How To Reach Post-Everythings

Couldn't Help Noticing, 1 September 2006 AD

Tim Keller asked the following question to his denomination:

How do we, as a denomination, do renewal and outreach in the emerging post-everything United States culture? ‘Post-everything’ people are those who are now in their teens and twenties—and they are our future.

In this brief article, Keller lays out six issues at stake in engaging this group and how Reformed theology offers the resources to address these issues:

1. Issue: Post-everythings like narrative and story
• Resource: Geerhardus Vos:
• If you know how to do Christ-centered preaching, then you turn every single sermon into a kind of story. The plot of the human dilemma thickens, and the hero that comes to the rescue is Jesus. Christ-centered preaching converts doctrinal lectures or little how-to talks into true sermons. Post-everythings who are interested in narrative are reached by such preaching that is deeply Reformed.
2. Issue: Post-everythings are experientially oriented
• Resource: Jonathon Edwards:
• Edwards taught that a sermon should not only make truth clear, but also should make truth real. In Edwards we find ways to preach that are Reformed, committed to objective truth and, at the same time, deeply experiential.
3. Issue: Post-everythings are set against moralism and self-righteousness
• Resource: Martin Luther:
• Traditional gospel presentations assume that the people want to be ‘good.’ But our kids’ generation wants to be ‘free.’ Luther said, ‘Look, you want to be free? Good. It’s good to be free. But you’re not. You are living for something and, whatever that something is, it enslaves you.’ If a person lives for reputation, then he is a slave to what people think. If a person lives for achievement, then he will be a workaholic. As did Luther, we should tell such people, ‘You want to be free? Fine. But you’re not going to be free unless Jesus is your salvation.’ When post-everythings rejected Christianity they thought moralism and Christianity were the same thing. But we can show post-everythings that the two are not the same, and that freedom really is in Jesus.
4. Issue: Post-everythings have a concern for social justice
• Resource: Hermann Ridderbos:
• [Go to] Ridderbos and other Reformed theologians who stress the coming of and the presence of the Kingdom. The Reformed understanding of salvation is not simply that God is rescuing individual souls out of the material world, but rather he is also redeeming all of creation. God is going to bring complete healing and shalom to the material world eventually.
5. Issue: Post-everythings love art because they love the material world
• Resource: Abraham Kuyper
• Abraham Kuyper’s understanding of Reformed theology enables us to say to post-everythings, ‘Christianity is not just a way for you as an individual to get peace, love and groovy vibes in Heaven. Christianity is a comprehensive worldview. You can be a Christian artist, dancer, manager, or minister and these are all ways of living out the gospel.’ When post-everythings hear that, they get extremely excited. They have never considered that Christianity embraces the whole of life.”
6. Issue: Post-everythings are not swayed by evidential apologetics
• Resource: Cornelius Van Til:
• If you start to present evidence for the deity of Christ or the proofs of God, post-everything eyes will glaze over. But the presuppositional apologetics of Cornelius Van Til can work with post-everythings. I think Reformed theology provides us with tools for our culture that Josh McDowell’s kind of evidential apologetics does not.

Noticed by Marty at 09:00 AM

Ozymandias

A poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Pencils Ranked #4

Forbes ranked the “20 Most Important Tools” recently, and the pencil scored #4!

“Writing may be one of the most important discoveries in human history. But it was easy-to-use writing implements–including the pencil, pen and brush–that made mass education and literacy possible. Cheap, reliable and convenient, the pencil represents these tools at their best. And because the sword came in at No. 8 on our list (more about the sword), we can now say for sure that the pen is mightier than the sword… ….In 1662, the first mass-produced pencils were made in Nuremberg, Germany, and in 1795, a French Chemist named Nicolas Conté invented a technique to make pencil leads out of powdered graphite and clay. In 1770, Edward Naime, an English engineer, created and began selling the first rubber erasers. The practice of painting pencils yellow began in the 1890s. Pencil manufacturers wanted to advertise that they were using high-quality Chinese graphite, so they painted them a color associated with Chinese royalty. Today, 75% of the pencils sold in the U.S. are still painted yellow. "

Small is the new big

Check out item seven of this title essay of Seth Godin's new book.

Tell me what you think!

"Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.

Small means that you can answer email from your customers.

Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others, while you keep the power because you invent the remarkable and tell stories to people who want to hear them.

A small law firm or accounting firm or ad agency is succeeding because they’re good, not because they’re big. So smart small companies are happy to hire them.

A small restaurant has an owner who greets you by name.

A small venture fund doesn’t have to fund big bad ideas in order to get capital doing work. They can make small investments in tiny companies with good (big) ideas.

A small church has a minister with the time to visit you in the hospital when you’re sick.

Is it better to be the head of Craigslist or the head of UPS?

