Category: Christianity

Save Christmas: Kill an elf

Findo found this story about a minister so keen to defend the honour of Christmas that he’s executing a satanic elf to make the point.

Elves, of course, are servants of Satan. Just like Hitler.


This weekend, Knudsen’s hatred for the creature he says “comes from the devil” manifested itself in the form of a mock execution by hanging of a Christmas elf outside his church.

Around the elf’s neck was a sign reading “we reject Satan and all his works and all his empty promises”, a reference to the Christian baptism rite.

Knudsen said decorating with elves at Christmas was “comparable to decorating with Nazi flags”, and described elves of all sorts as “poltergeists that come from the devil and make children sick”.

December 8, 2010

Driscoll on engaging culture

Following on from the excellent video about politics, Driscoll just posted this on his blog regarding a Christian approach to culture. It is, in my opinion, a thoroughly Pauline approach, in the next few days I’ll be posting an essay I wrote (at Venn Theology) unpacking Paul’s approach to areas of gospel freedom.

Read Driscoll’s whole post. It’s worth it. He apparently said he liked Jay Z’s music the other day on Facebook, and the crowd went wild.


“What I’ve found over the years is that whenever I speak about something culturally related from a Christian perspective, a debate rages. This has been the case since the earliest days of my ministry. This is because I consider myself a missionary in culture.”

“As a missionary, I do not view culture passively, merely as entertainment. Rather, I engage it actively as a sermon that is preaching a worldview.”

So, as a missionary, I find it a good thing to be aware of what is going on in culture in general as well as in music in particular. Though not a musician myself, I have some five thousand songs on my iTunes account from a wide range of genres and styles. Music is among the most defining and revealing aspects of any culture, and so in addition to enjoying some music, I study lots of music.

“As a missionary, you will need to watch television shows and movies, listen to music, read books, peruse magazines, attend events, join organizations, surf websites, and befriend people that you might not like to better understand people whom Jesus loves. For example, I often read magazines intended for teenage girls, not because I need to take tests to discover if I am compatible with my boyfriend or because I need leg-waxing tips, but because I want to see young women meet Jesus, so I want to understand them and their culture better.”

“The attitude we have for our children is the same we have for our church. This is why we have a pastor leading film and theology discussions. This is why we have a large contingency of Christians who are in the music business but do not wave the flag of Christian music. Rather, their theology informs their songwriting and artistry. Like our children, our goal is not to create a safe Christian subculture as much as to train missionaries to live in culture like Jesus.”

“As we engage culture (watching films and television, listening to music, reading books, shopping at stores, and so on), we must do so as theologians and missionaries filled with wisdom and discernment, seeking to better grasp life in our culture. We do this so we can begin the transforming work of the gospel in our culture by contextualizing the good news of Jesus. Not compromising. Not changing. Contextualizing. Practically, this means doing what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:22–23, “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.”

The truth is that every ministry is contextualized, the only difference is to which culture and which year of that culture. Everything from pews to chairs, sound systems, projectors, suits, and a printed Bible in the English language are very recent missiogical contextualizations in light of the two thousand years of Christianity.

“

December 7, 2010

Venn Theology: Stuff you might be missing

I’m still trying to figure out exactly what goes here and what goes there.

But in the last few days you might have missed these posts at Venn Theology (my new serious blog)…

1. Reasons you might be really terrible at Powerpoint.
2. Colours and branding and marketing and what they say about you and your product.
3. My lovely wife Robyn is posting her most excellent essay on Daniel in an eight part series. And would love your comments.
4. I’m unpacking my newly developed (or developing) approach to interpreting the Bible by grasping the historical context… ok, it’s not new, but I’m hopefully going to show the benefits of adopting such an approach. Here’s a follow up video with history professor/Biblical scholar/all round good guy Edwin Judge.

December 6, 2010

Muse’s Matt Bellamy on corporate songwriting

Muse were pretty epic last night. They have a beautifully crafted stage presence that makes the songs you don’t like on their albums make a bit of sense. It’s almost as though they write their songs with the arena and not the CD player in mind… wait. That’s exactly what they do. Apparently. According to this interview anyway, which has some relevance (I think) to writing music for churches. Not that I’m an expert on the matter. But I know what songs I like singing and don’t like singing (and I have a yawn test – if I yawn while singing a song it isn’t much fun to sing).

“Q: Speaking of your live show, Muse uses a lot of layers and complicated structures. As you are writing, do you three confer about how the songs will translate live.
A: The end venue, which relates to the last question, it has an impact on the writing, whether you like it or not. You’re always thinking – how is this going to be listened to. Our time is dominated mostly by touring, not by being in the studio. If we were just a studio band, we’d make one kind of album, but because we know we are going on the road, you can’t help but make music that has a relevance being in a large venue.
Using pronouns like “we” and “us”, instead of “I” – you move away from the personal and start moving to singing about more – even the whole venue will feel like it’s about them, or about all of us together in that room. It has an impact. It’s a major difference between the first album to this one, I feel the music we’re making is making a bigger effort to reach out to the people at the back of the venue. You can’t help but wanting to engage the audience.

