this sense of "place." Perhaps there's a connection between Adam being made from the stuff of the earth and then being placed in a specific place on the earth.

But Adam also had a job to do in his place. He was there to "work it and take care of it." He wasn't told to use and abuse it as many have interpreted Genesis 1:28 to say. Rather, his position was one of a care-taker who had authority (or rule) but who used that authority to govern well (to be a servant leader). If we are Adam's children, then
we also have this same mandate, to care for the "garden."

And women can't claim that this was Adam's mandate only, for in Genesis 1:28, the command was given equally to both of the people that God had created. Ownership of the land was also given equally to both the man and the woman in Genesis 1:29. So Adam and Eve, together, were formed of the earth, were settled in a specific place on that earth, and were told to be governors over the earth and all that was in it. In a sense, they were the first
environmentalists.

Unfortunately, both Adam and Eve were also the first anti-environmentalists. In their disobedience (Genesis 3), they brought sin into the world--sin that affects not only people, but the entire earth as well. They were cast out of the garden (displaced from their sense of place) and in the curse that Adam received, God said, "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life." Even Paul refers to this larger extent of Adam's sin when he says, "For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time." (Romans 8: 20-22)