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Miracles Part 3

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

Queensland's Budget Crisis in Housing

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 warning,

The Refugee Queue

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 of

Evolving in Monkey Town

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, the

The Mystery of the Cross

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 theologically - to

Miracles Part 2

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

Eusebius

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.  We know that

Miracles Part 1

Lately it seems that a lot of conversations I have come around to the subject of miracles, and in particular Jesus' miracles, so I thought I'd write a short series of posts on the subject. For a lot of my Christian friends, Jesus' miracles are one of the most important pieces of evidence of his divinity.  His miracles are seen as showing the power of God expressed through him, and vindicate his claim to divinity as well as the reality of God.  For them, without the miracles there is no Christianity. Paradoxically, these same miracles are one of the biggest stumbling blocks for many of my atheist friends.  One of the reasons they reject religion in general and Christianity in particular is that they find the idea of miracles impossible to believe.  As Crossan and Reed say, impossibility battles with uniqueness.  Both parties accept that miracles are highly improbable and that it would take something extraordinarily special to make one happen.  For the atheist, this

Queensland's Budget Crisis?

So apparently the Queensland Government's budget is in crisis, and without drastic action we will all be ruined.  It must be so because Peter Costello says so. Soon after its election the new Queensland Government appointed Costello, long-serving treasurer in the Howard government, to head a commission of audit into the Queensland budget.  Its interim report suggests that the government needs to save 25 to 30 billion dollars over a five year period to regain its AAA credit rating from Standard and Poors. Should we believe them?  Well, I'm no economist but I have my doubts.  For a start, why did the government appoint a veteran Liberal politician, and one notorious for his fiscal conservatism and love of surpluses, instead of, say, a distinguished economist?  Why does new Queensland Treasurer Tim Nicholls look so much like Costello's little brother at the press conference to launch the report? Secondly, the report includes a set of forward estimates from Queenslan

The Red Army

For my 50th birthday my in-laws gave me a copy of The Folio Book of Historical Mysteries , edited by Ian Pindar.  I've been reading it in bits and pieces over the past few months.  Like most anthologies it mixes the brilliant with the pedestrian.  Predictably there were articles about whether the Turin Shroud was real, whether Shakespeare really wrote his own plays, the identity of Jack the Ripper and the "real" story behind the murder of JFK.  Along with this were some surprises.  Who would have thought there was an actual historical event behind the story of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, or that the characters in The Three Musketeers were based on real people?  And I had certainly never heard of the fabulous Voynich Manuscript , a beautiful, elaborate book probably dating from the later 15th century written in a completely incomprehensible "language". Amidst all these gems and rocks are two little tales about the fall of imperial Russia.  The first is rather we

The Transit of Venus

Twice in every 100-odd years, Venus passes directly between the earth and the sun.  For a few hours, if there are no clouds, earth-bound mortals can see her shadow as it crosses the face of the sun and then disappears.  It happened today amidst much fanfare and astronomical excitement. This means it's a good day for a post on Shirley Hazzard's wonderful novel, The Transit of Venus .  Expatriate Aussie novelist Hazzard is not prolific by any means but what her work lacks in quantity it makes up in quality and The Transit of Venus is her masterwork. Published in 1980, it follows the lives and loves of Australian sisters Caroline and Grace Bell from their arrival in the UK after World War 2.  It is a lyrical, elliptical novel, moments of sly humour mingled with an all-pervading sense of tragedy.  Her characterisation is beautifully nuanced, you feel passionate love or scorn for each of her creations. Venus remains hidden for long, dreary years, reveals herself in a blinding

More Lives of Jesus 6: Rudolf Bultmann

I know I promised to review some more recent Lives of Jesus and I've been doing that, but late last year I picked up a copy of Rudolf Bultmann's Jesus and the Word in a second hand shop.  Since Bultmann has made a couple of cameos in these reviews, I thought I'd tell you a little more about what he says. Jesus and the Word was first published in German in 1926, and translated into English in 1934.  Bultmann had yet to embark on the project of "demythologising" Christianity which was to make him famous or notorious throughout the Christian world, depending on your viewpoint.  Here in this book we can see the beginnings of that theology and understand both its strength and its weakness. One thing this book shows is how little the study of the Gospels has changed over the past century.  Bultmann has a lot in common with the present day fellows of the Jesus Seminar .  Like them, he sees the Gospels as layered texts, some parts recording the actual words of Jesus