Author: Glen

Suckerpunched…

I was bit­ter­ly dis­ap­point­ed at the ref­er­ence sec­tion at Bere­an Chris­t­ian Store in San Jose. I had gone in with a coupon fig­ur­ing I’d pick up a sweet and expen­sive com­men­tary at reduced rate. After scour­ing the com­men­tary sec­tion I con­clud­ed that there was not one sin­gle com­men­tary in the store worth own­ing.

It made me very, very sad. I hate to be one of those min­is­ters who is always whin­ing about how Chris­t­ian book stores are dumb­ing down the faith, but I was almost sick inside at the low qual­i­ty of the books on offer.

As I was on my way out, I noticed Break­ing The Mis­sion­al Code was for sale. Since I had a coupon and the book had been rec­om­mend­ed to me by sev­er­al friends and I did­n’t want to leave bit­ter at the store, I picked it up.

It’s an easy read and I was gen­er­al­ly appre­cia­tive of their thoughts (espe­cial­ly their warn­ing to the rapid­ly swelling mis­sion­al net­works to not neglect tra­di­tion­al mis­sions in favor of church plant­i­ng), and I was almost done with it when I got suck­er­punched at the end.

A recent devel­op­ment in church plant­i­ng is that of plant­i­ng church­es on or near col­lege cam­pus­es. Lead­ers are dis­cov­er­ing that when church­es are plant­ed on cam­pus they are more strate­gic at reach­ing unreached and dis­con­nect­ed peo­ple on the col­lege cam­pus. They rep­re­sent a shift from col­lege and cam­pus min­istries that focus on those who already embrace the faith to that of plant­i­ng the gospel among those who have nev­er or sel­dom heard.
Break­ing The Mis­sion­al Code, Ed Stet­zer & David Put­man p. 232
empha­sis added

I feel vague­ly slan­dered…

I think per­haps the authors mis­un­der­stand what cam­pus min­istries do. And they also over­es­ti­mate the abil­i­ty of church­es to thrive on the col­lege cam­pus — some cam­pus­es are very reach­able that way and oth­ers are not. It’s a tool in our tool­box for reach­ing col­le­gians, not a replace­ment tool­box.

Over­all, it’s a good book if you haven’t read any­thing about lead­ing your church to engage the cul­ture before. Oth­er­wise you might find it rep­e­ti­tious. And libelous. 🙂

What Is The Internet?

A friend recent­ly asked me what the inter­net was. Evi­dent­ly there are some strange the­o­ries float­ing around out there, such as the one Jon Stew­art mocks in this clip:

So I gave her an expla­na­tion and she said she thought some oth­er non-tech­ni­cal friends might appre­ci­ate it, so here it is.

Your com­put­er has a few key com­po­nents — a CPU, a hard dri­ve, RAM, and an Oper­at­ing Sys­tem. Every­thing on your com­put­er is com­plete­ly obe­di­ent to your Oper­at­ing Sys­tem.

If you have two or more com­put­ers in your house, you can set up a net­work between them. When you set up a net­work, you’re basi­cal­ly adding addi­tion­al com­po­nents to your com­put­er. But these addi­tion­al com­po­nents are obe­di­ent to dif­fer­ent Oper­at­ing Sys­tems than your own.

So your Oper­at­ing Sys­tem has to ask the oth­er com­put­er’s Oper­at­ing Sys­tem for per­mis­sion before it does any­thing like read a file from the oth­er com­put­er’s hard dri­ve.

To set up a net­work, you need to tell the com­put­ers two ground rules: what “lan­guage” to speak with one anoth­er and how to find oth­er com­put­ers on the net­work.

The Inter­net is the largest net­work of com­put­ers ever cre­at­ed. There is a stan­dard lan­guage (TCP/IP) and a stan­dard way to find oth­er com­put­ers (the unique IP address that every com­put­er on the inter­net is assigned).

When­ev­er you log in to a wire­less net­work, for exam­ple, you are assigned a tem­po­rary IP address that any com­put­er on the inter­net could use to talk to you. Per­ma­nent­ly-con­nect­ed com­put­ers such as web­servers get per­ma­nent IP address­es.

So when we talk about the inter­net, we’re real­ly talk­ing about every com­put­er in the world that has a legim­i­tate IP address and knows how to talk to oth­er com­put­ers using TCP/IP.

As a lan­guage, TCP/IP is too gener­ic to be use­ful for most of the tasks we are inter­est­ed in. So there are addi­tion­al dialacts called “pro­to­cols” which com­put­ers can use to do things like view web pages.

To view web pages, com­put­ers talk using HTTP — Hyper Text Trans­fer Pro­to­col. That’s what the http:// in front of a web address is all about. To upload or down­load files com­put­ers use FTP — File Trans­fer Pro­to­col.

There are a lot of dif­fer­ent pro­to­cols.

So when you type http://news.google.com/index.html into your brows­er address bar, what’s real­ly hap­pen­ing is that your Oper­at­ing Sys­tem con­nects to the Inter­net using TCP/IP and asks a more sig­nif­i­cant com­put­er what the IP address of news.google.com is.

