Shane Hipps - Mennonites - A History of Non-Violence
[Audio Clip] March 25, 2010
For Much More Information on the History of Anabaptists
please see this excellent site - http://www.anabaptists.org/history/
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Rob Bell, Peter Rollins, Shane Hipps - Poets, Prophets and Preachers
A Pastoral Conference of Renewal (Sept 2009)
To purchase video set -https://www.robbell.com/work/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=3
Select Videos from "POETS / PROPHETS / PREACHERS"
Introducing Shane Hipps
"The Medium Is the Message"
Select Videos from "POETS / PROPHETS / PREACHERS"
Introducing Shane Hipps
"The Medium Is the Message"
Rob Bell & Peter Rollins discuss
Contemporary Theology
I Deny the Resurrection
I Deny the Resurrection
The Violence of Christianity
Material Faith
Changing the Structure
The Power of Parable
Pyro-Theology
Transformance Art
On Not Knowing What to Do
Suspended Space
The Dis-Courses
Illuminating the World
Rob Bell
Sermon Preparation & Delivery
Part 2/9
Part 3/9
Part 4/9
Part 5/9
Part 6/9
Part 7/9
Part 8/9
Part 9/9
Rob Bell - Drops Like Stars Tour Film
We plot, we plan, we assume things are going to go a certain way and then they don't and we find ourselves in a new place, a place we haven't been before, a place we never would have imagined on our own, and so it was difficult and unexpected and maybe even tragic and yet it opened us up and freed us to see things in a whole new way.
To purchase video set - https://www.robbell.com/work/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=3
To purchase through Amazon.com -
To purchase video set - https://www.robbell.com/work/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=3
To purchase through Amazon.com -
This book is an exploration of the complex relationship between suffering and creativity, driven by the belief that there is art in the agony. From the Back Cover
We plot. We plan. We assume things are going to go a certain way. And when they don’t, we find ourselves in a new place—a place we haven’t been before, a place we never would have imagined on our own.
It is the difficult and the unexpected, and maybe even the tragic, that opens us up and frees us to see things in new ways.
Many of the most significant moments in our lives come not because it all went right but because it all fell apart.
Suffering does that. It hurts, but it also creates.
This book is an exploration of the complex relationship between suffering and creativity, driven by the belief that there is art in the agony.
Promo: Drops Like Stars Tour Film - Rob Bell
Segment: Drops Like Stars Tour Film - Rob Bell
Interview: 100huntley - Rob Bell - Part 1 of 2
November 9, 2011
[Continued] Interview: 100huntley - Rob Bell - Part 2 of 2
November 9, 2011
Monday, October 31, 2011
Final Review: Rob Bell + Love Wins = Go and Make Disciples
Rob Bell Responds to Charges of Universalism
before the release of his book, Love Wins
March 13, 2011
Part 1: Rob addressing Mars Hill about his new book Love Wins before it is released.
[March 13, 2011] [Live Shadow-cast]
**********
Rob Bell Thanks Mars Hill for helping him write Love Wins
March 13, 2011
Part 2: Rob thanking Mars Hill for inspiring his new book Love Wins before it is released.
[March 13, 2011] [Live Shadow-cast]
**********
Rob Bell "What I Believe" after the release of his book, Love Wins
March 27, 2011
~ both videos are similar but each begin and end differently and together
~ both videos are similar but each begin and end differently and together
give a fuller presentation of Rob's Introduction to the Churches of Revelation ~
Rob addressing Mars Hill about his new book 'Love Wins' after it was released.
