The Internet Monk Archives

My “Most Influential” Books (1)

The other day Scot McKnight posted this:

A reader asked me to post my Top Five favorite, most influential, book list.

What is yours?

Here is my list:

Martin Buber, I and Thou
Augustine, Confessions
Dante, Divine Comedy
John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship

It got me thinking. I responded in the comments with a list right off the top of my head, and limited the books I included to contemporary ones that had shaped my faith in various ways over the years. But the more I have thought about it, I believe this idea would form the basis for a good series of posts here on IM reflecting on the various people, experiences, books, movies, music, etc., that have been influential in my life.

Today, we’ll start with five books (or groups of books) I read before I went to seminary.

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A Special Day in Baseball

From a Major League Baseball press release last week…

Major League Baseball is commemorating Jackie Robinson Day on Sunday, April 15, 2012 with a League-wide 65th anniversary recognition of Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson breaking the game’s color barrier in 1947. To highlight this special occasion, all players and on-field personnel will once again wear Number 42. Additionally, MLB will release a new national public service announcement voiced by Hall of Fame Broadcaster Vin Scully, will host a baseball and softball clinic for youth from select Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) programs in the New York area, and Clubs will hold special ceremonies in MLB ballparks around the country, including one featuring the Robinson family at Yankee Stadium.

“When Jackie Robinson took the field in Brooklyn 65 years ago, he transcended the sport he loved and helped change our country in the most powerful way imaginable,” said Baseball Commissioner Allan H. (Bud) Selig. “It is a privilege for Major League Baseball to celebrate Jackie’s enduring legacy each year, and we are proud that every April 15th, our young fans around the world have an opportunity to learn everything that the Number 42 stands for – courage, grace and determination.”

Here’s a brief bio video about Jackie Robinson, his career, and impact:

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Exuberant Easter!

Easter Oratorio, BWV 249
J.S. Bach

The soundtrack in my mind during the Easter season is all Bach, timpani and trumpets, and bright celebration. These days I have been listening to a shimmering 2011 recording of the JS Bach Easter and Ascension Oratorios by the Retrospect Ensemble.

Easter Oratorio is one of five works by Bach that we have to mark Easter Sunday:

BWV 4: “Christ lay in the bonds of death”
BWV 31: “The heavens laugh! The earth rejoices!”
BWV 249: Easter Oratorio — “Come hasten and run”
BWV 15: “For you will not leave my soul in hell”
BWV 160: “I know that my Redeemer lives”

The Oratorio is counted among Bach’s cantatas, though it has different features than most works bearing that designation. Its music was based on a secular cantata Bach wrote for a birthday celebration, and he revised it for other occasions as well. In service of telling the Easter story, it becomes an intimate yet exhilarating testimony to the emotional transformation in the first witnesses of the risen Christ. The text was likely written by Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici), whose words Bach used in many cantatas and the Passions.

The two-part opening has a Sinfonia: an exuberant movement featuring a festive trumpet trio, and then an Adagio: a richly expressive movement that encourages contemplation. From that point, the race is on as the trumpets resound once more and the enthusiastic, up-tempo chorus is raised:

Come, hurry and run, you swift feet
Get to the cave that covers Jesus!
Laughter and merriment accompanies our hearts
Since our Savior is risen again!

The heart of the Easter Oratorio is composed of an alternating series of recitatives and arias that track the movement from grief to the realization of hope in the risen Lord. The arias include the voices of Jesus’ mother Mary, the apostle Peter, Mary Magdelene, and John, who completes the transformation by singing:

We are delighted that our Jesus lives again
And our hearts, which first dissolved and floated in grief
Forget the pain and imagine songs of joy
For our Savior lives again!

Finally, celebration ensues with a hymn of praise that “hell and devil are destroyed,” and the choir shouts for heaven to open its magnificent drawbridges to welcome the triumphant Lion of Judah.

THIS is the spirit of Eastertide!

• • •

Here is another rendition of the opening Sinfonia, conducted by Philippe Herreweghe:

More Connected and Never Lonelier?

“We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

“…What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.”

• Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”

Saturday Ramblings 4.14.12

Greetings one and all! Your favorite rambling iMonk here to serve you the leftover goodies from a very busy week. On a personal note, I finished the first draft of a project that was taking way, way too long. I felt like I was swimming upstream in a river of mud. But I sent it off yesterday morning. Yes, there will be revisions, but I can handle revisions. Now on to writing what I love writing more than anything. Let’s make some Saturday Ramblings, shall we?

Sigh … I really, really wanted to not write about Mark Driscoll today. I really tried not to. But when you combine Driscoll with Liberty University, with an innocent blogger caught in the middle, well, you know it is going to have to be mentioned. I really don’t know who to cheer for in this battle. So what do you think: Should Driscoll speak at Liberty University? And how should Liberty apologize to Peter Lumpkin?

From the Opening-A-Can-Of-Worms department is the story of a teacher at a private Christian school in Texas who was fired for getting pregnant before she got married. Terminating the employment of a pregnant woman based on her pregnancy is against both Texas and United States laws. But the headmaster of the school said all of his teachers are “ministers” as well as teachers and are not subject to those laws. Ok then …

Well, the smarter one gets … Seems Lifeway Research recently asked 1,000 Protestant pastors to respond to this statement: “If a person is sincerely seeking God, he/she can obtain eternal life through religions other than Christianity.” Not surprisingly, 77 percent strongly disagreed with the statement. What is surprising is that of the remaining 23 percent, those most likely to agree held post-graduate degrees. Maybe I’m glad I haven’t gone after my doctorate after all.

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Fridays in Ephesus (1)

Fridays in Ephesus (1)
The Drama of Ephesians

During Eastertide on Fridays, we are reflecting on insights from Timothy Gombis’s recent book, The Drama of Ephesians: Participating in the Triumph of God.