Then it uses HTTP to talk to the Oper­at­ing Sys­tem of the com­put­er at that IP address and asks for per­mis­sion to read the file index.html. The remote Oper­at­ing Sys­tem uses HTTP to answer “Sure” and then pass­es the file along. Your com­put­er then dis­plays the file in your brows­er.

And that’s essen­tial­ly what the inter­net is and how it works.

Chi Alpha Worldwide on the Facebook

A clever Chi Alphan noticed that the Face­book now sup­ports glob­al groups. So they set up one titled: XA- CHI ALPHA WORLDWIDE ‑XA (I don’t know if that link will work or not — I took out the school pre­fix)

So Chi Alphans world­wide, unite!

Dana Broke Wind

Recent­ly we were all sit­ting down to din­ner when Dana fart­ed.

Mom: “Dana, what do you say?”
Dana: “Excuse you, Dad­dy.”

Peo­ple were, in my esti­ma­tion, entire­ly too tick­led by that remark. 🙂

Dana Cuteness

Me: “Dana, what’s your favorite thing to put in oat­meal?”
Dana: “Raisins.”
Me: “What’s your sec­ond-favorite thing?”
Dana: “Spoons.”

Stanford Grads In Unexpected Places

As some­one raised Epis­co­palian I tend to feel sor­row when­ev­er I read about the Epis­co­pal church in the news. The glob­al Angli­can com­mu­nion is doing okay, but the Amer­i­can denom­i­na­tion has real­ly jumped the tracks since I was born.

In case you haven’t heard, the Epis­co­pal Church in Amer­i­ca just elect­ed its first female pri­mate ever — Katharine Jef­ferts Schori. That’s not the source of my sor­row — I firm­ly believe in the min­istry of women (as does my denom­i­na­tion).

Here’s where the sor­row comes in: she’s appar­ent­ly an advo­cate of ordain­ing open­ly gay priests and bish­ops. So her elec­tion was sort of a slap in the face to the world­wide Angli­can com­mu­nion, a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of which seems pre­pared to write Ich­a­bod over the door of the Epis­co­palian church.

After the usu­al sigh that escapes my lips when see­ing the Epis­co­pal church in the head­lines, one detail leapt out at me: Bish­op Schori grad­u­at­ed with a degree in biol­o­gy from Stan­ford in 1974. Thanks to pur­ga­to­rio for putting that infor­ma­tion where it caught my eye.

Those darn Stan­ford alumni–they just keep show­ing up in the news. Some­times for good and some­times for bad, but always mak­ing a dif­fer­ence.

Things Which Interested Glen Last Week

Things I book­marked last week on del.icio.us.

Dis­claimer: these links are post­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly using the excel­lent yawd hack and are mere­ly things that were inter­est­ing enough to book­mark for future reference–I may or may not agree with the views expressed by the linked pages. In fact, I may not have even read them yet.

Some Gal Walking Through One Of Our Videos

I’m always amazed at how putting videos online has exposed Chi Alpha to peo­ple who would nev­er oth­er­wise dark­en the door of our gath­er­ings. For exam­ple, this gal was walk­ing through the back­ground of an inter­view I did with Dr. William Lane Craig and noticed her­self when lat­er watch­ing the video. She then blogged about it and it got back to me. What a small and crazy con­struct the inter­net is…

Any­way, I should men­tion that she curs­es in this post. If you pre­fer not to read pro­fan­i­ty then just skip read­ing the link and trust me that she men­tions the video and links to the Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford web­site.

Alas, she seems to have been unper­suad­ed by Dr. Craig’s argu­ments.

Some Thoughts On Jesus and History

An arti­cle in the Stan­ford Dai­ly today caught my atten­tion: Jesus Nev­er Lived, Speak­er Says.

My first thought was a bit car­nal — how come our events don’t get the same cov­er­age in the Dai­ly? We almost cer­tain­ly draw more peo­ple (as when Dr. Bill Craig lec­tured on the exis­tence of God to a crowd of hun­dreds) and our views are cer­tain­ly con­tro­ver­sial (God exists, Jesus is God, sin is real, sal­va­tion is pos­si­ble, etc).

My sec­ond thought was more focused: I should respond to this. I hear more and more stu­dents talk­ing about the exis­tence of Jesus as though there is some real con­tro­ver­sy, so I should­n’t let this pass with­out com­ment.

Now I was­n’t at the talk, so I don’t know exact­ly what the speak­er said. All I know is what the arti­cle claims the speak­er said. He could have been con­sid­er­ably more effec­tive at mak­ing his point than the arti­cle seems to indi­cate. This isn’t, strict­ly speak­ing, a cri­tique of the speak­er so much as a reflec­tion on the whole notion of Jesus being a make-believe per­son.

Accord­ing to the arti­cle, there are two clues that Jesus nev­er exist­ed:
1) Paul did­n’t talk about the details of Jesus’ life
2) The sto­ries about Jesus sound pret­ty amaz­ing.