[March 27, 2011] [Live Audio]
**********
Rob Bell Defends himself and his church Mars Hill, pt.1
April 22, 2011
Rob Bell Defends himself and his church Mars Hill, pt.2
April 22, 2011
Rob Bell Defends himself and his church Mars Hill, pt.3
April 22, 2011
"Go and Make Disciples"
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Some humor, Some truth
The Skit Guys
To view more skits - http://skitguys.com/videos
Tommy Woodard and Eddie James are The Skit Guys. They have been best friends since high school. Think of them as the wise guys in class who had everyone laughing and managed to make a career out of it. They've been teaching God's word using comedy, drama and whatever category talking action figures fit into for over twenty years.Review: Christian Smith - The Bible Made Impossible, Part 9
I have selected Dr. Roger Olson's reviews to help in the assimilation of Christian Smith's book since he interacts with a multitude of Christians either in favor of, or in opposition to, the subject matter. As prelude, I would encourage a reading of the introductory post earlier submitted for this project - http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/10/read-christian-smith-bible-made.html.
- RE Slater
**********
Part 9 - Narrative theology: following up on
my review of Smith’s book about biblicism
by Roger Olson
Posted on October 14, 2011
In The Bible Made Impossible Christian Smith does touch on narrative theology, but I think it may offer more (to an evangelical approach to the Bible that avoids some of the problems he discusses) than he suggests. Here is my summary of narrative theology:
Some Thoughts about Narrative Theology
1. Narrative theology focuses on the Bible as a whole (canonical interpretation) as a dramatic account of God’s activity; its main purpose is to identify God for us (i.e., God’s character).
2. Narrative theology acknowledges that the Bible contains propositions, but it says biblical propositions are not independent of or superior to the metanarrative of God’s saving activity. (Jesus told stories—parables—and sometimes interpreted them with propositions. But the propositions serve the stories, not vice versa. If propositions could communicate the point better, then surely Jesus would have started with the propositions and then given the stories to “illustrate” them.)
3. A biblical proposition is “God is love” (1 John 4:8), but it needs interpretation. It does not simply interpret itself. What is “love” in this proposition? How is God’s love related to God’s justice, etc.? It won’t do simply to look up “love” in a dictionary. The only way to interpret “God is love” is to look at the biblical story that reveals God’s character through his actions.
4. According to narrative theology, the Bible contains many kinds of statements—commands, propositions, expressions of praise, prayers, poetry, prophecies, parables, etc. All are included by narrative theology under and within the rubric of “story” or “drama.” They are all parts of the great story of God whose central character (for Christians, at least) is Jesus Christ. Therefore, all must be interpreted in light of that story and its purpose—to reveal the character of God through his mighty acts leading up to and centering around Jesus Christ.
5. Theology is our best human attempt to understand the biblical drama-story and that includes developing canonical-linguistic models (complex metaphors, doctrines) that express its meaning for the church’s belief and life. But a theologian cannot do that properly unless he or she is “living the story” together with a community of faith shaped by the story.
6. Doctrines are secondary to the story; they cannot replace it. They are judged by their adequacy to the story—their ability to draw out and express faithfully the character of God as revealed by the story. But the story is primary; the doctrines are secondary and that means always revisable in light of a new and better understanding of the import of the story.
7. The task of the church is to “faithfully improvise” the “rest of the story.” Christians are not called simply to live in the story; they are called to continue the story in their own cultural contexts. First they must be grounded in the story. They must be people for whom the story “absorbs the world.” Second, they must together (communally) improvise the “rest of the story” faithfully to the story given in the Bible.
8. The alternatives are to either a) regard the Bible as a grab bag of propositions to be pulled out to answer questions, or b) regard the Bible as a not-yet-systematized system of theology (like a philosophy). Both alternatives fail to do justice to what the Bible really is—a grand drama of God’s mighty saving acts that progressively reveals his character culminating in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
- Roger Olson
Review: Christian Smith - The Bible Made Impossible, Part 8
I have selected Dr. Roger Olson's reviews to help in the assimilation of Christian Smith's book since he interacts with a multitude of Christians either in favor of, or in opposition to, the subject matter. As prelude, I would encourage a reading of the introductory post earlier submitted for this project - http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/10/read-christian-smith-bible-made.html.
