Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Do You Believe This Book?!

In my random Internet wanderings, I sometimes read foreign newspapers to keep an eye on what’s happening in the world, or at least in the anglo-sphere. I recently read something interesting in the Jerusalem Post. The op-ed focuses on a point in the Republican You-Tube debate where one of the questions posed is whether the candidates believe in the Bible, saying: “This will tell us everything we need to know about you: do you believe every word of this book?” (He then holds a Bible up to the camera, I can’t tell, but it looks as though he may have also been trying to show us the traslation. King James, no doubt but it wasn’t picked up on).

The author of the the article asks the same question to some Rabbis. Their responses are pretty interesting. None of them affirm anything like verbal inspiration, even though some of them seem to hold to Mosiac authorship of the Torah. They clearly have a ‘tiered’ canon, with the Torah forming the center, the other books forming a commentary on the Torah, but all of it suppored by an indispensible and authoritative history of interpretation.

I recently read The Mediation of Christ by Thomas Torrance, in which he argues that Christians desperately need to communicate with and understand our Jewish brothers and sisters in order to (among other things) properly understand God’s covenental relationship with humanity and better understand our own faith. After reading this article I’m wondering now if they might have something to teach us about the study and use of Scripture too.

Posted by at 20:42:37 | Permalink | Comments (8)

Friday, December 7, 2007

Christmas!

Christmas is quickly approaching, and even though it’s in the winter and I don’t like cold, I love Christmas.

It’s because I love it so much that I sometimes feel like Christmas actually gets lost in a lot of what goes on, and the church doesn’t really fo much to help. At the church I went to where I was living before it seemed like they were allergic to Christmas carols. I tend to think that there are a couple times throughout the year where we Christians need to get together and sing the same 20 songs Christians have been singing at that time of year for hundreds of years, instead of the same 20 songs we sing every Sunday. That type of consistency and connectedness means a lot, especially after a lifetime in the church.

This Christmas, go and sing some carols and stand in the face of our stifling politcal correctness and wish someone a “Merry Christmas!”

Oh, and Merry Christmas!

Posted by at 06:15:01 | Permalink | Comments (2)