Saturday, April 29, 2006

Towards the summer months...

As the only other person with a title, besides the King, I would like to put out a call for links and/or other stuff people want up here on our pitifully budgeted blog (King: we need a budget, where are those fees going?)

I put an HTML counter up, but it is quite pathetic. If we had some actual webspace I could load a javascript, but sinceI am just leeching off of google's mighty servers, we are stuck with the unmovable counter below.

I do not have the initiative of the King or the craiger, all I can do is propose ideas, but if someone else had some drive we could do a lot with our own domain and webspace. How cool would that be! So if anyone gets bored over the summer, www.socratic.org is still open for rent...

Friday, April 28, 2006

Ehrman & Hays Audio Online Now

Dear Friends,
The Audio file for the Ehrman and Hays "debate" is on Duke's website now. You can download it. Its a good thing I brought my own setup because the Media Center's recording didn't work out. So right from my computer to the Duke website to your home...

http://www.divinity.duke.edu/news/noteworthy/060428davincicode

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Reflections on Ehrman and Hays

Wow! 530+ people. Who would have ever thought we'd have that many people show up for this event. I don't know that I have a ton of intellectual/theological reflections on this event but I do have some that are significant for me.

First, this is the first debate I have been at where I have seen someone left of center (Hays) articulate the gospel in response to someone who is way left of center (Ehrman). Coming from a relatively conservative tradition, I have only heard the debate play out along the following lines: if anything in the Bible is not the equivalent of a tape recorder transcript of what was said and done then the entire Bible (and Christianity) fall apart. I found Hays' articulation of the Gospel without relying upon this perspective both refreshing and compelling. I found his articulation of the Gospels being "faithful portrayals" a strong response to many of the things I experience as obstacles to the Gospel in our culture.

Second, Hays (and in some respects Ehrman) have helped me to be able to articulate the Gospel as a pastor in our culture. I have been given another model, which is new to me, about how to respond to issues and pressures that Christianity faces in our culture these days. This was, for me, a major reason for pulling this event together (and others like it). Having recently given up on inerrancy, I have been left with a vacuum about how to express biblical authority. Hays has helped fill that void. I hope we are able to host more events like this in our next two years.

So what next? What should we start planning for the next two years? How can we top this?

Peace and grace,
Tom A. (Socratic King)

All Hail King Tom

I think it was a wonderful success and we have an incredible precedent to follow up with our next event, whatever it may be.

I think the UNC snipes were the highlight of the evening,

"2005"

It could not have been set up any more perfectly.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Ehrman/ Hays event

There is finally some kind of website with information on the event to which I can link. If you haven't read the book, either find about 45 minutes to read it or don't. It doesn't deserve more of your time. The best thing, I would say, is to just look at one page, see how absurd it is, have yourself a good laugh, and then set it back down.

Then think of the dead friend in A Beautiful Mind running around killing people at the Cardinal's behest.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Inerrancy of Scripture

I have uploaded a document from Phil called "The Inerrancy of Scripture." The article is by Kevin Vanhoozer, Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at New College, University of Edinburgh. You may access it by browsing to it on the Group iDisk of Duke Socratic Club web site

I posted this in response to a series of discussions I have heard or participated in on the topic of sola scriptura, sola fidei, etc. Phil sent this article, and, I learned once again that my understanding of a key concept was partial and imperfect. Perhaps your understanding of "inerrancy" is similarly off the mark. So check it out and let's discuss!

How should we go about making doctrinal decisions? On what authority(ies) should we rely?

Monday, April 10, 2006

Confessions of a Mennonite Camp Follower

The king has ribbed me a bit about the growing list of denominations with which I have declared common cause. When we met I was a loyal United Methodist. Over the course of our first year here I have discovered that 'Methodist' is just another word for someone with a "doubtful theological background," and I have been enchanted with rightness of those I had assumed, in my denominationalism, were wrong. I have discovered that I came to Duke wrong on most things of which I was certainly certain. Since many of those dearly departed certainties were things I learned in Sunday School designed to help me understand why Baptists and Catholics were heathen, I have grown deeply skeptical of the whole notion of denominations. And so, at my last audience with the king, the one in which I basked in his royal admonishment of my faithlessness, I confessed to being an evangelical postliberal post-denominational Wesleyan Anglo-Catholic (b)aptist. Which, I insist, amounts to a fair impressionistic depiction of John Wesley, Jim McClendon, and even Stan the Man.

It turns out that I am not alone in my ecclesial whoredom. Reading during my quiet time this morning from an essay by St. Stanley his very self ("Confessions of a Mennonite Camp Follower" in Disrupting TIme, 2004), I find the following:

"...like a camp follower, I do not have an ecclesial home, so I whore after that which I think is faithful to the gospel. I cannot pretend that such a position can be made ecclesially intelligible. My only defense is that God in our time seems to have led many of us to that point. We live in a time when the theological battles that seemed so important and justified Christian divisions simply no longer matter....That God has made some ecclesially homeless we can only pray will be the beginning of a unity, as John [Yoder] would put it, from the bottom up."