So Paul did­n’t talk about the details of Jesus’ life in his let­ters. I find this unsur­pris­ing giv­en that I, an ordained Pen­te­costal mis­sion­ary, rarely do so in my own let­ters. Even when writ­ing let­ters devot­ed to the­ol­o­gy I rarely talk about Jesus’ life the way that the speak­er seemed to assume that Paul should have:

“Paul nev­er dis­cuss­es Jesus’ fam­i­ly, his deeds, where he went or where he came from,” Car­ri­er said. “He nev­er dis­cuss­es any of his con­fronta­tions with the author­i­ties, nor any dis­putes about what he taught. He says Jesus became flesh, was cru­ci­fied and buried, but he nev­er says when or where or posi­tions these events in any his­tor­i­cal con­text.”

I rarely bring up these details because they are assumed to be the back­ground for the con­ver­sa­tion, in much the same way that I rarely men­tion the details of George Bush’s life when dis­cussing his pol­i­tics. That does­n’t mean I don’t believe in or am unaware of the fact that he has daugh­ters — it just means that I don’t always con­sid­er them ger­mane.

To insist that Paul should have men­tioned such details as evi­dence that he believed Jesus was a real per­son seems quite arbi­trary to me, espe­cial­ly giv­en that he men­tions Jesus by name 198 times with absolute­ly no indi­ca­tion that he’s refer­ring to a made-up indi­vid­ual. No one would argue that I don’t believe in George Bush on such grounds, and so I don’t see why we should think that this is evi­dence that Paul did­n’t believe in Jesus.

As to Jesus’ life sound­ing pret­ty amaz­ing — ya think? That sort of seems to be the point. The claim that Jesus was God in human form almost requires that cer­tain amaz­ing events occur through­out his life. So I sort of scratch my head when the guest lec­tur­er says:

“Jesus con­forms so close­ly to the cri­te­ri­on of a myth­ic hero the prob­a­bil­i­ty that he was a myth­ic hero increas­es sub­stan­tial­ly,” he said. “There are 22 fea­tures that have been iden­ti­fied by schol­ars that are com­mon­ly shared by many myth­ic heroes. They can be ranked with a score accord­ing to how many fea­tures they have. Jesus clear­ly scores at least 19 out of 22.”

…

Jesus scores high­er on this scale than almost all oth­er heroes, includ­ing Her­cules and Romu­lus, Car­ri­er said. Only Oedi­pus scores high­er.

“Jesus com­petes for sec­ond place only with The­seus and Moses,” he said. “Every­one who scores more than 11 on this scale is most like­ly myth­i­cal. No his­tor­i­cal fig­ures who accu­mu­lat­ed some of these fea­tures by chance or leg­end, such as Alexan­der the Great or Augus­tus Cae­sar, scores even as high as 11.”

Well of course he scores quite high. That’s like point­ing out that NBA play­ers are tall and ath­let­ic. How do you think they score all those points? Jesus being extra­or­di­nary is sim­ply evi­dence that he was extra­or­di­nary. Whether he was extra­or­di­nary by not exist­ing or extra­or­di­nary by being God is the ques­tion the guest speak­er wished to address — but his argu­ment does noth­ing to tip the bal­ance.

Against these fee­ble argu­ments stands the schol­ar­ly con­sen­sus that there was actu­al­ly a man named Jesus. Why is there such a con­sen­sus? Because in addi­tion to the Bible, there is plen­ty of exter­nal evi­dence that Jesus lived. For exam­ple:

There’s a very help­ful (although incom­plete) arti­cle sum­ma­riz­ing these and oth­er extra­bib­li­cal sources about Jesus which includes a dis­cus­sion of the reli­a­bil­i­ty of the Jose­phus text.

I think the reporter was wise to include this dis­claimer the guest speak­er offered:

Despite this evi­dence, Car­ri­er was quick to point out that this is just a the­o­ry.

“We need to go out and inter­act with the com­mu­ni­ty and see if it stands up to the evi­dence,” he said. “I’m not here declar­ing that this is absolute­ly true and it would be fool­ish to deny it. We’re not at that stage yet.

“The nor­mal pro­ce­dure is to assume that a per­son who is claimed to be his­tor­i­cal is his­tor­i­cal,” he con­tin­ued, “unless there is a rea­son to doubt it. I believe this is an appro­pri­ate prin­ci­ple. For exam­ple, mere­ly lack­ing evi­dence is not enough of an argu­ment for some­one not exist­ing his­tor­i­cal­ly. You need actu­al evi­dence for them being mythi­fied.”

I am still await­ing such evi­dence.

Dr. Dana

I’m a lit­tle under the weath­er today (I have this real­ly painful cough that kept me up most of the night) and Dana noticed that I was rub­bing my eyes at lunch. The fol­low­ing dia­log ensued:

Dana: “Watchoo doing?”
Dad­dy: “Dad­dy’s sick and tired, and he’s try­ing to feel bet­ter.”
Dana: “You wan­na feel much bet­ter?”
Dad­dy: “Yes, Dad­dy would real­ly like to feel much bet­ter.”
Dana: “You want some dia­per cream?”

Bless her heart.