Bo Knows...

You don't play at Nebraska, you play for Nebraska.

Myanmar Relief

In the wake of the disaster in Myanmar, I recommend sending relief donations to Food for the Hungry.

Now that I'm half-way through preaching on James...

...I'd have to say that if one were to throw it out, they might as well throw out the four Gospels as well.

If anything has struck me so far, it has been the affinity of language that James uses with that of Jesus' teaching; especially Matthew 5-7. The notion that James was an old Jewish sermon coated with a veneer of Christianity, as some critical commentators have suggested, is at best, a careless reading. Rather, it reads as one who knew our Lord intimately and whose instruction echoes with the voice of our Good Shepherd.

Beauty's Dance

Balthasar comments at the beginning of his The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics on beauty as something of a forgotten category of theology in the modern world. He writes:

Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. (Seeing the Form, p. 18)

Goldilocks Gospel and the Three Reverend Bears

Very interesting article by CT's Colin Hansen on differing perspectives of the gospel among Mark Dever, Tim Keller, and N.T. Wright. Of the three, I find myself most sympathetic to Keller and least, perhaps, to Dever. My quibble with Dever is that I wouldn't consider the eschatological fullness of Christ's victory a mere "implication." (N.B. Not to be read as a slight against Pastor Dever.) At the same time, N.T. Wright could possibly be faulted for seemingly collapsing too much into eschatology. Finally making Keller's [smirk on]"Just right!"[/smirk off] Of course all three of these are isolated quotes and shouldn't amount to too much other than interesting specimens of different shades of a most wonderful proclamation.

NT WRIGHT: the “mission of the church is nothing more or less than the outworking, in the power of the Spirit, of Jesus’ bodily resurrection. It is the anticipation of the time when God will fill the earth with his glory, transform the old heavens and earth into the new, and raise his children from the dead to populate and rule over the redeemed world he has made.”

MARK DEVER: “According to Dever, Christians must never confuse implications of the gospel with the gospel itself. “The gospel that has been committed to us is the Christian message that Jesus has died in the place of sinners in order to reconcile them to God,” Dever said. “That gospel has been uniquely entrusted to the church, and thus it must remain the center of our message and our mission.”

TIM KELLER: “Through the person and work of Jesus Christ, God fully accomplishes salvation for us, rescuing us from the judgment for sin into fellowship with him, and then restores the creation in which we can enjoy our new life together with him forever.”

HT: Sets 'n' Service

A Riddle For Our Time...

Stormy waves of distant pools therein;
mere tiny ripples from Copenhagen and Berlin.

Robin Hood: Season Two

Last year, the BBCA's production of Robin Hood quickly became our favorite sit-down-as-a-family television show. Now, this isn't a "great" show by any stretch. There are a number of things to complain about: cartoonish action, idiotic villains, endless formula, and all the characters are hopelessly modern. Yet, in spite of all this (and more) I won't complain. It's a fun story each week with the good guys beating the bad guys. What's even more fun is that they don't fail to remind you of why Robin does what he does. In unveiling the "big picture" plot of Robin Hood, we are returned to a Christian narrative week after week (something, I'm sure, the producers have no intention of doing).

Robin Hood essentially portrays a man who is intensely loyal to his King and lives in accordance with the king's promise that one day he will return home. Robin is marked as as an "outlaw" because those who wield provisional authority in the king's absence have betrayed their fundamental loyalty to their sovereign lord and seek only power by means of oppressing the weak and the poor. Robin "robs" by taking 1/10th from those who have grown rich by their collusion with evil men and he works to foil the plotting of the wicked. Robin lives by faith, showing his faith by his works.