So, beloved king and followers of all things Socratic, I confess that I, too, am a Mennonite camp follower. It may be because I like Martin so much, or it may be because those submariner's dolphins for which I worked so hard have corroded in the light of the politics of Jesus. And be warned, mighty king, that I intend to follow shamelessly other camps that I encounter on this journey. You see, this faithlessness that others may decry as a fancy for fetishes, I see as a bashing of boundaries that no longer matter. It's liberating. But that's not all. Ecclesial whore though I am, I am also an aging warrior with no time to waste following camps fighting yesterday's battles; for it seems clear to me now that tomorrow's war demands that we be free of today's boundaries. And I have no doubt we are being fashioned to fight tomorrow's fight for the kingdom, albeit with plowshares and pruning hooks. We will be ordained at a time in history when the church in America fractures over inescapable, polarizing questions of sex, gender, race, and worship style that are already shaping new ecclesial boundaries. So, like St. Stanley, I intend to whore after that which I think is faithful to the gospel. I know that means I won't be ecclesially intelligible. My only defense is that God seems to have led others ahead of me to pass through that same point.

Friday, April 07, 2006

On Dennett

Socratics,
It was an interesting day yesterday. We had the opportunity to meet and talk with Daniel Dennett. Here are a couple of thoughts given the experience:

1. Dennett was considerably more personable and civil than I was expecting. I was surprised since his books, particularly Breaking the Spell, is so polemical against religions and Christianity. But he was quite easy to talk with. His head was not in the clouds. He was not arrogant. He was not pushy. He was a good listener and seemed geniunely interested in having a conversation with us. I think this goes to show that the boxes we put people in rarely ever fit.

2. I found generally his description of Christians (and thus I would suspect of other religious individuals) quite thin at times. I rarely found myself in his descriptions of Christians. I think he assumed that Christians don't think, don't ask questions, never ask why they believe what they believe, and are generally content to be told what to believe by their leaders. After working in a church for 8 years, I can genuinely say that I wish Christians were so maleable. It would have made my job so much easier! Yet I had to on a regular basis explain and defend almost every decision or belief. Rarely was I met with total resignation to whatever I thought. I will give a further example of his thin description of Christians below.

3. During our time with him (in which there were only about ten of us at the Div School) I asked him the following question: On Pg 512 you say, “Bach is precious not because he had within his brain a magic pearl of genius-stuff, a skyhook [a magical supernatural gift], but because he was, or contained, an utterly idiosyncratic structure of cranes, made of cranes, made of cranes, made of cranes [one biological process built on top of another biological process, etc...].” I wonder whether this is not creating a “turtles all the way down” kind of solution. On what ground does the first crane stand? (for a reference explaining "turtles all the way down" see http://members.tripod.com/TheoLarch/turtle.html). He agreed that Darwin has these kind of problems but suggested the solution then went back to cosmology. In other words, there have been many, many universeses and this was the first one that worked to create us. It seemed to me that he only pushed the "turtles all the way down" from biology to cosmology. He did end up saying something to the effect that there is a problem with this but added that if the only role that God played was that there was something rather than nothing, that was an awefuly small God. The more I've thought about his conclusion about God's role (assuming that is all that God's role is, for the moment), the less I agreed with his valuation of it. The something we have in the universe is quite an amazing something. If all that God did was cause this something to exist rather than not exist, then does it not follow that this God is even greater than (or at least as great as) the universe? This sounds pretty awe-inspiring to me.

4. Lastly, after his big lecture to 500 people I wrote him the following email:

Dear Dr. Dennett,
Thanks again for coming to visit with our group at Duke Divinity School.

I did want to add one thing after your lecture. I am a graduate of Wheaton College and would suggest that gives me some experience to speak on what evangelicals (as a sub-group of Christianity) might mean when they say something like what was on the sign of the Baptist church which you had a picture of in your lecture (“Morality Without God Equals 0”). They mean one of two things (neither of which you thought they meant):

1. Good works are not enough to earn God’s love (or heaven, or salvation)
2. Morality without God has no logical foundation.

It does not mean as you suggested: Atheists are immoral (though it may mean that atheists act illogically when they act morally or value morality). In fact, a considerable amount of the history of Christian theology is an attempt to understand why people who are not Christians act morally. This can be seen in Thomas Aquinas’ appropriate of Aristotle’s cardinal virtues, John Calvin’s concept of common grace, and John Wesley’s theology of prevenient grace among others. Therefore, I’d suggest that the course of Christian history (and theology) is not what you suggest it is: telling atheists they are immoral people who necessarily act in immoral ways. Nor would I ever want to be characterized as telling you that you act immorally because you are an atheist (in fact, I found your interaction with us very civil and personable and enjoyable). I know plenty of people who are “brights” [Dennett's self-made word for Athiests] who are very moral people.

Again, I greatly appreciated the very unique opportunity we had to talk with you today. I hope it was meaningful for you as well.

So these are my thoughts on Dennett and I appreciate the Blog Master's giving us this space to rant and rave. I look forward today to meeting with Dr. Heutter then our second Pub Night.

Peace and grace,
Tom

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Unoffical No More

Dear Offical Duke Socratic Club,
We have been voted onto the island. DSC (Divinity Student Council) voted us in today as an offical student group. So we'll start of the year as an offical group!
The King

Monday, April 03, 2006

Hütter Links and such