Q: Do you miss playing small clubs?
A: I like it for different reasons. When you go into a small club, you can totally misjudge the set-list. There’s a certain type of songs which work well in a small venue and others that work well in a big venue. You can get it wrong. There’s a song from the last album called “Take A Bow”, and I imaging on this album it’ll be the track “Eurasia”, that if you played at a really small venue it would actually be crap (laughs). It just wouldn’t work. The pretensions of it, or the over-reachingness of it would be exposed.
Whereas when you go into a stadium environment, it feels perfectly relevant. The boldness of the emotion, the instrumentation of the music fits very well.

Q: So when you are writing, you are writing to the space?
A: I wouldn’t say it’s conscious. I’ve noticed it’s happening unconsciously. It might be the impact of playing in front of large audiences for a long period of time. It makes you think differently about people, it make you think differently about yourself. It’s no longer just a subjective, lonely experience.
“

December 6, 2010

The Andrew Show

This kid is going to grow up to be a racist Third Eagle of the Apocalypse. The puppet only gets a say about 3 minutes in.

He’s a junior KKK member. No kidding.

December 6, 2010

Bad Christian Music #74

YouTube’s supply of bad Christian music seems bottomless. I can’t remember if I’ve seen this before. But it made me laugh.

December 4, 2010

Driscoll on Christianity in public

Say what you will about Mark Driscoll – but the man is sharpest (I think) when he’s talking about how the church should interact with the surrounding culture. I like this video because we are almost completely in agreement.

Christianity, society and politics from CPX on Vimeo.

He talks about how we can learn from Calvin’s approach to Christianity and Politics, avoiding anachronistically suggesting that any imposition of Christian government is wrong, and suggesting that it’s not appropriate today because you’d need everybody in a country to be Christian in order for that to be appropriate.

“Change often times comes from the bottom up. And I think one of the great myths is that politics changes culture. Politics doesn’t change culture, it represents culture. Politics represents the views of the constituency.”

“My efforts particularly in our city have not been politically active, I’m quite frankly not, I mean, we don’t talk about politicians or issues, much, I mean as I’m teaching through the Bible there might be some corollary between a social issue and a biblical teaching, but for the most part our goal is to love and serve people, to serve the city, to be people who really do love and are committed to our city and want to see the benefit to all people in the city, not just the Christians, and I believe that as more people share that ethic that will help to turn the culture of the city over and that will lead to political change.”

Watch it. It’s good.

This is the sort of post that is eventually going to migrate to Venn Theology (in fact, it’s cross posted there).

December 3, 2010

A Badd take on Christianese

Badd make funny videos.

December 2, 2010

Obama cuts face, Third Eagle is in his element

There’s nothing like a Korean conflict to get the Third Eagle excited. Nothing. Except, perhaps, for a presidential shaving mishap…

Obama’s 12 stitches on a lip injury are great fodder for numerological bizarreness.

Obama is the last king of the south… and Kim Jong Il is the last king of the north (from Daniel 11)… or maybe it’s Vladimir Putin. And nuclear weapons are a “strange god”…

My question is still where does this guy get his water backdrops from?

December 1, 2010

Another brick and a wall

Why do these preachers always sound like they’re hyperventilating?

Via Christian Nightmares.

November 24, 2010

Hipster Preacher: as crazy as the other YouTube crazies

Ok. I’m glad the Wine Barrel guy from Brisbane doesn’t have a monopoly on crazy.

“We have the most revelation of any generation that has walked the planet.”

I can take this “revelation” and leave it… but thanks.

Oh. This explains it.

November 19, 2010

And so it begins… Christian in England loses job and court case for disagreeing with gay adoption

Interesting. From the BBC.

“A Christian adoption adviser dismissed for refusing to recommend same-sex couples as suitable parents has lost her claim for religious discrimination.

Dr Sheila Matthews, 50, from Kettering in Northamptonshire, lost her job with the county council when she asked to abstain from voting in same-sex cases.

She told her employers Northamptonshire County Council she felt children “did best” with heterosexual parents.”

And so it begins. In England.

So, it turns out one can not abstain from an issue one disagrees with on religious convictions in England – note, she wasn’t actually voting against gay adoption, she was asking not to be put in a situation where she would have to vote against them. Lunacy.

More people should read this article from ABC Unleashed. This is a ridiculous case of forcing someone to conform to the majority view on a conscience issue – the type of think 1984 warned us about…

Here’s the killer line from that ABC article:

…there is an alternative to the combination of ‘disapproval and hate’; and it is ‘disapproval and love’. Even in our hyper-sensitive Aussie culture ‘disapproval and love’ is a moral oxymoron, but in fact we adopt this approach to life every day and it is a morally consistent approach for relating to people whose sexual expressions differ to those with whom you agree.

November 17, 2010

Bad Christian Music: Redux

So, the title of this video on YouTube promises so much, and delivers so little. It ends up being a guy using a Poker motiff and standing in a bar, singing about Jesus while wearing an awful shirt and doing bad Country Music style dancing.