- RE Slater
**********
Part 8 - Final installment of the
Review of Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible
by Roger Olson
Posted on October 5, 2011
Chapter 7 “Rethinking Human Knowledge, Authority, and Understanding” and “Conclusion”
Smith here argues for evangelicals to “break from modern epistemological foundationalism once and for all, but without sliding into a problematic postmodernism.” (149) As he sees it (and he’s not alone) modern and contemporary evangelical theology has “bought into foundationalism whole hog.” (150) This is what Mark Noll and others have ironically labeled the “evangelical enlightenment”—evangelical theologians’ tendency to mimic the epistemology of the Enlightenment which is now being discredited.For readers not familiar with foundationalism, Smith defines it (as he means it, anyway) on page 150: “a conviction that rational humans can and must identify a common foundation of knowledge directly up from and upon which every reasonable thinker can and ought to build a body of completely reliable knowledge and understanding. Such a foundation upon which all knowledge is to be built must stand indubitably against all challenges, must be universally accessible to all rational people, and must unfailingly produce the kind of reliable knowledge sought after. When such a foundation is secured, then the resultant knowledge that will be built from and upon it will be for all rational people absolutely certain, completely truthful, and universally binding.”
Smith argues that this Enlightenment-based foundationalist rationalism is no longer believable and must be replaced with critical realism. I have argued here before that Lesslie Newbigin rightly argues the same. For Smith, anyway, critical realism takes more seriously than foundationalism the inevitable interpretive nature of all knowing—perspectivalism without subjectivism or relativism.
The same point is made by theologian Gary Dorrien in his excellent book on evangelical theology entitled The Remaking of Evangelical Theology (Westminster John Knox, 1998): “Evangelicals are prone to fret that everything will be lost if they have no ground of absolute certainty or no proof that Christianity is superior to Islam or Buddhism. This fear drives them to impose impossible tests on Christian belief. Inerrancy or the abyss! It also drives them to invest religious authority in a posited epistemological capacity that exists outside the circle of Christian faith. The truth of Christianity is then judged by rational tests that are not only external to Christian revelation but given authority over revelation.” (201)
I whole heartedly agree with Smith and Dorrien and have said so in Reformed and Always Reforming and other books and articles. Of course, not all evangelicals fall prey to foundationalism, but those that adhere strictly to the theological method of the Old Princeton theologians Alexander, Hodge and Warfield tend to. Even Carl Henry’s presuppositionalist method, often accused of fideism by evangelicals more enamored with evidentialism, is based on a kind of foundationalist mentality. Smith rightly calls evangelical theologians (and others) to abandon these attempts to secure certainty through rational means; they lay a burden on the Bible that it simply cannot bear as an ancient text with all the markings of human culture and personality, etc.
Of course, this move away from foundationalism won’t go far to solve the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism (PIP), but it will help evangelicals avoid embarrassment and foolishness. Biblicism does not depend on foundationalism; it can exist independently of it. But Smith believes much evangelical theology (as opposed to folk religion) has rested its case for certainty on the shaky ground of Enlightenment rationalism.
The second section of Chapter 7 is entitled “Not starting with a theory of inspiration.” Smith does not argue for abandonment of inspiration or any theory of inspiration, but he argues that too often evangelicals begin with a presupposed theory of what inspiration must mean and then continue to force that onto the Bible. It’s a deductive process of determining what the Bible “really is” divorced from a careful, inductive study of the phenomena of Scripture. He’s said something like this before in the book. Here, in this section, he offers some alternatives to such a deductive approach such as learning from non-evangelical sources (such as the church fathers) and non-American evangelicals (e.g., Brits and Europeans) how they view Scripture. He rightly concludes (even though I’m not sure how this fits with the subtitle of this section) “American evangelicals have no need to be biblically or ecclesially self-sufficient, must less superior to other believers around the world. By listening—critically but also appreciatively—to the voices of genuine others, evangelicals stand a chance of learning more and perhaps better about what the Bible is and how it can best be read and understood.” (156)
I think this may be another watershed among evangelical scholars—those mostly conservative, neo-fundamentalists whose theological heroes are almost exclusively North Americans (Edwards, Hodge, Strong, Boettner, et al.) and those who really believe it is to our benefit as North American evangelicals to listen to and critically appropriate the insights of the church fathers (including the Greek ones and not only Augustine!), the medieval theologians, the radical Reformers (not just the magisterial Reformers), and contemporary non-North Americans such as Newbigin, Wright, Moltmann, Volf (now a North American but with roots in Eastern Europe and education in Germany), et al.
