I'm going to be blogging through Peter Leitharts survey of the OT " A House for my name" over the next few weeks. I've been wanting to read this book for a while now after having been recommended by a good friend. I'm REALLY looking forward to this read....one of the things that piqued my interest was a blurb by RC Sproul on the back that says this book will "help free you from a hermeneutic held captive by the enlightenment..". Amen to that, as I continue on my journey to understand our Bible on its own terms and in its hebraic world view.

One of the things I'm already excited about learning just from breezing thru it it that the Bible tells the same story over and over again. This vibes with what I'm learning in NT wrights JEsus and the NT people of God. There is a basic worldview, a basic story that is told over and over again thru out the bible. here we go...

Olivia from zach walden on Vimeo.

Time for a new post. I'm feeling really stretched the last oh...lets see...6 months since I started at Crossings Community. I feel that way because I'm really being stretched in these areas....teaching, administrating, and casting vision that works. I am more comfortable with my strengths, which are on the opposite end of the spectrum- building relationships, listening, being compassionate, etc. So as a youth worker, I need the last list, but as leader of our group I also need to be adequate in the first set of skills I listed. It's hard.
So what have I learned about teaching the last few months? Well, it needs to be practical. Thats it. Biggest thing I've learned. Teaching must meet people where they are at. Once again- hard. Hard for me because I'm not practical, I get lost in the text. I read, ponder, and read some more, and then continue to ponder about the biblical theology, whether the text means this or that, how much biblical history you need to know to understand Jesus and so on and so forth. HELP! I also spend too much time on seminary websites, searching for something that will help me bring this divine story right down into the practicalness of life. The struggle I have is that the Bible is not practical sometimes. It has great, grand themes of redemption fulfilled in Jesus. So why would a middle schooler care about those things? They don't....unless they see how it practical, how it applies to them somehow.
Soooo....I'm stretch,stretch,stretching.......someday maybe I'll get it together.

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As I have tried to express in various venues, the specialization in the fields of biblical studies, theology, etc., is not a helpful development, especially in a post-religious world. I would love to see come serious attempts at cross-fertilization, where much dialogue ensues, and Christian scholars are on the same page of trying to articulate issues that pertain to how we think about Scripture."

Good quote by a certain scholar...what he is saying is that in seminaries and schools, the idea of a professor specializing in a certain area (for ex: OT theology) is not helpful to evangelicals as a whole because the teaching that comes from that prof is not integrated with other feilds (like extrabibilical Israelite archaeology) and so does not give a whole picture to the person learning OT theology. I think thats what he is saying anyways. ...shoutout to sky for being the only one who reads my blog

"The church always flourishes when it is looking outward; it falters when it is looking inward."

I read this on reformation21.org, it is a quote from pastor Michael Rogers of Westminter Pres here in Lancaster.

I am becoming more and more aware of a particular viewpoint that is popular among americans. I'm not sure what to call it, so we'll go with..."tolerant neutrality". I've heard this viewpoint alot among the people I work with in the mental health field. It goes something like this....

"We need to tolerate everyone around us and oppose cultural norms and expectations for behaviour. We do not look to some outward source for the standard of right behaviour or morality. That standard comes from within the human being and is intuitively known. With the right teaching and modeling that intuitive sense of what is right and wrong will guide and lead a person to what is good."
Okay....as I ask those who espouse this view where they get their standard of goodness they answer that it is intuitive, that we should all be able to recgonize what is right together because the true knowledge of what is right and good lies within all of us.
So what do I say to this? I think that the understanding of what is right or wrong can be influenced by an intuitive sense ( the conscience) but where do we gain the conscience? And are we saying that as we grow up the conscience is not formed and shaped by the interactions we have with others? And why do people's intuitive sense of what is right and wrong differ so much? I find it impossible to come to a real understanding of what is right and wrong, good and evil, based on this line of thinking. Right and wrong will differ as much as the individual persons and societies differ.
When we reject the Lord's standards of what is right and wrong, what is good and evil, what is pure and impure, we just replace it with our own. And our own standards will be as different as the separate individual lives we have all lead and the different cultures we all grew up in.

There is no basis for tolerance without a standard for goodness.