Painting Fakes

In my first post on Jesus' miracles I summarised my reasons for not seeing the miracles as demonstrations of power, and in the second I commented on the way the miracle stories are bound by the culture and world view of their original authors and hearers.  The starting point for this one is the theory of some New Testament scholars that among the original sources for the gospels were a "sayings gospel" and a "signs gospel".  If they existed (and their existence is merely an hypothesis, no copies exist), then the first was a collection of the sayings or teachings of Jesus, and the second of deeds attributed to him.  Within this framework, Jesus' acts are not defined by whether or not they require supernatural power, but simply by the fact that he did them. No doubt Jesus did many things - getting dressed, washing his hair, going to the toilet, ordinary everyday things of which we have no record because they were not worth recording.  The deeds we have i...

I mentioned previously that I am very skeptical about the Queensland Government's supposed budget crisis .  I believe it has been greatly exaggerated by the Newman LNP Government as an overarching story to justify cuts which are essentially ideological.  Recent events in the housing portfolio, dear to my own heart, have confirmed this suspicion.  New housing minister Bruce Flegg, who has no history of involvement in housing issues, started his tenure by announcing that (shock! horror!) Queensland's public housing system is losing $2m per week, and is struggling to cope with the demand for housing from low income tenants.  He proceeded to float a number of ideas for "improving" the system, most of which involved moving tenants on from their housing in some form.  He advocated alternatives including shorter leases, compulsory transfers and asking single tenants in large housing to share if they are not willing to move. Then this week he has announced, without wa...

The management of News Ltd's flagship The Australian assures us that they don't have a political agenda, they just report the news as they see it.  If that's the case, then they see things in a slightly odd way.  Or perhaps it's better to say they see some things, but not others. For the past two Saturdays The Weekend Australian has featured pretty much identical cover stories about the refugee issue.  Yesterday's was entitled Too Poor for a Boat, Family Stuck in Asylum Void , and features the story of Burmese Chin refugee Ngun Tin Tial and her family, stuck in Kuala Lumpur after fleeing persecution in their homeland and living in legal limbo, earning a meagre living in the grey economy.  They would like to come to Australia and have got some way along the application process.  However, the wait is long, and apparently being made longer by the fact that when Australia accepts boat arrivals, these are counted towards our overall refugee and humanitatian quota...

Having had a rave about the seeming inhumanity of one of our favourite worship songs, perhaps now is as good a time as any to post my review of Rachel Held Evans' Evolving in Monkey Town.   I enjoy Evans' blog , with its combination of deep compassion and theological challenge, and wanted to read more. In many ways Evans' spiritual journey has been like my own, from fundamentalism to a more liberal view of Christianity.  However, she was more deeply immersed in fundamentalism than I was, and has taken 20 fewer years to travel the path.  Perhaps this shows that she's smarter than me - she certainly writes better! Evans grew up in Dayton, Tennessee, venue of the infamous "Scopes Monkey Trial" in 1925 in which school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution in his science class, contrary to Tennessee statute.  She went to fundamentalist Christian schools before attending Bryan University, named after William Jennings Bryan, ...

A while ago I had a rant at the songs showcased at last year's TWIST event, including their focus on the bleeding Jesus.  The issue came up for me again recently in my own church.  Normally when I'm playing music in church I choose what we sing, but a couple of weeks ago I was helping someone else out and they chose a song by Pat Sczebel called Jesus Thank You, the first verse of which goes: The mystery of the cross I cannot comprehend The agonies of Calvary You the perfect Holy One, crushed Your Son Who drank the bitter cup reserved for me A polite but pointed discussion ensued.  I find the third line shocking.  It portrays God the Father as a filicide, a killer of his own child, a cold and calculating psychopath who sacrifices his own child in order to satisfy some kind of cosmic scheme of his own devising. My two fellow musicans, who are both highly intelligent and educated people who have thought deeply about theological issues, justified the line the...

Speaking of reading ancient texts through modern eyes, that's the subject of my second post on miracles . For the past two centuries, people in Western countries have primarily seen the world through a "scientific" mindset strongly influenced by the Enlightenment.  We see the things that take place around us as products of impersonal natural forces, and when something takes place our first reaction is to seek a natural cause.  This makes it very difficult for us to believe in miracles, because we believe that they are not a "normal" part of the cosmos.  The natural is everyday, the supernatural is extraordinary. This mindset was behind the blossoming of the "rationalist" lives of Jesus which began to be written in the 18th and 19th centures, and which are still influential today.  These sought to explain Jesus' miracles in rational, scientific terms.  The feeding of the 5,000 was explained as an event in which Jesus shamed the rich into sharing...

Apologies for my short absence.  I've been busy with work, it being the end of the financial year and all, and not much spare time to write down the thoughts clattering around my head.  Anyway, in between other things I've been gradually working my way through Eusebius' History of the Church.   Eusebius has been called the "father of church history" and this work, which first appeared early in the 4th century, is the earliest surviving attempt at a comprehensive account of the first three centuries of Christianity. I say "attempt" because the work is hardly comprehensive.  In the first place, it is almost entirely a history of the Greek-speaking church of the Eastern mediterranean, with occasional insertions of events from the West, especially Rome.  Yet for me this was the least puzzling thing about it.  As a 21st century reader it is easy to see what it lacks as a work of history. For a start there is no real sense of development....