First Gay Couple Legally Wed In Kent County

Posted on December 6, 2015 by PaulVK

Calvin College Student Newspaper Chimes

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Kory Plockmeyer writes about the crowd-sourcing “ministry share” overture on YALT

Posted on December 6, 2015 by PaulVK

YALT

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Abortion Rights, Gun Rights, and CRC Church Order Article 28

Posted on December 5, 2015 by PaulVK

Church Order Article 28a

Article 28 a. These assemblies shall transact ecclesiastical matters only, and shall deal with them in an ecclesiastical manner.

Skye Jethani on the Phil Vischer podcast quipped about the political “sacraments” for the right and the left in the US: abortion rights and gun rights. Thinking of them as “sacraments” I think is enlightening. Depending on how you view it they could go either way. Both sides clinging to guns and abortion in different way. both “tools” fundamentally employed as instruments for “life giving” or “life taking”. Both images tightly entwined as sacraments of freedom, autonomy and power.
Abortions aren’t done in church. Guns aren’t manufactured or sold in church. Both sides want to employ the church in their agenda to right a political, civil ship.
Doug VG has done us a service in his unstinting demand to recognize Article 28a. Other articles that get attention get blessed with lots of “supplements” bearing witness to Synodical attention. Famous articles like 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 17 and 23. Doug will makes sure that 28 get some love. 🙂
It’s hard not to see that the Christian life should inform our beliefs and behaviors when it comes to abortion and gun control. The Bible doesn’t say much about either directly, but we get God knitting us together in the womb and some pretty cutting words from Jesus about swords.
Church leaders might listen to Emily Dickinson
 Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
I can’t hear this and think about how Jesus entered into the very violent culture war and how that impacted his teaching.
One of Tim Keller’s big themes is idolatry. We can spot our inordinate loves often by inordinate anger. Anger, as the therapist tells us is neither good nor bad, but it like all of our emotions informs and communicates something of what is below. It illuminates our attachments.
The Christian church is beset by massive interpretive pluralism when it comes to theology, but this is equally true when it comes to our political application of our Christian beliefs. I often smile at the hubris of politics as it imagines it can save the world, but religion we can’t know. Do we lack sufficient pluralism in politics to realize this? Again, read the Christian debates prior to the Civil war are enlightening.
We would rightly embrace the idea that what is of utmost value, our commitment to our God requires our highest passions, yet the form of these passions need not be facile. The same Jesus wept mightily in the garden, cried in the anguish of abandonment on the cross, but had a face like flint to journey to Jerusalem, and was silent and resolute before Pilate and the Sanhedrin.
We surely want the church to inform and shape the moral and political lives of its members but what Article 28a asserts is that it must tell all the Truth but tell it slant. There are times, places, media and spaces for members to engage each other over politics but around the sacramental table they must be one. Article 28 tries to hedge the church from the urgency of the now so that the much longer story will not be lost in our passions of the moment.

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Video from Nov. Conference of Center for Pastor Theologians

Posted on December 5, 2015 by PaulVK

Vimeo

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Meet the man who wants to be president, and then live forever

Posted on December 5, 2015 by PaulVK

http://www.theverge.com/a/transhumanism-2015

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How to have Bold Public Joy when the World is Pulling Itself to its own Doom

Posted on December 5, 2015 by PaulVK

This Month in Killing

If you are a person that likes to watch US news the last few weeks have been anything but cheery. Let’s Review. (for the year in Terrorist attacks see Wikipedia)

  • Oct 31: ISIS downs a Russian jetliner over the Sinia killing 224 people
  • Nov 9: 14 year old girl (Boko Haram?) blows herself up in Camaroon killing 4 others
  • Nov 12: ISIS suicide bombers kill 43 in Beirut
  • Nov 13: 130 people killed in Paris in ISIS attacks
  • Nov 17: Boko Haram bomb kills 34+ in Nigeria wounding 80
  • Nov 18: Boko Haram, two girls ages 11 and 18 detonate suicide bombs killing 17 and wounding 123 others in Nigera
  • Nov 20: Gunmen in Mali attack a hotel killing 23
  • Nov 22: female suicide bomber from Boko Haram kills 8 refugees fleeing attacks from the same group
  • Nov 24: Suicide attack in Tunisia kills 24
  • Nov 26: Boko Haram attacks a village in Nigeria killing 18 wounding 10 and burning 100 homes
  • Nov 27: Robert Dear kills three and injures 4 in attack of a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs
  • Nov 27: Boko Haram kills 21 in a suicide attack against Shia Muslims in the Nigerian city of Kano
  • Dec 2: Boko Haram kills 3 to 6 civilians in Cameroon
  • Dec 2: Mass shooting in San Bernadino killing 14 injuring 21

The Regularly Scheduled Program This Interrupted 

Of this list (and this is already culled by me) most of us via the news mostly paid attention to Paris, Robert Dear and now San Bernardino. Before that we were fixed on the Presidential debates, the war against ISIS and the upcoming Paris Climate Change meetings. These things of course continue. We view the world through a very small information window whose focus is mostly determined by figuring out the American attention market so that news programs can sell advertising spots. Not necessarily the best filter for determining importance.

Why We Believe in Politics Continue reading →

Posted in On the way to Sunday's sermon | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Between the World and Me

Posted on December 5, 2015 by PaulVK

Reviews of Ta-Nehisi Coates book

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15 Things To Do To Forget the Soul-Crushing Realities of this world if you have no real hope for it

Posted on December 4, 2015 by PaulVK

15 Things to do when the world is shitty and terrifying

https://twitter.com/embeedub/status/672816985370136577

https://twitter.com/embeedub/status/672817776264937472

See also the conversation between Thabiti Anyabwil and Ta-Nehsisi Coates

The message is the world can’t be fixed so the best you can do is some good around you to help make yourself feel better.

 

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Same Sex Marriage as Theological Crisis for the CRC

Posted on December 3, 2015 by PaulVK

Noll

The Standard Narrative of Progressive Liberationism

Many Americans, Christian or not assume a narrative that lines up the following into a new American civil rights manifest destiny.

  • In the American Civil War and Abolitionist movement American abolished slavery
  • In the Women’s Suffrage movement America began to embrace the dream of equality between the sexes (understood as male and female)
  • In the Civil Right’s movement America began to embrace the dream of equality among the races
  • In the LGBTQ movement for marriage equality American is beginning to embrace the dream of gender autonomy and public self-determination.

This narrative has become the primary moral matrix for public morality inside many churches and in the minds of the non-religious and anti-religious. It is meta-narrative broadly and simply assumed. It inspired a progressivist reading of the Bible even among some otherwise conservative evangelical  scholars and is implicit behind so many demands for change in traditional institutions.

The broad implicit assumption of this narrative has brought conflict to conservative denominations like the CRCNA who have a strong tradition of Bible allegiance. According to conservative Protestant orthodoxy faithful Christians seek answers to social questions from the Bible. A classic example of this is the recent CTS Forum publication on Biblical and Hermeneutical Reflections on Same Sex Relationships. Anyone knowing the CRC will find no surprises in this document. I also doubt it will change anyone’s mind on the subject.

Massive Biblical Interpretive Pluralism Continue reading →

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Prayer Shaming: The View From Jesusland | The American Conservative

Posted on December 3, 2015 by PaulVK

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-view-from-jesusland-prayer-shaming/

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