300 words on Avatar

A disclaimer: I’m a sucker for panorama, spectacle, and sheer wonder, so it took me some time to wake up from an immersion in the Avatar ride. The technical magic and imaginative splendor are beyond my abilities to review. How appropriate that this film ends up first on the list for Into the Dark this year because on one level the film concerns the discipline of seeing. Before you judge the film with instant likes and dislikes, loves and hates, take some time to consider how it sees the world and what it says. If memory serves, early on in the film Jake gets a lesson from Norm on the nuances of the verb “to see” in the new language. To Jake, saying “I see you” is simply recognition of an object: like a “yeah, you’re there.” But to the world he is about to enter, “I see you” plays on different levels of “seeing:” discerning, knowing, grasping, comprehending, seeing from deep inside. That verbal shift hints at the clash between two cultures at the heart of the film: one mechanical, imperial, individualistic, and thoroughly modern – another spiritual, tribal, communal, primal and pre-modern. The former can’t see anything but an object to mine; the latter “sees” the living connection at the heart of all things (and the latter are Na’vi – “prophets” in Hebrew, “seers” even). The point is that we all need to wake up to what we’re doing and what we’re missing. It’s a fair criticism, even if I don’t share the pantheism at its heart.* Nor do I share its polarization.** Jake’s musing narration doesn’t diminish the fact that Avatar tells its story with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. But again – I loved it.

grace and peace - Andy

* That’s a whole other post; holler if you are interested.
** That’s also another post. Suffice to say, reality is a lot messier and we’re all complicit in the way “we” live.

He came here

Last night we hosted a light-hearted post-Christmas party for our student ministry leaders at New Hope. Before they came I tried to think of a few short words to say: something on how our time spent seeking out students seems weak and foolish, yet it contains the magnificent secret of God's gracious love that seeks us out and is with us in Christ. After everyone left and I was washing dishes, I remembered this quote I ran across recently from Karl Barth:

“At this point everything becomes clear or unclear, bright or dark. For here we are standing at the centre. And however high and mysterious and difficult everything we want to know might seem to us, yet we may also say that this is just where everything becomes quite simple, quite straightforward, quite childlike. Right here in this centre, in which as a Professor of Systematic Theology I must call to you, ‘Look! This is the point now! Either knowledge, or the greatest folly!’—here I am in front of you, like a teacher in Sunday school facing his kiddies, who has something to say which a mere four-year-old can really understand. ‘The world was lost, but Christ was born, rejoice, O Christendom!’… ‘God became man for thy good, O man. ‘Tis God’s own Child that binds Himself to thine own blood.’”

It brought much joy to me last night: may it do the same for you as well.
(HT: More Than 95 Theses)

on work

"Let the church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade – not outside it.”

– Dorothy Sayers, via Scot McKnight in his book, The Jesus Creed

more madness, please

"[Mark 10:42-45] is a kind of managerial madness that is the very foolishness of the kingdom of God, which Jesus demonstrated in his own life … the good news deconstruction bears to the church is to provide the hermeneutics of the kingdom of God. The deconstruction of Christianity is not an attack on the church but a critique of the idols to which it is vulnerable, any one of which is toxic to the kingdom of God ...
But what, then, is the kingdom of God? Where is it found? It is found every time an offense is forgiven, every time a stranger is made welcome, every time an enemy is embraced, every time the least among us is lifted up, every time the law is made to serve justice, every time a prophetic voice is raise against injustice, every time the law and the prophets are summed up by love. From time to time the figure of Jesus, or fragments of his figure, appear here or there in individual lives, showing up sometimes in people who burn with a prophetic passion, sometimes in people of inordinate compassion and forgiveness. When this happens, we are likely to mistake such people as made or weak, which in a sense they are – mad with the follow of the cross, weak with the weakness of God."
-- John Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 138.

Here’s to more madness is my life – in our lives – in 2010.

the 2009 booklist

As the year winds down, I thought I’d share a list of what I’ve been reading. Once again, it’s heavy on books for Fuller coursework (though that period of my life has officially come to an end: the diploma arrived in today’s mail). I realized I never published last year’s list, so a few of these might stretch back to the fall of ’08 Here they are, in no apparent order, and apologies for the ones I’ve forgotten:

