Bully's Blog

From God, the Christian Socialist and the Mad Monk by Chris Uhlmann

It might irk many to hear it but Judaeo-Christian morality is a foundation stone of Western democracy and, before we pull it out, perhaps we should ponder its strengths as well as its weaknesses. Because the West still hasn’t found an answer to the questions Friedrich Nietzsche’s fool posed in 1882.

Nietzsche wrote of the lunatic “who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around, just then he provoked much laughter.

“Why did he get lost?” said one. “Did he lose his way like a child?” said another. “Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone away on a voyage? Or emigrated?

“Thus they yelled and laughed.

“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

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“The great human hunger is for love—for communion. Power, wealth, pleasure, freedom—each of these are powerful motivating forces which can seduce us into imagining that their presence will complete what is lacking in our lives. They are false lovers, idols that demolish our humanity rather than fulfill it. Yet we can make idols of people as well, especially if we think that by loving and being loved only by others near by we will find completion. We will find ourselves once again suffering set back and brokenness as a result of making either our love for the other person or group, or their love for us, the measure of our acceptance. Continue reading

An oldy but a goody from Gary DeMar:

Israel’s End-Times Gamble

“If you’re gonna play the game, boy, ya gotta learn to play it right. You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, Know when to walk away and know when to run.”

Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” has sold millions of copies since its 1978 release and spawned five made-for-TV movies. But the song’s appeal is in its no-nonsense philosophy. When there is no way to win, it’s time to walk away from the game. The game is over for Israel. Let me explain. In Tim LaHaye’s pre-tribulational rapture novel The Remnant the Jews are in for a hellacious future. Two-thirds of the Jews living in Israel will be slaughtered. LaHaye is not alone in holding this noxious position.

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“To be postmillennial is to be committed to the claim that the state of creation, over time and in time, will be recognizably as the prophets predict…”

Peter Leithart gets down to the nuts and bolts of postmillennialism:

I am postmillennial, and postmils like to speculate about the long view. We like to ask questions like: What is the church and world going to be like after another several millennia of evangelism, baptism, teaching, discipline, Eucharistic merriment? What kind of political system will exist?  How will the church worship? What will the economy look like? What kinds of technological advances will be retained and which will be dispensed with as incompatible with God’s commandments?

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Brian McLaren’s twists and turns are too subtle for a generation of Christians left vulnerable by ministers who don’t teach the Bible. Erich Rauch of American Vision is very helpfully working his way through Brian McLaren’s latest book, A New Kind of Christianity.

“Due to the strong influence that he has as a “pastor to pastors,” any time McLaren releases a new book it is a pretty big deal within the walls of the church. And because he is giving voice to concerns that many pastors and church leaders have expressed and thought about themselves, his writings indirectly resonate from American pulpits nearly every Sunday morning. His newest book, A New Kind of Christianity, claims to describe what Christianity might look like if it were “not afraid of questions.” Questions are a really big part of McLaren’s ministry. In fact, the subtitle of the book is: “Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith.” Now I am certainly in favor of questions; I think that far too many people are far too easily satisfied with conventional ways of thinking and doing things. I agree with McLaren that questions can effect change; but I disagree with him and his book’s subtitle because it’s not the questions that cause the progress, it’s the answers. And unfortunately, this is where McLaren is his weakest.”

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Most commentators, including N. T. Wright, get the Restoration era all wrong. Our history as God’s people is cruciform, which is reflected in the four faces of the cherubim. The Mosaic “bull face” (the Bronze Altar) was replaced with the Davidic “lion face” (the Ark). The Ark was taken by God, and the era of the prophets began, the “eagle face” (the all-seeing Lampstand). Resurrected Israel was to be wise men to Gentile kings, leaven within the kingdoms shown to Nebuchadnezzar. They would not have a Jewish king until the fourth face, the Man, arrived (the Table of Showbread).

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or Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

There’s some weird stuff in Leviticus. It is deliberately so, forcing us to chew on it, which in turn forces us to see the world in terms of symbols, as God intended. Most of us moderns can’t be bothered with it. It’s beyond our capacity. We think such notions are childish when in fact they require an uncommon wisdom.

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I have a friend who owned and ran a small restaurant for six years. Very hard work. He tried to sell his business for the last three of those years without success. We prayed and he sold it at 9.20am the next morning.

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Other friends also have a business. They are well past being ready to retire and have been trying to sell their business for a couple of years. Their prayers seemed to be answered but the buyer dropped out. What is God doing?

The hidden God has you where you are for a reason. The bad things in life crush us to show us what we are. If good comes out, it is a fragrance that blesses and encourages everyone. If bad comes out, and we are like a lanced boil, we can still use it as a step towards obedience and healing in our lives and others. It’s better to be like the son who verbally disobeyed his father then thought better of it.

Mike Lawyer’s exhortation at ChristKirk on March 7 is encouraging:

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The Bible vindicated yet again, by a site that dwarfs Pompeii

Ben Witherington comments on the unearthing of a huge temple complex and its relevance to Genesis:

This temple lies west of the Biblical plain called Haran and is only 20 miles from the Syrian border. This places it right in the fertile crescent which begins below modern day Iraq, includings the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and winds its way north through Syria and into eastern Turkey.  This is the world not only of Genesis, but of the great Anatolian civilization of the Hittites (yes those Hittites as in Uriah the Hittite—husband of Bathsheba)… Klaus Schmidt and his team of Kurdish diggers have uncovered an enormous temple complex that pre-dates the Great Pyramids by some 7,000 years and Stonehenge by at least 6,000 years!… After 12 years of hard work, Schmidt has found at least four temple complexes. The radar scans of the area indicate there is a huge amount more to uncover here. And Schmidt has a thesis about this temple complex—here is a short excerpt from the Newsweek article on this:

“Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.”

The importance of this find for Biblical thinking is this—the Bible says that from the outset, human beings were created in God’s image. Human beings were religious creatures from Day One. Archaeologists and sociologists have long dismissed this theory saying organized religion comes much later in the game than the beginning of civilization and city building. As Ian Holder director of Stanford’s prestigous archaeology program says— this is a game changer. Indeed, it changes everything experts in the Neolithic era have been thinking. Schmidt is saying that religion is the cause of civilization, not the result of it. Towns were built to be near the Temple complex. Agriculture was undertaken to feed those living there and supply the temple complex, and so on. The first instincts of humans were to put religion first. Maybe there is more to that Genesis story than some have been willing to think or admit. Maybe human beings are inherently homo religiosis.

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Some great quotes from an interview by Barbara Demarco-Barrett with author Mary Karr:

“[My young son] came flouncing in in his Power Ranger pyjamas and said “I wanna go to church.” I said “Why?” and he said, “To see if God’s there.” It was about the only sentence he could have said that would have gotten me to go. So we did this thing we called God-a-rama in which we went to various temples and mosques and zendos. I had no interest in going to church so I brought a latté and a paperback.

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