Jesus Wants to Save Christians by Rob Bell and Don Golden

Jesus Wants to Save Christians redifines what it means to be a Christian. The book's subtitle is: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile.

This book changed the way I understand my Bible.

Ok, let me just give you a few thoughts from this book and maybe you'll be intrigued enough that you'll want to read it for yourself.

The first chapter was particularly awesome: it's called The Cry of the Oppressed. It begins in Egypt. The Children of Israel are slaves to the Empire of Egypt. The super-power of the ancient world. Then God miraculously saves the Chilren of Israel and brings them out of Egypt, across the Red Sea and to Mount Sinai. At Sinai God gives the Children of Israel the law.

And this is where this chapter gets really awesome, because its about the fundamental purpose of the law. God begins by telling his people: "Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (Exodus 19:5-6). So God wants his people, the Chidlren of Israel, to show the world who He is and what He is like--because that's what priests do.

The Cry of the Oppressed shows that the Ten Commandments are not a series of strict rules given by a firebreathing God to keep the people in line.

So the first commandment is that they have no other Gods. This is because their humanity, their value as people is directly linked to their ability to remember their liberation from slavery, because slavery is "a fundamentally inhumane condition" (p. 33) and their liberation from slavery was a gift from God. "If they forget God," the author writes, "they are at that very same moment forgetting their story. If they forget their story, they migh forget what it was like to be slaves, and they might find themselves back in a new sort of slavery" (p. 33).

The second commandment builds on the first. It prohibits any "image in the form of anything" (Exodus 20.4). The authors explain that in the ancient near East, images made of clay or wood or bronze or any other kind of material were constructed to give the gods depth and size and shape so that the people could understand just who their god was and what he or she was like. But the God of the Ten Commandments commands His people not to construct any images like this. Why? Because He wants His people to be a kingdom of priests. He wants His people to be the ones showing the world what He is like. He doesn't need an image made of wood or clay or bronze or marble, because this God has people.

The third commandment is not to "misuse the name of the LORD your God" (Exodus 20.7). So God has redeemed these former slaves and is now asking them to be His representatives to the world. His character, in a manner of speaking, depends on them and on how they carry His name. The authors write: "The command is certainly about the words a person speaks. But at its heart it is far more about how Israel carries herself as those who carry the name of God" (p. 34).

And the fourth commandment is to keep the Sabbath. They were commanded to take one day each week and rest. They were not to do any work on the Sabbath. This is because in Egypt, they worked every day without a break; they were treated as possessions, objects to be exploited and not as people. The Sabbath reminds them that they are not in Egypt anymore; they are no longer slaves. Their value does not come from how many bricks they produce but from the God who loves them and rescued them.

Here I'll just quote one whole paragraph for you: "Everything about the rest of the commandments speaks to this newfound liberation. God is inviting, God is looking, God is searching for a body, a group of people to be the body of God in the world. Following the Ten Commandments are all sorts of laws and commands about how to live in this new way. The Israelites are told not to charge interest: 'If you take your neighbour's cloak as a pledge, return it by sunset, because that cloak is the only covering your neighbour has. What else can your neighbour sleep in? When he cries out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate' (Exodus 22.26-27). Do you hear the echoes of Egypt in the command? If they begin to oppress on an individual basis, God says that when the oppressed cry out, 'I will hear.' The warning is sharp here: don't become another Pharaoh, because God acts against people like Pharaoh" (p. 34-35).

So the authors show how God continually warns His people that He hears the cry of the oppressed. They write: "It's as if God is saying, 'The thing that happened to you, go make it happen for others. The freedom from oppression that you are now experiencing, help others experience that same freedom. The grace that has been extended to you when you were at your lowest, extend it to others. In the same way that I heard your cry, go and hear the cry of others and act on their behalf" (p. 35).

Next God takes His people into the Promised Land, where they enjoy a period of prosperity. But soon, they're in Jerusalem. Under King Solomon, the Children of Israel enjoyed the greatest prosperity ever. But, the Bible tells how King Solomon used slaves to build the temple, to build his palace, to build the walls of Jerusalem, to build his military bases... slaves. So, it wasn't long then before the oppressed became the oppressors. The authors put it this way, "Jerusalem is the new Egypt" (p. 41).

And so, as God promised that He would always hear the cry of the oppressed, that He would always oppose the oppressors, it's not much longer before the Children of Israel are in slavery again, in Babylon. In Exile.

The authors put it this way: "Exile is when you fail to convert your blessings into blessings for others. Exile is when you find yourself a stranger to the purposes of God" (p. 45).

So the Children of Israel came full circle.

I liked this. It was very eye-opening and it changed the way I understood the Historical Books of the Old Testament. It helped me see what God meant when he called His people a Kingdom of Priests and a Holy Nation, and it helped me see what it's like to fail at that. It also helped me see that God's purpose for the Children of Israel is the same as His purpose for the Church. He wants someone to show the world who He is and what He is like, to show the world the freedom from the Egypt-systems that only He can provide.

