Australian Idol

I love Australian Idol. It's always a pleasure to watch talented artists, and I enjoy the whole mentoring process - the judges are always making astute, creatively informed comments. This year I'm also loving seeing the characters of a couple of contestants. One of them (Stan Walker) is definitely a Christian. I'm not so sure about the other one (Toby Moulton), because there's a gag order on religious talk.

These men have the judges commenting on their character almost as often as their singing. The thing that stands out most to me is their humility. Even though they can't say much, they are a brilliant witness. I think more Christians should go on reality shows (unless of course the show's premise is spiteful or crass). Our culture might not care about metanarratives, but we care a lot about individual's stories and how a person's beliefs play out in their life.


- apologies for all the equi-length sentences. It's a bit jolting to read. I wouldn't get a good mark for "Sentence Variation" if I was one of my students.

Underwater

The way they teach us Ancient Greek and Hebrew at SMBC is grammar in the first year and Bible translation in subsequent years. This is well and good. In fact it has many pluses. But it's not language by immersion is it - or at least not in the first year. And I think I learn languages best by immersion. So, I haven't been doing particularly well, and I've been worried that all this pain will be for nothing and I'll never look at another word of Hebrew or Greek once I'm done here.

But I have a cunning plan. I've bought a New Testament with Greek on one page and an English translation on the facing page, and I've done the same for the Old Testament in Hebrew*. I like these far better than interlinears that give the English translation of each word under the word. I don't want to learn to give a literal translation of these languages - I want to learn to translate the actual meaning of sentences. So it's this that I want to expose myself to, again and again. My plan is to read as little as a sentence, or as much as a paragraph each day, first in the Hebrew/Greek and then in the English. I want to get into the habit of this now, so I've got more chance of keeping it up later. I'm not planning to employ amazing powers of observation or anything while I read, and certainly not to work out the grammatical status of individual words. I don't even care if I only understand one word in a sentence. I just want to be immersed.


*These were actually quite hard to track down, certainly on the net. I ended up finding them at the Bible Society bookshop. There seems to only be one option for each language. For Greek, it's the Nestle-Aland Greek-English New Testament, with the Novum Testamentum Graece for the Greek and the RSV for the English. For Hebrew, it's the Hebrew-English Bible published by the Bible Society in Israel, with the Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia for Greek and the NKJV for English.

Master of Divinity! project

I am two thirds of my way to becoming a superhero. In second semester next year we get to chose whether we do a project/thesis or two regular subjects. I've been hanging to do the project since I began my studies, and I think I've finally worked out some sort of a topic . . .

I want to look at what the Bible says about the importance and effect of physical closeness on relationships. I don't particularly have romantic relationships in mind, but of course it will play into that. The sort of situations I'm thinking of are those of friends (or missionaries) who are living in distant places, friendships between people on the net who have never met in person, and the relationship between Christians today and the Father, Son and Spirit who we can neither see nor touch.

I'm interested in this stuff largely because of me! I'm as much a dancer and aesthete as I am a writer and thinker, and, for some reason, (because I'm a thinker no doubt) I'm not satisfied to just let myself be, but am always wondering about how these things should play out. I'm also interested because I observe physical absence having curious effects in the situations described, but can't quite put my finger on the effects or say if they're good, bad or merely neutral.

I can think of all sorts of biblical passages and angles to take on this subject - the goodness of physical creation, the indwelling of the Spirit in us, Jesus' incarnation, why Jesus went to people to heal them when he could've done so at a distance, what 1 John 4:20 means etc etc. I'm going to try and work it out in January. But please do let me know if you have any suggestions :-).

amalgamate verb, -mat.ed. -mat.ing.

My Sydney church, Central Sydney Presbyterian, is joining up with another church, Abbotsford Presbyterian. We're doing it because the school hall we currently meet in is being extended, thanks to the government's stimulus money. A couple of Sundays ago both congregations voted for us to start meeting together, with a view to formally amalgamate halfway through next year. In many different ways, God's hand looks to be in the whole process, which is a great comfort and joy for us near-sighted people. It's going to be a really interesting time.

I don't know how other people in Central Sydney would characterise the church, but to me, it's a church of people who have integrity and desire to grow. People try to be honest about who they are and where they're at, and they really want to become more like Jesus. This means that we're pretty caring and concerned for each other. It also means we're pretty straight-up and blunt and we don't care about the niceties. We're a relaxed, casual bunch.

The church we're going to is a small, lively church full of elderly people. It's currently much more formal in style and more old-fashioned in aesthetic than Central Sydney. Thank God we don't have to somehow try to achieve unity and harmony - that's already been won in Christ. But we do have to live in accordance with this profound reality. It's going to be a good test I reckon and a rare opportunity to show the difference that the gospel can make in the lives of people. Stay tuned and I'll let you know how it goes.

The living's easy

Sometimes I'm good with people, but sometimes I get shy and find it hard to talk to them . . . and sometimes I talk, but keep myself back out of distrust. Still other times I'm trying hard to impress and not really being myself.

So I've prayed that I will share myself with people, and put them first. I like it when God answers this prayer because then I'm a little more like Jesus, the relationships are a little more like they will be in heaven and I'm more myself than at any other time. Too much time spent worrying over your image or fears turns you into a caricature of your true self. If, by God's grace, you can forget these things, then the living's easy - you have only to be the woman or man God made you to be.

We like some metanarratives

In this quote, Clark succinctly exposes some contemporary flawed thinking. He does back up his first point with some earlier argument, but I can only quote so much. It's a good book.

If authority is necessary to community and if it can function properly in community, then contra the postmodern critique, metanarratives are not essentially evil. Further, while postmodernism embraces local narratives as the antidote to oppression by metanarratives, it overlooks the oppressive potential of minority stories. The tribal conflicts in central Africa, Northern Ireland, and southern Europe indicate that minority voices can equally lead to violence. Postmodernism is also simplistic in failing to see its own interpretation of the world (that all metanarratives are evil tools of oppression that must be ddeconstructed) as an alternative metanarrative. Metanarratives are necessary and not necessarily evil; local narratives are hlepful but not necessarily good. . . . It is precisely the proper exercise of duly consituted authority, constrained by truth and love, not the rebellious rejection of all authority whatever, that safeguards against abusive authoritarianism.


- DK Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology (Illinois: Crossway Books, 2003) 78-79.

A vision for life

A rockin' post over on the eighteen-heads-are-better-than-one MTS Tasmania blog.


Sorry about the lack of posts lately. I'm uncertain whether it's because I've been busy with college, or because I haven't had anything worth saying . . .