You may have noticed that this site was displaying posts from November 2003 yesterday and today, rather than the current month’s posts. The server was undergoing a memory test, and I wasn’t supposed to change any of the settings during the test. For some reason, the server time got set to (as you might have guessed) a random time in November 2003.

Due to WordPress’ post-to-the-future feature, all posts written after Nov 18, 2003 weren’t displayed, so you got a flashback.

It’s fixed now, but it actually had kind of a cool effect: people read my old posts, and I even got a few comments on them. Perhaps I’ll stop writing new entries, and just recycle the old ones every two years. Assuming moderate turnover in my readership, only a few people (Ted H., Virusdoc, Salguod, The Ogle, etc.) would notice.

So the checking account bounced this week, which came as a total shock to me. There should have been at least a grand left in the account. I called the bank and transferred some money from savings (which we needed to pay our grad school tuition), but still had no idea how my mental tabulation of our balance had gotten so far off.

I balanced the checkbook today, and while looking at the bank statement online, realized that our 2nd mortgage company has been both drafting our account for $500+ each month, as well as billing us for a similar amount. Since December. There’s the $1,000 I was looking for.

Normally, when you sign up for automatic payment drafts, they tell you to keep paying your bills until the draft goes through. Normally, they also tell you when they’ve drafted your account, and stop sending you monthly bills. However, our company, Countrywide, apparently feels no obligation to notify you that they’ve already drafted your account, and tells you to send in the full amount. (They also doubled our interest rate a few months ago for no apparent reason other than that they are apparently allowed to do that whenever they feel like it. We’re looking to re-fi soon.)

If I had checked the tiny print on the back of the statement, I would have seen that both the draft and the check were listed, which should have given me pause. But, since I wasn’t expecting anything unusual, I didn’t even look at the back of the statement. I saw the “minimum payment due” amount, wrote a check, and put it in the mail. Done it a thousand times (actually closer to seven hundred if I look at my check numbers).

Bank drafts are supposed to save everyone the trouble of dealing with paper checks, right? Ughhhh. I really hate money.

UPDATE: After talking with Aaron, I couldn’t resist looking up this Morgan Stanley sketch from last night’s rerun of Saturday Night Live.

The Church Report (whatever that is) has a new list of the 50 most influential Christians in America (via Addison Rd).

T.D. Jakes tops the list, which I think is probably a good choice (they took nominations, and listed those with the most nominations). Also on the list are lots of televangelists, Brian McLaren, Len Sweet, Billy Graham, lots of seeker-sensitive megachurch pastors, and the entire Christian Coalition. Oh yeah, and Dr. Phil. And the Pope - but he’s #43, well below Rob Bell.

Judging from the number of broadcasters on the list, these people were chosen because of the size of their audience. At the moment. In 20 years, though, I think very few of these people will have made any kind of lasting difference to the church or to the world. Power. Fame. Wealth. Book sales. All a flash in the pan, to be forgotten in the smoke and light of the next big names.

Billy Graham will never be forgotten. He has entered the ranks of John Wesley, Charles Finney, Jonathan Edwards, the Booths, and other preachers we still quote.

Len Sweet has made a conscious effort to push Christians into thinking like the rest of the postmodern world, and I think he will make a lasting impact. He’s a little too smart and edgy to go totally mainstream, though, so he probably won’t be remembered much in 20 years.

McLaren will continue to get more famous and influential, much to his chagrin. He has helped a generation of Christian leaders and thinkers own their doubts and rethink their faith, and will continue to do so. He draws heavily on Sweet, but will be remembered better because he’s more accessible.

So who’s missing? I think we’ll have forgotten many of these people by 2026, but we’ll still remember Tom Wright (who will likely still be alive, since he’s only 58 now). His influence has yet to be fully felt on this side of the Atlantic, but it’s coming. American theology has been mediocre for a long time, and Americans are listening to N.T. Wright. If Chuck Norris were British, Tom Wright would be the Chuck Norris of theology. ‘Nuff said.

First, the world was graced with SNL’s East-Coast ChronicWHAT?cles of Narnia (EDIT: YouTube has removed the video at NBC’s request) video, which gave us the immortal equation
Mr. Pibb + Red Vines = Crazy Delicious

Then, the West Coast responded in like form, with Lazy Monday:

Macchiato!