Small is the new big only when the person running the small thinks big.

Don’t wait. Get small. Think big."

Seth Godin
Author of Small is the New Big

You can visit Seth's blog here.

Small Update

1. Recieved a call to be the teaching elder of a small PCA church.
2. Just finished the written exams for ordination (Six tests took 22 1/2 hours to complete)

What is Labor Day about?

Overhand the Hammers Swing: Poems of Work
by Philip Levine


What follows are images of work from contemporary American poets, that is poets contemporary to me. When I say work I mean the sort of brute physical work that most of us try to avoid, but that those without particular gifts or training were often forced to adopt to make a living in a society as tough and competitive as ours. This may in fact be a species of work that is disappearing from America as more and more automation replaces the need for human hands, that is manual labor. Perhaps the most beautiful evocation of this activity I find is in Whitman's great "Song of Myself":

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,
Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is great heat in the fire.
From the conder-strew'd threshold I follow their movements,
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

For Whitman this sort of work, which he liked to pretend he engaged in, is communal and harmonious; it is done with precision and craft, and the reader is left to assume that it brings to each man a sense of fulfillment as well as community. Over a century later another brilliant American poet finds two men engaged in similar labor--and though they should be even closer than Whitman's blacksmiths, being father and son--the blows they strike are in truth meant partly for each other:

We stood on a wooden platform
Facing each other with sledgehammers,
A copper-tipped sieve sunken into the ground
Like a spear, as we threaded on five foot
Of galvanized pipe for the pump.
As if tuned to some internal drum,
We hammered the block of oak
Placed on top for the pipe.
It began inching downward
As we traded blows--one for you,
One for me. After a half hour
We threaded on another five feet. The sweat
Gleamed on our shirtless bodies, father
& son tied to each other until we hit water.

(from "Song for My Father" by Yusef Komunyakaa)

Komunyakaa writes as a participant, one too busy or spent to notice the "sheer of their waists": perhaps if Whitman's blacksmiths had themselves written poems the overall pictures might not be so different, for they too may have felt driven by such labor deep into the self and marching "to some internal drum" or like the proud fathers of James Wright's poem, not marching at all but "ashamed to go home" where their "women cluck like starved pullets."

As we shall see in the poems that follow such work often leads to despair or worse, the human body torn to shreds like the bodies of Kenneth Patchen's orange bears, "Their paws smashed in the rolls, their backs/ seared by hot slag, their soft trusting/ bellies kicked in. . . " Patchen's vision of the nature of labor leads him to question his master, Whitman: "What did he know about/ Orange bears with their coats all stunk up with soft coal. . . "

For Whitman such work may have led to a people and a continent fulfilled, but as we see in Snyder's marvelous "Hay for the Horses," it can lead to more work and not much else or in the words of his sixty-eight-year- old bucker of hay, "I sure would hate to do this all my life/ And damnit, that's just what/ I've gone and done."

Oh, Death! Where is your sting?

Death, be not proud (Holy Sonnet 10)
by John Donne

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy'or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Does it mean what it says?

A thought provoking Wold Magazine article by Gene Edward Veith

Is a translation of a text supposed to provide what it says or what it means? Or what the translator thinks it means, or wants it to mean?

One translation approach—whether of the Bible or anything else—is the "formal equivalent" method. This approach seeks words in the English language that replicate as closely as possible the words in the original language.

The other approach is the "dynamic equivalent" method. This approach seeks to replicate not words but meanings.

A good translation, of course, will do both, but "the dynamic equivalent" approach, favored by most contemporary Bible translators, carries with it a certain philosophy about the text that can easily be abused—as secular linguists with no theological ax to grind are pointing out.

The pioneer of dynamic equivalence in Bible translation was Eugene A. Nida, former head of the American Bible Society, who, to his credit, did much to translate the Bible into multitudes of native languages on the mission field. The goal, as he explains it, is to render the biblical text in terms of the culture of the readers. "The equivalent forms," he said, "should not be 'foreign' either in form ... or meaning." The translated version should not only read like a modern text; it should resonate in terms of modern meanings. A passage, he says, should be expressed "in terms of relevance to the present-day world, not to the biblical culture."

This approach to translation, arguably, makes the ancient world of the Israelites more accessible to tribes in the mission field. Mr. Nida and his approach gave us the "Good News" Bible in modern American English. The approach can be used modestly and judiciously, as it was in the New International Version (NIV). But Today's New International Version (TNIV) takes the approach to an extreme that reveals the limitations of the dynamic equivalent method.

First, how can a scholar writing thousands of years later, from an entirely different culture and speaking an entirely different language, be so confident of what the original text "really means," other than what it says?

