nakedpastor

Win this ORIGINAL painting I completed this week!!! How?
1. Go to today’s post, “Why I Listen To Atheists” (http://davidhayward.ca/blog/?p=110)
2. Post a comment (your name will be entered in the draw which closes Sunday night, August 20, 2006, at midnight Atlantic Time).
3. Wait for the announcement Monday morning, August 21, 2006, on who won.
4. Wait for your free original Hayward painting to arrive in the mail.
EASY AS THAT!
Contest Rules:
1. No matter how many comments you make, and you can make as many as you want, your name is entered only once.
2. If you are family or friend (or anyone else), you ARE allowed to enter and win.
3. I’m still permitted to edit or delete inappropriate comments.
4. If you’ve already made a comment on this post, you are already entered to win!

Evergreen Moon, watercolor, 3″x5″, worth $250.00 (unframed)

1. I believe that all voices should be free to speak and to be heard.
2. I believe that they are not afraid to ask some hard questions that I think need asking.
3. I believe that God cannot be scientifically or logically proven, as they insist.
4. I believe they have the ability to expose idiocy that has risen to the level of taboo.
5. I believe their critique of church life can be more objective, therefore more incisive.
6. I believe, as they argue, that the church and the state must be kept separate.
7. I believe I must respect even the strongest opponent of my views and beliefs.
8. I believe, since I have atheist friends, that most mean no harm.
9. I believe they can, like anyone, employ measures that threaten human liberties.
10. I believe that sometimes I have been one myself!

These are generalizations, since “atheist ” does not describe a cohesive, homogenous or unified group.

Darren Rowse over at Problogger is asking for submissions of lists, which partially inspired this one!

Roland H. Bainton, in his book, Here I Stand. A Life of Martin Luther, writes: “Even our very quest for God is a disguised form of self-seeking” (p. 176).

This reminded me of something Karl Barth wrote in his famous Romans commentary:
“Look how Michelangelo has depicted the ‘Creation of Eve’: in the fullness of her charm and beauty she rises slowly, posing herself in the fatal attitude of—worship. Notice the Creator’s warning arm and careworn, saddened eyes, as He replies to Eve’s gesture of adoration. She is manifestly behaving as she ought not. Eve—and we must honor her as the first ‘religious personality’—was the first to set herself against God, the first to worship Him; but, inasmuch as SHE worshiped HIM, she was separated from Him in a manner at once terrible and presumptuous… Tragic—because, when men, knowing good and evil, become like God, when their direct relation with Him gives birth to independent action, then all direct relationship is broken off”(Romans, p. 247).

The church needs to be reminded of this reality. Our endeavor to make worship, any aspect of church life, or even the church itself more meaningful or intentional only exposes our separation from God. It is, as Luther believed, more about ourselves than God.

Hey everyone! Just giving you the heads up that I am soon going to change the name of my blog site to churchpundit.com … hope you like it, because I DO! And God told me to name it that Nah, just kidding. However, I do want you to tell your family and friends (and your enemies if you wish!) about my blog. I’d appreciate it. Stay tuned!

“It seems to me…. that what God is doing right now is dismantling the denominational systems as fast as possible” (Loren B. Mead, The Once and Future Church, p. 39).

Yesterday while I was teaching at my church, I took great delight in being frequently interrupted by people with questions, comments, and even quips. It makes the “preaching event” fun, engaging, communal, and anti-authoritarian. I do not have all the answers. No one does, and all of us together don’t either! But when we, as a community, gather around a text and try to understand it together, with anyone allowed to give input, it just seems, and I think is, more just, non-coercive, non-manipulative, and free. I personally agree with Mead’s quote above, and think that the sooner we cooperate with the dismantling, the better off we’ll be.

Here’s a painting of mine I did recently! You can buy it in my eBay store!
I’m getting ready to go to my church. I look forward to getting together with my brothers and sisters, worshipping together, and learning from the Bible. Talk later!

I’ll admit it: I am a critic of the church. But its because I love the church. And note: I criticize it from the inside believing that the church can become what it is. But criticism should be heard from all quarters. So, I think it can withstand and endure the severest critiques. Chomsky is a case in point. He is a severe critic of the United States, a well-known dissident. He appreciates the incredible freedom Americans enjoy that has been achieved with tremendous struggle. But he critiques the country from the inside because it is obvious he loves the United States and democracy and wants to see it proper, not self-destruct. Another case in point is Romeo Dallaire. When I read his excellent book, Shake Hands With the Devil, I was inspired by his passion for justice, democracy, and peace. His criticism of the United Nations is severe, but it’s because he believes it should play an important role in the world, not because he wants to see it annihilated.

