I’ve realized that there are some attitudes and ways of handling things that I need to change in my life. Thank you to the friend who had the courage to call me on them.
To those who know me, please call me on attitudes and actions in my life that are not christ-like. I want those attitudes out of my life, but I’m not always able to identify them myself.
I’ve been called on a few things by a good friend… so I have been and still am doing some serious soul searching. There likely won’t be any posts here for a couple of days as I continue through the process.
Chris Marshall just got back from a trip to Europe and he posted some interesting stuff on his blog about it. One comment that I wanted to discuss is “The U.S. is 100 years behind in the movement known as post-modernity”. I’ve been thinking about something that I think is at least part of the cause of that. It seems to me that postmodernism really is just post-christendom. When the established church(es) lose their mindshare what we are left with in western culture is postmodernism. Following this line of thinking and looking for where postmodernism is the most developed I think it seems obvious that European and Canadian christendom(state-churches) disintegrated much faster than the U.S.’s funtional christendom. By having the religious organizations split off from the government is has allowed them to survive better.
Honestly, I’m not sure I think it’s a bad thing that christendom is dead. I think even our functional christendom causes many more problems than we realize. For example, we are at war with Iraq. Our President, George W. Bush is proud to be a christian and he wears that on his sleeve. And since it is what got him elected, I guess he should. But when we go to war in the middle east, that comes off as them being attacked by “the christian US”. There have been reports of large persecutions of christians in Iraq since we invaded. It turns out christians had more security before we got there. Now they are seen as friends of the US. I was just reading about a similar situation in history. When Constantine declared the Roman Empire to be christian, that set off persecutions of christians in the Persian empire. They had previously been afforded lots of freedom in the Persian Empire, but once Rome was christian, they were friends of the enemy. So, this is only saying that, for the sake of the church worldwide, I want the church to be split off from identification with any government.
Alright, too much rambling and I’m running late for work. Maybe I’ll post more later.
I have been thinking about the idea of the gospel getting translated into a culture. As I have been trying to see what following Jesus has looked like outside of western culture I have looking into The Church of the East a lot. They were the branch of the early church that brought the gospel into Asia. Apparently they made good inroads into the Persian Empire and India in the first couple of centuries and were into China(via the Silk Road) by the 600’s at least. There really isn’t much literature available about them, so it’s a struggle to learn more. I think it’s important though. I think it could be as useful as learning about the Celtic mission. Although it looks like the Celtic mission was much more successful. Modern America is getting influenced more and more by other cultures. Eastern cultures and religions are getting more and more common and Wicca has it’s roots in the Celtic druids. How early disciples explained the message about Jesus to those cultures can help us strip away some of our baggage and give people a better picture of Jesus himself.
People have apparently found some writings by Christian monks in China that date to about 700CE. They get called the Jesus Sutras. I’m looking for a non-new age translation of them if anyone knows where I could find one.
When I was driving down to Virginia last weekend I spent the whole time flipping through the radio stations. I would come across an 80’s song that I hadn’t heard since then… and I would know all the words. Man, there must be a lot of my brain used up on songs. But this got me thinking… why don’t I know the bible like that. A couple of generations ago it was much more common for people to know big sections of the bible. I think that one of the biggest factors is all the different translations we now have. While there are many good things about having a variety of up-to-date translations, not having a standard makes memorization much harder. A few generations back everytime you heard the bible read you always heard the same translation, the King James Version. Now when we hear the bible read it’s almost always a different translation. I think one of the reasons we learn songs well is because they are the same everytime we hear them. The bible used to be that way, but isn’t now. Some groups have tried to standardize on the NIV or NRSV… but there isn’t concensus. I think that I might standardize my reading to a certain translation to help me memorize it better…