Michael Zimmerman, dean of the college of letters and sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, is coordinating an Evolution Sunday project, which currently has over 10,000 signatories:

On 12 February 2006 hundreds of Christian churches from all portions of the country and a host of denominations will come together to discuss the compatibility of religion and science. For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science. More than 10,000 Christian clergy have already signed The Clergy Letter demonstrating that this is a false dichotomy. Now, on the 197th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, many of these leaders will bring this message to their congregations through sermons and/or discussion groups. Together, participating religious leaders will be making the statement that religion and science are not adversaries. And, together, they will be elevating the quality of the national debate on this topic. link

Here is a local news story on the Evolution Sunday project.

It’s about time evolution got a hearing in churches (especially considering how much time creationism and ID get in the courts). The full text of the letter reads:

Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth. link

I must say I think it’s dangerous to dichotomize truth into “religious” and “scientific” truth, because it becomes very easy to dismiss whichever kind you don’t like by painting it as inferior to the other. What do you think?

I read the first half of the apocryphal OT book Judith today in my HarperCollins NRSV Study Bible, which is my first bible to contain the apocryphal and deuterocanonical books.

The introduction to Judith does not hesitate for a moment in asserting that Judith is pure fiction. The introductions in this bible are generally on the liberal side, but seem to reflect honest scholarship and no detectable bias (except toward history and textual theories rather than a flat view of scripture).

Judith weaves together several periods in history, starting with Nebuchadnezzar’s military conquests, and his revenge on Palestine for its failure to rally to his aid in an earlier war. I get the impression that the combination of events revealed here is entirely fabricated, though based loosely on historical and pseudo-historical memories of the Assyrian empire that were kept alive in Israel.

Right now I’m at the point where Nebby has Israel under siege, and is about to do his worst to the dehydrated remnant. Judith will enter in the next chapter, and I think the story will end up sounding something like Esther. Really, it sounds like Old Testment fan fiction, as if some young writer was inspired by Esther and decided to put ink to parchment with his own story.

Admittedly, this is an odd post. I’m testing a new XML-RPC blogging tool called Zoundry, which is specifically designed to make it easy to insert affiliate links in your blog posts. If you order the HarperCollins study bible, 100% of the Amazon commission will go to the Hurricane Katrina relief at the American Red Cross. You can also get an affiliate ID with Zoundry and make money for yourself, in which case they keep a share of the commissions. It’s nice because you only have to have one affiliate ID (instead of one with every website they work with), and the link-creation tools are amazing - you can create sophisticated links quickly, without logging into an associates site. Check it out.

I’ve just started James K.A. Smith’s Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Orthodoxy, which promises to be a deeper venture into contemporary philosophy and theology than I’ve undertaken since enjoying Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy.

I can tell this will be one of those books that offers way too much to blog about, but I wanted to get down one salient point from the first chapter:

…the classical liberal theological project … could be described as “correlationist.” Here the agenda is to correlate the claims of Christian revelation with the structures of a given culture or politico-economic system such that both, in some sense, function as a normative source for the theological project.
…
The act of correlating and formulating the claims of Christian revelation in terms of given cultural frameworks (sometimes masking as the human condition) aims at ultimately making sense of revelation in terms that are (supposed to be) universally accessible. As Milbank summarizes, “Modern theology on the whole accepts that philosophy has its own legitimacy, its own autonomy apart from faith.” Theology, then, merely articulates “the knowledge of God” in terms of the “categories of being in general” disclosed by a supposedly autonomous philosophy.

In other words, the modern theological project wanted to communicate the Christian faith in terms comprehensible and acceptable to modern ears, so it situated theology beneath philosophy, where the Enlightenment said it belonged.

Smith is talking specifically about the Tubingen school of liberal theology, but I think the same can be said for all modern protestant theology. Christians at each point in history articulate their faith in ways that make sense to them and the world around them. At the same time, they critique the approaches that have come before them, and critique most severely those that have preceeded them most recently. I don’t think it can be any other way, and I don’t think any of this is necessarily bad.

However, it can result in a good deal of a) cultural captivity, and b) wasted energy. If each generation has to figure everything out afresh, rejecting the father’s-Oldsmobile articulation of the faith, each generation is going to be equally bound to the culture of its day, and will fail to learn from its forerunners in the faith.

I am pleased to see that Smith cites Robert Webber’s The Younger Evangelicals as offering a way out of this conundrum. We can learn from the past. We can critique the past. We can - indeed, must - articulate the faith in our own generation, without either accepting unquestioningly nor rejecting wholesale the version we received.

Stay tuned for more, including an actual description of Radical Orthodoxy.

A long time ago I offered CDs of pictures from our 2003 trip to Mount Rainier National Park. About two or three people took me up on it, and recently someone else asked. I figured it would be faster and cheaper to upload them for you to download, so enjoy. They make great backgrounds for PowerPoints.

These pictures are released to the public domain.

Download (28.9MB ZIP file)