I was at a party last night, and had a conversation with a friend who also has teenagers, like me (not “teenagers like me”, but “teenagers, like me”… that comma makes a difference!). We were talking about our teenagers’ relationship with the church. The important difference between us and them is that we are willing to put up with a lot in order to get to a worthy goal. In other words, we are willing to put up with some theological nonsense, politics and religiosity, in order to server the church. My kids won’t! If they smell even a hint of manipulation, abuse, control, hypocrisy, propaganda, or half-truths and lies, the vote with their attitudes and level of involvement.

So, that’s why I criticize the church. It’s not because I want to see her destroyed, but because I believe that she can become what she is called to be in this world. This is going to be, I think, the main purpose of this blog.

I watched the Noam Chomsky dvd last night, Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without A Pause. It is a documentary on the man. I found it quite awesome and inspiring. He is an American intellectual who is a dissident of profound proportions. Watch it if you can. Here are some quotes I wrote into my journal:

“If I’m a persona that attracts people, the world’s in real trouble. You know… if I had the capacity to be a good speaker, which I don’t, I wouldn’t use it. I mean, I’m a boring speaker and I like it that way. If people want to come and hear me, that’s fine. You know I don’t do a song and dance, and I don’t have fancy rhetoric. I doubt very much whether anybody is attracted by whatever the persona is. People are interested in the issues, and they’re interested in the issues because they’re important!”

This reminds me of the Puritan approach to preaching. They determined, in the face of the growing popularity of fanciful rhetoric in the pulpit, that they would preach with an unadorned style and allow the content of their preaching to carry it’s own weight. Like the theologian J. I. Packer notes:“ A crucified style best suits the preachers of the crucified Christ” (A Quest For Godliness, p. 73). Chomsky agrees with straightforward method.

Another Chomsky quote:
“That’s why fear is so prevalent in the United States: it’s not real; it’s manufactured.”

“The main task of intellectuals is to make sure people never look into the mirror.”

“Be cautious when you hear about intellectuals being fighters for justice.” (He is referring to some liberal intellectuals rewriting history to say that Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam, when all the original documents indicate that he had no intention of doing so.)

Anyway, fascinating stuff that not only applies to social criticism and politics, but to religion and the church. The level of Chomsky’s honesty, which has cost him a great deal, is something I aspire to as a pastor for the benefit of the church.

I intend to write a book one day on Church Splits. They happen often enough, but I also experienced one first-hand. It has been going on 10 years since it occurred, and I’ve been waiting until I can write it with as much objectivity as is humanly possible. I feel I am getting closer to the point where I can write it without unjustly or unnecessarily injuring anyone. That’s my goal. I came across this quote in Karen Armstrong’s book, The Spiral Staircase. My Climb Out of Darkness:

“The scholarly observer must render the mental and practical behavior of a group into terms available in his own mental resources, which should remain personally felt, even while informed with a breadth of reference which will allow other educated persons to make sense of them. But this must not be to substitute his own and his readers’ conventions for the original, but to broaden his own perspective so that it can make a place for the other. Concretely, he must never be satisfied to cease asking ‘but why?’ until he has driven his understanding to the point where he has an immediate, human grasp of what a given position meant, such that every nuance in the data is accounted for and withal, given the total of presuppositions and circumstances, he could feel himself doing the same” (p. 290).

What I take this to mean for me personally is that I must come to the place where I can actually feel myself feeling, thinking, and doing what others felt, thought, and did through the split, and perhaps even sympathize with them. I can’t write about the split until I reach this point of detachment. In fact, this quote is an excellent guideline for all writers or anyone at all who wishes to work towards a more united world.

In all fairness, I need to report that Tom Harpur’s website seems to have removed the page delineating what he felt was a “reasonable response” to his book, The Pagan Christ. In one of yesterday’s posts, I expressed that I thought his four criteria were unfair. In its place is a page solely dedicated to responding to James Patrick Holding’s website, www.tektonics.org, a site on which Holding, as Harpur believes, “bitterly assails any and all scholars who dare to go against his literalist, fundamentalist line.”

I should indicate here that Holding, in his critique of The Pagan Christ, quotes extensively from the Canadian scholar Dr. W. Ward Gasque’s own extensive critique of the book. Just google something like “critique Harpur” and you’ll find plenty to read, both for and against!