The rest of the book is about how we can and have become the oppressors. How we have become strangers to God's purposes. The Church is not showing people the great power of God to liberate people from the world's systems. Instead, the Church is becoming a world-system, oppressing people. Or at least, legitimitizing the oppression of others. Turning a blind eye.

The rest of the book is about how we can return to God's purposes by following Jesus' example. By taking the downward slope of self-abasement and humility.

The rest of the book is about how Jesus has redeemed us. Jesus has spread his blood on "the doorposts of the universe" so that we could be liberated and live like liberated people.

So, there's a pretty huge gospel message in there and I couldn't do it much justice by summarizing it, so read the book. If you can't find it or can't afford it, let me know and I'll send you my copy.

I'm going to quote a few lines from the book's epilogue here and that will be the end of this:

"Jesus wants to save our church from thinking that the priests are somebody else.

Jesus wants to save us from standing at a distance, begging Moses to speak to God because we're convinced that if we speak to God, we'll die.

Jesus wants to save our Church from fear.

We haven't been brought to that kind of mountain. Sinai, alive again.

Jesus wants to save from making the good news about another world and not this one.

Jesus wants to save us from preaching a gospel that is only about individuals and not about the systems that enlsave them.

Jesus wants to save us from shrinking the gospel down to a transaction about the removal of sin and not about every single particle of creation being reconciled to its maker.

Jesus wants to save us from religiously sanctioned despair, the kind that doesn't believe the world can be made better, the kind that either blatantly or subtly teaches people to just be quiet and behave and wait for something big to happen 'someday'" (p. 178-179).

okay: in my summary, i shamelessly quoted parts of the book without attributing them. sorry. i only hope i haven't misconstrued what the authors intended to say.


also: it occurs to me that some people might misinterpret to idea of the book based on my explanation of it. so if you find yourself disagreeing with the idea of the book after reading this and not the book, please read the book and then decide.


also: if it helps, i don't think Rob Bell and Don Golden are trying to, in any way, negate or diminish what Jesus did. I don't think they're telling us that we have to do Jesus' job. Jesus came to show the world who God is and what He is like. He also came to redeem the world. our job isn't to redeem the world or to show the world what God is like and who He is in our selves but to point others to Jesus; to show the world God, through Jesus. And to do it the way Jesus did, by taking the downward slope. by humbling ourselves.

Stephen R. Lawhead - The Paradise War

So this morning I couldn't sleep after Janelle left, so I finished reading The Paradise War, book one of the Song of Albion trilogy.

Stephen R. Lawhead is a phenomenal writer. His command of the english language is impressive, even intimidating. His prose is pretty near flawless. His writing flows poetically so that its delightful to read.

What's even more astounding than his writing ability, though, is the fact that his publishers let this book be printed the way it is! It's like an unfleshed outline for a fascinating fantasy adventure.

Okay, here's a quick summary of the plot and then I'll go into what I hate about the book. Lewis and Simon are roommates at Oxford University, they're both in post graduate studies. Simon gets it into his head to go to the Otherworld, and drags Lewis along with him. Lewis fails to get through the portal, however, and returns to Oxford alone. At Oxford, weird stuff starts happening and it becomes apparent that the Otherworld is unraveling, so, with the help of Professor Nettleton, Lewis goes through the portal and enters the Otherworld to find Simon.

He finds himself in Albion, and with Simon's help, is mistaken for a warrior. The Great King, Meldryn Mawr sends Lewis to the warrior school at Ynys Sci, where he spends seven years. After his seven years are over, Lewis is a well trained warrior, and just in time too. He returns to the Kingdom of Prydain--King Meldryn Mawr's dominion--to find it ravaged by the Lord of the Dead and his demon army. He joins the great King and the few survivors of Prydain on a long trek to the King's last surviving fortress. They are pursued by the demon army, but they get to the fortress at the last minute, only to be besieged by an army they cannot defeat.

It's up to Lewis to find the Song of Albion and release it, so that it binds the Lord of the Dead to his own domain.

Okay, that's a pretty brief summary, there's quite a lot more to the story than that, but you'll have to read it yourself if you want to find out about it.

My problem with the story is this: it's shallow. The plot is thin. The characters are fluid and two dimensional at best. It's almost like Lawhead doesn't really even know his characters, they're just there to roll the plot along.

At Ynys Sci, three female characters are introduced, the three daughters of Scatha, the school's governor. Lewis falls in love with all three of them, apparently, and there's some kind of weird platonic sexual something going on between the four of them because they all kiss, hold hands, and cuddle with Lewis but they act like its normal, no one talks about it, and the sisters don't get jealous of each other. Lewis seems to prefer one of them, but that doesn't stop him from kissing, holding hands, and cuddling with the other two. It's just weird. And the sisters seem interchangeable, they have no definite individual characters, they always appear together or near each other and one is just as good as another. Then, one of them gives Lewis a prophecy, and they're almost never mentioned again in the story.