Smith’s third section of Chapter 7 is entitled “Understanding different ways of doing by saying” and deals with speech act theory. This is perhaps the most technical section of the entire book and some readers will no doubt get lost in the philosophical discussion of various forms of communication such as “locutionary” acts, “illocutionary” acts, and “perlocutionary” acts. This view of Scripture, which is promoted by Kevin Vanhoozer, among others, regards the Bible not as a collection of factual propositions (although it contains propositions) but as God’s communication to us by acting upon us with various kinds of speech acts. In other words, as I have often argued, the main purpose of the Bible is not information (although it contains information) but transformation. Smith rightly says “Scripture, in short, can be approached as something quite different from a holy life handbook, an error-free instruction manual, or a compendium of divine oracles about life’s various and sundry issues and challenges. Instead of those…approaches…which are so often used for humanly driven, therapeutic purposes and so are inadequate to a truly evangelical approach, the view developed above puts us, the readers, back into the position of being acted upon by God through the words of Scripture.” (162) I have no criticism of this section of Chapter 7; I whole heartedly agree and recommend interested people look into Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine for more on this.
The last two sections of Chapter 7 are “The many dimensions of ‘biblical authority’” and “A historically growing grasp of the meaning of the gospel.” The first of those two sections talks about the Bible’s “transformative capacity” (and extension of the previous section) and the last one talks about how the Bible is not the final word on many important subjects of faith and practice. By that Smith does NOT mean the Bible is wrong about anything. Rather, he means that on many subjects the Bible is silent or gives principles that need to be applied as culture develops. He gives as examples the creeds and definitions of the first four ecumenical councils that do not merely repeat what the Bible says but interpret and apply what the Bible teaches in ways that go beyond the Bible itself by addressing new situations. The Bible, he says, carries implications for many subjects about which it does not directly or fully speak such as slavery. He argues that evangelicals need to deemphasize the idea of “Bible passages as collections of complete and final teachings on every subject imaginable” and come to understand “the Bible and the gospel it preaches as a dynamic, living, active force of truth in human life and history.” (170)
This proposal agrees completely with those of Vanhoozer and N. T. Wright. The former talks (in The Drama of Doctrine) about not staring AT the Bible but looking along it—putting its often inchoate divine ideas into practice in ways the biblical writers could not have anticipated. He calls this “faithful improvisation.” Wright talks about a five act play; contemporary Christians are the actors who have to improvise the fifth act on the basis of the first four which are already written and with which they are thoroughly familiar.
Smith provides many pithy statements about his book’s thesis in the Conclusion. Here’s one I particularly like: “Rather than insisting that God must have provided a revealed word of a sort that our preconceptions and historical social situations tell us had to be—and then bending over backward to defend that insistence in the face of good evidence to the contrary—we would do well to take the actual revelation that God has given us on its own terms and learn how to read and understand it well. If anything, biblicists should be ashamed for refusing to accept—on what turn out to be faulty and outmoded philosophical grounds—the actual inspired scriptural writings that God has provided for his people.” (175-176)
My final word about Smith’s book is that it represents a powerful challenge to neo-fundamentalism and folk religion among contemporary evangelicals, but I doubt it will be heeded by very many of those people. And its proposals will not go very far toward solving the problem of PIP. PIP will always be with us. It’s simply part of the human condition. Holding a different view of the Bible isn’t going to fix it. Nevertheless, overall and in general, I do think Smith’s view of the Bible is better than either conservative evangelical biblicism or liberalism (“inspired insofar as it is inspiring”). But it swims in ambiguity which is why most lay people and pastors will probably not like it and conservative evangelical theologians (I mean neo-fundamentalists) will condemn it.
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