Though, the country style dancing is not as bad as this country style dancing…

And I know what you’re thinking – these videos have been stripped from their original context, where it was probably ok to be dancing like a cowboy and singing about Jesus.

Well, I ask you, were these eyebrows ever ok, in context? The words are ok – but this is a Television commercial for Christianity, and that sort of facial expression has always been synonymous with “crazy”…

At the very least, he didn’t forget the words.

But what you guys really need to inspire you is a Christian boy band (as in kids – as in something like Hanson, but not)…

This is what happens when they grow up. They become a “Christian Crunk Rock Band”… called Family Force Five.

Maybe they didn’t get enough Psalty the Psinging Psalmbook, and his rhythmic dog Blooper.

Maybe we all need some Kerney Thomas, whose seemlessly redubbed televangelist programs are something to rival the Wine Barrel Church in heresy that makes you unsure whether to laugh or cry.

November 17, 2010

Research shows Christians are nicer than atheists

Yeah. Read it and weep those of you in the religion poisons everything mob. The results are in. In America anyway.

Forty percent of worship-attending Americans volunteer regularly to help the poor and elderly, compared with 15% of Americans who never attend services. Frequent-attenders are also more likely than the never-attenders to volunteer for school and youth programs (36% vs. 15%), a neighborhood or civic group (26% vs. 13%), and for health care (21% vs. 13%). The same is true for philanthropic giving; religious Americans give more money to secular causes than do secular Americans. And the list goes on, as it is true for good deeds such as helping someone find a job, donating blood, and spending time with someone who is feeling blue.

England’s Telegraph follows this USA Today story in breaking the news.

No doubt there’ll be a long queue of atheists lining up to debunk this theory on the internet. Because they’ve got so much spare time (since they’re not out and about, you know, helping people.

And the answer to the question of why this is the case isn’t “because we’re told to be good from the pulpit” – no, it’s good old peer pressure, in the form of community.

What is it about friends-at-church that fosters good citizenship? It could be that requests to get involved carry more moral weight when they come from someone you know through your congregation rather than work or your bowling team. Or perhaps religious congregations simply foster peer pressure to do good. At this point, we do not know the precise magic civic ingredient in religious friendships.

Not knowing exactly how religious friendships foster good neighborliness thus leaves open the possibility that the same sort of effect could be found in secular organizations. But they would probably have to resemble religious congregations — close-knit communities with shared morals and values. Currently, though, such groups are few and far between. (Communes might qualify, for example.)

Interesting. Thoughts?

November 16, 2010

Old Testament 102: My sample Daniel answer

If there happens to be a question about the meaning of Daniel this is what my answer will look like (though I’ll pad it out with some Bible):

Ask a Christian doomsday cult fanatic what their favourite book of the Bible is, and in the mix with Revelation and Ezekiel will no doubt be the book of Daniel. Daniel is a tale of two halves – the latter half has been widely recognised as apocalyptic in nature – a cryptic condemnation of foreign rulers, and a message of hope for the people of God in the midst of foreign persecution. But what to do with the first half of the book? Chapters 1-6 read like a series of court tales in a foreign land, with enough similarities to a Disney movie to spawn countless retellings in children’s stories in churches around the globe. But could it be that simple?

Short answer, no. Like many stories that appear to be straightforward and geared towards children (Shrek for example) the story contains an undercurrent of harsh and satirical criticism of foreign rule – a mocking of inept kings, with a hopeful note for the people of God. God is in control, despite Israel’s political dilemma.

The identification of Daniel as a Menippean Satire was proposed by Valetta. Valetta identified the fourteen elements of satire from the late (second century) BC period. A recognition that has implications for the dating, and interpretation, of Daniel. Debate in scholarly circles has been largely settled on the question of a sixth century prescriptive dating of the second half of Daniel – while scholars are not ruling out predictive prophecy per say, some, such as Goldingay, note that such a level of detail is not common in Biblical prophecy (though such an assumption seems also to depend on ruling out a single, early, author of Isaiah), other problems presented for a sixth century dating include a series of historical inaccuracies that are best explained if the book is written in the second century with a sixth century setting. The only scholar of note still advocating a sixth century dating is Tremper Longman. Longman’s position sees him advocate a fairly simplistic application of Daniel’s first six chapters, he sees them as stories of bravery under fire, to be imitated by believers facing hostility.

Daniel as satire presents a more robust application – foreign rule is seen to be ridiculous, or worthy of ridicule, in comparison to the greatness of God’s rule. Clues for the satirical reading include the use of the language of the court (Aramaic) for much of the negative presentation of foreign rulers, the refrain “oh king may you live forever” occurring at intervals and incidents where the king is experiencing a particularly humiliating or traumatic time, and the presence of all fourteen elements of the Menippean Satire described by Bahktin. A satirical reading also integrates more comfortably with the apocalyptic undertones of the second half of the book – positioning the whole book as a rebuke of foreign rule designed to inspire hope within the oppressed people of Israel. The satirical take on the king (probably Antiochus IV) softens the target for the deadly blow of chapters 7-13, the prediction of his downfall. The book then contains a united condemnation of foreign rule, a message of judgment, and a message of hope for the oppressed.

November 15, 2010