Rick Bragg: All Over But the Shoutin’
John Caputo: Philosophy and Theology
John Caputo: What Would Jesus Deconstruct?
Neal Stephenson: Anathem
Jurgen Moltmann: The Crucified God
Wilfred Thesiger: Arabian Sands
Christopher Moore: Lamb: the gospel according to Biff, Christ’s childhood pal
Margaret Feinberg: Scouting the Divine
Francis Chan: Forgotten God
Malcolm Gladwell: Outlier
Karl Barth: Dogmatics in Outline
J. Beilby& T. Eddy, ed: the Nature of the Atonement: Four Views
Thomas Oden : The Word of Life (Systematic Theology vol 2)
T.F. Torrance: The Mediation of Christ
Peter Rollins: How (not) to Speak of God
Craig Detweiler: Into the Dark: Seeing the Sacred in the Top Films of the 21st Century
Tim Keller: Prodigal God
Megan Whalen Turner: The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, the King of Attolia
K. Barth & E. Brunner: Natural Theology
Vinoth Ramachandra: Subverting Global Myths
Gustav Aulen: Christus Victor
Patricia Wilson-Kastner: Faith, Feminism, and the Christ
Sam van Eman: On Earth, as it is in Advertising
Jeff Arthurs: Preaching with Variety: How to Re-create the Dynamics of Biblical Genres.
John Calvin: 2/5 of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (in process this year)
Peter Kreeft: Between Heaven and Hell
The Shack: William P Young
Michael Pollan: In Defense of Food
Clark Pinnock: Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit
Paul Fiddes: Participating in God
Graham Buxton: Dancing in the Dark
Henri J. M. Nouwen: The Return of the Prodigal Son
Miroslav Volf: The End of Memory
David Augsberger: Hate Work
Gordon Oliver: Holy Bible, Human Bible
Andy Stanley: Communicating for Change
N. T. Wright: Surprised by Hope
James K.A. Smith: the Devil Reads Derrida
Henry David Thoreau: On Walden

Favorites?
1) John Caputo’s Philosophy and Theology – eminently readable, a delight, and a compelling case for the “and” in the title. I’ll be recommending this for some time to come …
2) Torrance’s The Mediation of Christ – freeing, beautiful, dense yet rich, draws you deeper into the heart of Christ’s incarnation and atonement. But I can say the same about Moltmann's shocking The Crucified God.
3) Neal Stephenson’s Anathem – a sprawling voyage into an alternate universe with enough math, philosophy, and adventure to please.

Resolutions for 2010? More fiction and poetry, as my diet has been a bit one-sided. And please, do share your own favorites!

Into the Wild

Over the last few days I sat down to watch Into the Wild. I'd read the book years ago, and coming on the heels of some things this week, the film got me thinking and I wrote some things down, Here they are, for what it's worth.
--
This past week I watched the film Into the Wild (dir. Sean Penn, 2007). If you are unfamiliar, it’s taken from Jon Krakauer’s book which tells the true story of the young Chris McCandless. After college, Christ renounces his life, renames himself Alexander Supertramp, and journeys into the wilderness (in all senses) and an eventual, tragic death at 24. I got into a discussion at work about it, with comments of “how selfish, what a waste, senseless” etc. Yes and no. Even if we allow that it’s a selfish waste, I can still admire the struggle, still sense the challenge it presents to our own lives and world. In Alex’s case, I can’t help but think that his struggle was just off-course enough to mean an endless beating against the wind, a tack into its teeth. Sure, the art of elimination knifes off all the stuff and junk that clutter and cloud our inner worlds – call it society, people, money and materialism, idols, desires, careers, what have you. But when everything is stripped away in the name of truth, what’s left?

In the end, truth can be as merciless a tyrant as any other, leaving you weak, pale, pitiful, and cold. It, too, demands your death, but it remains to be seen whether your death will bring any life. Or will it be just the final, too-familiar flameout of a once-brilliant torch? Closer to the heart of things, I think that the very part of us that has to be better, be right, be moral, alone be strong, alone be true – that part has to die as well. If it doesn’t, it becomes another petty god, a sham-idol in the jam-packed temple of humanity. And idols don’t give life.

It’s not the wild that kills the devil in me – but I think Alex/Chris knew that. It might reveal it, make me face it, but merely being in extremis doesn’t bring liberation. The real liberation comes when all our strivings only further tighten the cords further and we realize that we have to die in order to live. The truth is, someone has died for me and that alone gives me the power to die to myself and live for others. Without love, truth – however piercing, however beautiful – is only so much noise. Someone far wiser than I wrote that truth is not known unless it is loved. I think of some of Alex’/Chris’ final words: “in God’s name someone help me please …” In God’s name, someone has helped us, someone has loved us – and showed us the fullest extent of that love. God help us all.

(cross-posted at Facebook)

the great exchange

"Let us then rejoice in this grace ... for what greater grace could God have made to dawn on us than to make his only Son become the Son of man, so that human beings might in their turn become children and heirs of God? Ask if this were merited; ask for its reason, for its justification, and whether you will find any other answer but sheer grace."
-Augustine