Second, the ancient biblical world really is quite a bit different from modern American culture. To make it not seem "foreign" is to miss the point, since it actually is foreign. And making the Bible fit our culture—instead of making our culture fit the Bible—has a way of watering down its authority.

Secular linguists—such as Stephen Prickett, in Words and the Word and Origins of Narrative—describe the dynamic equivalent approach as "naïve" and "simplistic" in its understanding of language and in its assumption that cultural meanings are easily transferable. Dynamic equivalent practitioners pride themselves on achieving clarity, but a text like the Bible, according to Mr. Prickett, is filled with mystery, multileveled meanings, and unique "untranslatable" revelations—all of which get leveled out and lost in many contemporary translations.

Mr. Nida admits that his approach involves "exegesis" as well as translation. A dynamic equivalent translator must substitute what he thinks something means for the literal expression, instead of leaving the exegesis and interpretation for readers and pastors.

Another problem with dynamic equivalence is that it tends to explain away metaphors, figures of speech, and specialized language—when those are the very elements that make a text powerful and profound. For example, the New Testament often refers to Christians as "saints." We don't use that word much anymore, so the TNIV gets rid of "saints," using instead words like "believers" or "people of God."

But this obscures an important theological point, that Christians are considered by God to be holy. If the translators wanted a new term for the word used in Greek, they might have used something like "holy ones." But to change "saint" to "believers" focuses on belief rather than holiness; to "people of God" focuses on their membership in a community. Those do apply to Christians and are described elsewhere, but "saint" contains a profound theological insight that is blithely swept away.

A person has to know "what it says" before trying to figure out "what it means." And it may never be possible to exhaust the depths upon depths of meaning contained in a single verse of Scripture. The TNIV translators, in trying to make the Bible more suitable to modern sensibilities, just get in the way.

See anything?

Anything look like faces? It is just our anthromorphosizing brain. It is working to grasp patterns whereever they may be.

CAN!

Please take a moment to read this post and watch the video. It will make you have greater sense of your humanity and will help you understand the nature of our heavenly Father's grace toward His children.

Strongest Dad in the World
[From Sports Illustrated by Rick Reilly]

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to Pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots. But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck. Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars -- all in the same day (doing the Ironman Triathlon). Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much -- except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs. "He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life," Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old, "Put him in an institution." But the Hoyts weren't buying it.

They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. "No way," Dick says he was told. "there's nothing going on in his brain." "Tell him a joke," Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? "Go Bruins!"

And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, "Dad, I want to do that." Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described "porker" who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. "then it was me who was handicapped,"

Dick says. "I was sore for two weeks." that day changed Rick's life. "Dad," he typed, "when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!" And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

"No way," Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year. Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?" How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried. Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzz kill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don't you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own? "No way," he says. Dick does it purely for "the awesome feeling" he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together. This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992 -- only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time. "No question about it," Rick types. "My dad is the Father of the Century." And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. "If you hadn't been in such great shape," one doctor told him, "you probably would've died 15 years ago." So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life. Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father's Day. That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy. "The thing I'd most like," Rick types, "is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once."

Why wood and graphite?

Kevin Kelly explains why he uses a pencil.

A pencil can generate megabytes of text, needs no batteries, and has no user manual. It is comfortable to hold, it smells good, and it is relaxing to turn around in your hand as you try to think of the right words. Pencils don’t need ink; all they need is a sharpener. They are warm and friendly; they have souls.

John Version 7.0

Up! Up! And away!

Your results:
You are Superman

Superman 80% Spider-Man 55% Iron Man 55% The Flash 55% Catwoman 55% Robin 52% Green Lantern 50% Hulk 45% Batman 45% Supergirl 40% Wonder Woman 40%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

Show Exxon Who's Boss!

My experiences have led me to believe that we "need" much less than we think we do. Furthermore I believe that one of the greatest needs of 21st-century North Americans is a simplification of life. We have too much "stuff," want more "stuff," work more to get more "stuff," have less time to use our "stuff" as well as do things that really matter with people who are beings that really matter, have more "stuff" to worry about and maintain, and less have less energy to do all of it! I would love to see if you prove me right by your reaction to what I just said and what follows. :-P

The book by Chris Balish nudges us in the right direction. His book, How to Live Well Without Owning a Car: Save Money, Breathe Easier, and Get More Mileage Out of Life was the subject of a great Morning Edition NPR story this morning. Listen to it here.

The publisher notes:

Between rising gas prices, endless car payments, and countless hours spent in gridlocked traffic, do you ever get the feeling that you don’t own your car, but rather your car owns you? Car-free convert Chris Balish shows why kicking car dependency could be the soundest and sanest lifestyle change you can make, and provides realistic strategies for making the leap. From saving money to building a better world, even diehard autoholics will find hundreds of reasons to set out on the (car-free) road less traveled.