Almost all the characters are like this, two dimensional and interchangeable, only there to move the plot along. I'm thinking the first person narration is partly to blame because Lewis narrates like he's writing a newspaper article that lapses into poetry and excessive description.

Suffice to say, I wasn't too thrilled with this story. I didn't enjoy reading it.

Here's the thing, though, I know Lawhead can write a good story because I've read his King Raven Trilogy and loved it! And I read The Warlords of Nin and it was pretty good too, so maybe this book was just hastily written? I'm not sure what the problem is, it's just a really crappy story.

December

We got snow! It's so cold.

But temperatures are back up next week and the snow will be gone. Darn this Nova Scotian weather...

So, here's what's up this month:

On the 28th, janelle and i will be flying out to Ontario, where we will meet up with Chad and Leanne and the rest of my family at Chad and Leanne's house in the Detroit area.

Until then, i'm working five nights a week. We're having a no-tax event at the store this weekend, so it's going to be a busy one, and after that the store will be open two hours longer until Christmas (open at seven, closed at eleven). I will have to get used to working with customers again. The worst is when I still have stock on the floor when the customers arrive. It's kind of embarrassing.

And I'm reading Stephen Lawhead's The Paradise War. I'm about halfway through it, and the going is slow because I'm not so excited about it. Expect a review within the next week or two.

And Janelle is off school, as of this morning, for the holidays. I'm super excited about that! Yay.

Anyways, that's about it.

Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman

In grade 13 I had a teacher who loved Richard Feynman. He did a whole ... unit, I guess you could call it... on Richard Feynman. We watched a movie called Infinity, about Feynman's younger years, after he got his Ph.D from Princeton and while he was working on the Manhattan project, and while his first wife was dying of cancer. Hmm... that's interesting. I wonder if there's some kind of link there... Manhattan project, wife dying of cancer...

Anyways, that was the first I ever heard of him, but he was such an interesting guy. Smart, funny, really, really funny. I mean, he was the kind of guy who did just about everything... storytelling, yeah, story telling--a nobel prize winning physicist, storytelling, samba drums, drawing, and safecracking. Yes, safecracking. It was one of his many, many hobbies. Before he died, one of his last ambitions was to travel to Tuva, near the border between Russia and Mongolia because he wanted to learn how to do throat singing. But he died before he could get clearance to go there. There's a book by Ralph Leighton all about that.

Here's an interesting anecdote. While he was working on the Manhattan project, he was stationed at a remote top-secret base in the desert. The barracks where he was living was a short drive from the station where the research was going on, but to get into the station he had to go through a checkpoint and sign in. One morning, he found a hole in the fence surrounding the station, but instead of telling anyone about it, he signed in and then left the station through the hole and went back to the check point and signed in again. He did this a bunch of times before they realized that he was signing in, but not signing out and started wondering what was up. Yeah, I thought that was funny too.

Anyways, I found Richard Feynman so fascinating that I decided to buy a couple of his books. He wrote a bunch of textbooks on physics as well as a few books like The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and The Meaning of it All. He also delivered a series of freshman lectures on physics over two years at the California Institute of Technology. These lectures were so popular that seats had to be reserved for the students who had registered for the lectures because if they showed up a bit late, there'd be no seats left because of all the people trying to get in to hear Richard Feynman lecture. These lectures were published in 1963 into one book called Lectures on Physics. This book was later distilled into two short books, Six Easy Pieces: the Essentials of Physics Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher and Six Not So Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time. I originally wanted to buy Lectures on Physics but it costs over a hundred dollars, so I bought Six Easy Pieces and Six Not So Easy Pieces at something like ten dollars apiece.

I started reading Six Easy Pieces immediately and thoroughly enjoyed the beginning of it. The first part of it is all about the basics of physics: everything is made of atoms. That's easy enough to understand. Even the stuff right after, I could get: how atoms behave, and all that. After that, though... he got into Quantum something or other and totally lost me but I persevered until chapter four, where he started talking about the theory of the Conservation of Energy and I was like, okay, yeah, I get that. And he used a really neat little example, where Dennis the Menace has twenty eight blocks (or is it twenty three) and keeps hiding them on his mom, who is pretty obsessive about finding these blocks and counting them. And then he went on about how perpetual motion is impossible and a small part of me died inside. But I didn't really understand much else of it, so there's still a bit of hope left. Anyways, after that, I pretty much gave up on the book... I'd need to have a background in physics to understand it and I didn't even take physics in High School. I took biology instead. And failed it. The closest I've ever come to studying physics, aside from reading the first three and a half chapters of this book is arguing with my brother about perpetual motion. You see, I have this fantasy that a physicist will one day discover perpetual motion and then we'll all have free energy and the world will be ushered into a lengthy age of peace, socialism, and space travel. Yeah. But my brother actually understands physics because he's an engineer, you see (or is he an engineer because he understands physics?) and he knows that perpetual motion is impossible, so every time we talk about it, he's intent on crushing my fantasy, which disappoints me tremendously.

Anyways, back to the book: it's a fantastic book. Really well written. If only I could understand it.