• • •

“Ephesians, then, is a drama, portraying the victory of God in Christ over the dark powers that rule this present evil age, and the letter becomes a script for how God’s people can continue, by the power of the Spirit, to perform the drama called the triumph of God in Christ.”

One prayer I have for the Church is that God will restore our imaginations.

The way we often approach and read the Bible is a good example of why we need this. God has given us such a rich, multifaceted book of stories, poems and songs, wise and provocative sayings, prophetic speeches, and apocalyptic writings! Yet many of us have somehow managed to maintain perceptions of Scripture as a book primarily of propositions, instructions, doctrines, and lessons.

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If It Walks Like A Duck …

Ozzie Guillen is an idiot. The manager of the Miami Marlins was interviewed by Time magazine for an online article, released last week. In the interview, Guillen—again, a baseball manager, not a foreign diplomat or spokesman—spoke about how he feels about Fidel Castro.

“I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that [SOB] is still here.”

Nice. Really nice. Especially when your brand-new $675 million stadium rests in the heart of Miami’s Little Havana. Especially when many of your ticket-buyers fled from Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Guillen basically told those fans, “Hey, you know how your parents and grandparents starved and lived in cardboard boxes? Well, I really respect the man who brought that about because none of your people could kill him.”

That is why I say Ozzie Guillen is an idiot. But, you say, isn’t it his right to say what he did? Your opinion of what he said is just that—your opinion. No, I would reply. What Ozzie said are not just words. They are damaging words. They have caused harm to the team he leads, the organization he is employed by, and the community his team represents. He is held to a higher standard. This very well could cost him his job.

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Journey into New Life (1)

It is Eastertide, the Great Fifty Days during which we celebrate the victory of the risen Christ, remember his appearances, prepare for his Ascension, and prayerfully wait for the power of the Spirit to come at Pentecost.

I have long thought that this was an especially good time for the Church to gather together in study. Our culture does not make that easy, however. For I have also found that, for those with families, April and May can be the busiest months. Schools are moving toward the end of the year, outdoor activities at home and in the community are springing up everywhere, and there are holidays and graduations and weddings and vacations to keep in mind. Here in the northern hemisphere at least, life in all its facets emerges with fresh energy in spring.

And yet this is also the time when the followers of Jesus are called to be most alive to the spiritual possibilities of life in Christ. We make a great deal of Holy Week, with its culmination on the Triduum of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Then we wake up Monday morning and go to work. But in the Church Year, like at Christmas, the Easter season actually begins, not ends, on the day we call Easter. It introduces us to the risen Christ, and the rest of year, beginning with the season immediately following, is the time we during which we are called to walk with him.

During these Fifty Days, we at Internet Monk want to encourage you to walk in newness of life with Jesus. So, for the next few weeks on Wednesday afternoons we will provide a meditation on a Gospel passage and on Friday mornings, we will direct our attention to a recent book on Ephesians that focuses on the great drama of Christ’s victory.

Our Gospel passage is Luke 24:13-35, the story of the risen Lord’s encounter with the disciples on the road to Emmaus. I have chosen this text because it sets forth a Lukan paradigm of what it means to walk with the living Lord Jesus Christ. This story is more than a story of something that happened back then. It represents what newness of life is all about, how it works, what it is like to experience the new creation. We are the disciples on the road, and Jesus comes to walk with us. He encounters us personally, opens the written Word to us, comes into our lives, feeds us at his Table, and sends us forth renewed.

Today we will introduce this story and its main features.

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iMonk Classic: Icebergs, Onions and Why You’re Not As Simple As You Think

Onion after vanGogh — Onion (after van Gogh), by melisdramatic

Classic iMonk Post
by Michael Spencer
from April 2008

Note from CM: Yesterday I had my interview with a counselor about the results of the psychological testing that is part of the ordination process in the ELCA. More about that later. It brought to mind some of Michael’s insightful writings about his own journey of self-understanding. Here is a great example of that.

• • •

“My theology is simply what I read in the Bible.”

Sure it is.

“What I believe and practice is simply what the Bible teaches and nothing else.”

Of course. What else could be simpler?

I’m sure several of you won’t be surprised at all to learn that I meet with a pastoral counselor on a regular basis. It’s one of the best things I do. We talk about all sorts of things, and we’ve developed a very beneficial dialog around many of the the issues that are part of a Jesus shaped spirituality.

Almost every time we meet, one of us will wind up saying that human beings are far more complex than anyone realizes. And that goes double for our view of ourselves. We’d like to think that we’re quite simple in our motivations and behavior. Our self-description is almost always biased toward “what you see is what you get,” even when we are well aware that such is not the case.

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More Creed Tinkering?

Note from CM: In conjunction with this post, you might want to go back and read our post from April 23, 2011, “He Descended into Hell,” in which we quoted representatives from many traditions and what they say about this article of the Creed.

• • •

It seems that N.T. Wright is not the only one concerned about the Creeds of the Church and what they contain (or don’t contain).

Last week, Daniel Burke wrote an article in the Washington Post called “What did Jesus do on Holy Saturday?” in which he examines the line from the Apostles Creed: “He descended to hell”. Though Burke admits that what Jesus did after his death and before the resurrection has been a matter of disagreement and debate throughout the history of the Church, he also affirms that “Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and most mainline Protestant churches teach that Jesus descended to the realm of the dead on Holy Saturday to save righteous souls, such as the Hebrew patriarchs, who died before his crucifixion.”

However, Burke reports that some prominent evangelical spokesmen are calling for the removal of this article from the Creed, asserting that there is no biblical evidence for Christ’s descent or the “harrowing of hell”.

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