• The first practical, accessible, and sensible guide to living in North America without owning a car.
• Exposes the true costs of car ownership and shows how getting rid of your car can simplify your life and put you on the road to financial freedom.
• Packed with realistic, economical alternatives to owning a car, including chapters on carsharing, carpooling, and even car-free dating.
• Includes more than 100 real-world tips, strategies, and success stories from people who are happily car-free or "car-lite," from cities to suburbs.
• According to a 2004 American Automobile Association study, the average American spends $8,410 per year (roughly $700 per month) to own a vehicle.

Low-Tech Superiority

In an article from 2003 entitled No more pencils in high-tech world? Think again, John Schmid of the International Herald Tribune writes about my favorite tool:

The world’s oldest word-processing and graphics system has no memory and no spell checker. It needs constant maintenance and cannot be upgraded; it could not be more analog and less compatible.

And folks keep using it.

For over four centuries, the classic wooden pencil has defied obsolescence — a feat that generations of laptops and palm devices cannot match. Even in the aftermath of the great technology bust, worldwide output of basic black-lead pencils has continued to grow and now reaches an estimated 15 billion a year.

‘Twenty years ago, I really worried about what will happen with the wood-cased pencil,’ said Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell, the chief executive of Faber-Castell, the world’s biggest and oldest maker of pencils.

‘Yet I still believe in handheld writing,” said the count, the scion of an aristocratic family that has run the closely held Bavarian company since 1761. “If I had listened to my advisers 20 years ago, who talked back then about computer-aided writing and whatever else, I would be bankrupt’….

….In terms of raw numbers, the pencil is mightier than the PC, whose estimated 140 million in sales last year is dwarfed by pencils’ billion. Production of black-lead pencils across Europe rose 12 percent in 2001 from 2000, according to the most recent figures from the European Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association. In developing countries, demand has grown even faster, Meller said.

And in the $220 million United States market for black-lead pencils, sales have held steady or risen, according to the A.C. Nielsen agency. A torrent of cheap, unbranded Chinese imports, which have tripled since 1996 to $30 million last year, led to anti-dumping duties against Chinese companies starting in the mid-’90s.

I believe there is a basic and wholesome quality about writing with a pencil. It is altogether more enjoyable than a keyboard. Nothing can match it. Why do you think the pencil has survived this long?

Recommended Reading

I just finished The Horse and His Boy, the third book in The Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. It is a wonderful book that I would highly commend to you. It is a little slow on the front end, but the plot development at the front of the book provides the necessary umphh for the end of the book.

There are a number of things that struck me. One is Shasta being a type of Moses, and another being the analogical teachings regarding the presence and providence of God. I even used The Horse and His Boy during a hospital visit last week as it related to the presence and providence of God...Wonderful material.

I wept on several occasions and had goose bumps a time or two as well. I hope you treat yourself to a reading of this book.

John

Are you from Missouri or something?

The American psychologist Joseph Jastrow in 1889. In this image, the two figures are identical, although the bottom one appears to be larger.



So you look at the above and say OK maybe they are the same size. You can even see that it is true. How about the photo below, is it possible that these two are the same size?



Even knowing that the two above are the same size it is hard to believe. Look at them how is it possible for them to be the same size? Well you don't have to take my word for it, check out the video below.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"

I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or His own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state

Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

The photo is Trodos Mountains by Per-Andre Hoffmann

A Hearty Meal

A Table richly spred, in regal mode,
With dishes pil'd, and meats of noblest sort.
And Savour, Beasts of chase, or fowl of game,
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boyl'd,
Gris-amber steam'd; all Fish from Sea or Shore,
Freshet, or purling Brook, of shell or fin,
An exquisetest name, for which was drain'd
Pontus and Lucrine Bay, and Afric coast.
Alas, how simple, to these Cates compar'd,
Was that crude Apple that diverted Eve!

Paradise Regain'd by John Milton

Painting "Fumée d'Ambre Gris" by John Singer Sargent, 1880

LINK

Hot!

It's so hot ...

The cows are giving evaporated milk.

Farmers are feeding their chickens crushed ice to keep them from laying boiled eggs.

The birds have to use pot holders to pull worms out of the ground.

The best parking place is determined by shade instead of distance.

Hot water now comes out of both taps.

You can make sun tea instantly.

You learn that a seat belt buckle makes a pretty good branding iron. (YEOW!)

The temperature drops below 95 F (35 C) and you feel a little chilly.

You discover that in July it only takes 2 fingers to steer your car.

You discover that you can get sunburned through your car window.

You break into a sweat the instant you step outside at 7:30 a.m.

You realize that asphalt has a liquid state.

The potatoes cook underground, so all you have to do is pull one out and add butter, salt and pepper.

Stay cool...