Simone has been enjoying trawling through the YouTube Archives of the Third Eagle of the Apocalypse (also known as the guy who wrote the “End Times Anthem”).
Here are his tips on how to prepare for World War Three. And if you don’t believe him it’s probably the devil.
I love how every prophecy of Daniel and Revelation actually apply to America.
Apparently there’s been a bit of chatter on the interwebs (see Al, and Mikey) about how appropriate it is for Christians to be “cool”… I’m breaking a cardinal rule of cool here by talking about what cool is, and isn’t. But this sort of quote is just a little bit stupid.
“Likely, right now someone in your church is reading Blue Like Jazz or some similar book. It will resonate with them in style and content—it is cool and Christian. And it is extremely unhelpful. The only antidote seems to be twofold. The first is to reintroduce young Christians to the biblical Jesus: the person who died an agonizing death for their sins, who will tread the winepress of the wrath of God, and who listens to their prayers. The second is to begin the battle against the cool. The godly must begin to prove in the pulpit, in writing, and in their lives that Christianity is the deadly enemy of the cool.”
Now, I don’t know what planet this guy is from. I could understand if he was directing these remarks at the kind of people who think it necessary to install dirt bike jumps in church auditoriums to weakly make a point in a sermon. But that isn’t the definition of “cool” he went with.
” And the cool is the Western postmodern entertainment driven culture that has tutored our children and ourselves for the last fifty years.”
He must be really old and lame. But that’s not what “cool” is. That’s an old man’s definition of cool. That’s the definition someone comes up with looking into an idea or concept that they are not part of. Nothing says uncool like trying to define cool. Unless you want to compare it to being forty+ and having a Twilight tattoo.
Maybe my reaction against this is because I have been brainwashed by my postmodern entertainment driven culture. Cultural texts like:
Cool is almost completely subjective. It moves and changes with whatever group of people you move and change with, including within Christian subculture. It’s an ambiguous word (check out how much trouble the dictionary has defining it), and I think it could readily be applied to the life and ministry of Jesus. Even King Missile thought he was way cool… Here are some of the lyrics from a song called Jesus Was Way Cool:
“He would tell these stories and people would listen.
He was really cool.
If you were blind or lame,
You just went up to Jesus
And he would put his hands on you and you would be healed.
That’s so cool.He could have played guitar better than Hendrix.
He could have told the future.
He could have baked the most delicious cake in the world.
He could have scored more goals than Wayne Gretsky.
He could have danced better than Barishnikof.
Jesus could have been funnier than any comedian you can think of.Jesus told people to eat his body and drink his blood.
That’s so cool.
Jesus was so cool.
But then some people got jealous of how cool he was,
So they killed him.
But then he rose from the dead!
He rose from the dead,
Danced around and went up to heaven.
I mean, that’s so cool.
Jesus was so cool.
No wonder there are so many Christians.”
But lets face it – definitions of cool are pretty arbitrary unless they come from The Rock.
Jesus was pretty good at that. Our job as Christians though is to be like him (which hopefully becomes more and more a case of “being ourselves”). I just don’t see how “cool” and “Christian” don’t mesh up – unless you understand “cool” as “conforms to social norms” rather than as “refuses to be influenced by social norms” (which I guess applies to those people who think Justin Bieber or any character from Twilight defines “cool”). The only thing this post proves is that trying to define cool in order to criticise it is just not cool.
Wouldn’t it be nice if your morning news came with a straightforward interpretive key – something a little bit like these warning labels (available as a pdf) from this guy named Tom Scott.
Have you been wondering why the Labor party is launching its campaign today – less than a week out from the election? I know I have. Now I know, and it makes me grumpy.
…a loophole in Department of Finance policy means the sizeable daily travel allowances for politicians and staffers are paid out of the public purse until the day of the respective political parties’ campaign launch.
The Liberal Party and the Nationals have been carrying their own costs for a week and will ultimately be financially responsible for nine days of the 33-day campaign.
However, the ALP will continue to have public funding until the conclusion of tomorrow’s ”official” campaign launch in Brisbane, leaving Labor with just five days to pay for.
Minor parties have never looked more attractive to me.
Kanye West joined Twitter a couple of weeks ago (I think I mentioned it at the time). His Tweets have been, shall we say, over the top. So over the top that a few people decided they would make nice captions for cartoons from the New Yorker, sparking possibly the funniest internet meme ever.
A bunch here at Huffington Post, and some at urlesque, and at BuzzFeed.
A gonzo journalist who spent twelve years getting to know the ins and outs of the Japanese organised crime gangs, the Yakuza, managed to sit three bona fide gangsters down to play Yakuza 3 – a Playstation game.
They seemed to enjoy the experience. The interview is here, and it’s pretty fascinating.
“M: A real fight–it’s short and it’s brutal. Over in a minute. Nobody goes around trading blows and crap like that. Usually the first guy to punch wins.
K: I like that you can grab things like ashtrays or billboards and beat the crap out of the punks bothering you. Or smash their faces into car windows. That’s what you’d really do in a fight, grab something and use it as a weapon.
S: Why doesn’t he just shoot them?
K: That would be unrealistic. Nobody is going to waste a bullet on some street punk, like the ones that keep bugging Kiyru.
M: If they wanted to make it realistic, he’d pull out a gun and shoot it and miss! Or the damn thing wouldn’t fire. That would be realistic. (They all laugh).
K: Shooting people sends a message.
M: So does shooting anything. Shooting people gets you sent to jail.
K: That’s part of the job description. ”
Mikey raises the question1, on Christian Reflections, about whether its ever acceptable for a muso to start providing prayer muzak.
I say no.
I’d love to read your thoughts over there too.
1 Though he calls it something very different -“the post-sermon prayer tinkle” which to me sounds a little like a post sermon bathroom break, analogous to the obligatory pre-sermon bathroom break (if you don’t know about this, don’t ask. I think it’s called “Preacher’s Belly”… or it should be.
When Hanson famously crooned:
“Plant a seed, plant a flower, plant a rose
You can plant any one of those
Keep planting to find out which one grows
It’s a secret no one knows.”
In their wildly popular chart-topping pop-ballad Mmm-Bop, which was, as we all know, a lyrical triumph, they could well have been singing about the Life Box – an environmentally friendly postage box that, when planted, may or may not become a tree.
The cardboard box is laced with tree seeds. You just have to soak the box in water, tear it into pieces, and stick it in the ground. Easy.
Details here.
Some time ago I posted about an invention that monitors the weight component of your toilet transaction. It looks like they weren’t the first to think that idea up – here is a patent submission for a very similar item, from 1924.
Can you imagine people’s Facebook statuses with this sort of thing. “is proud of little Johnny whose bowel movement just registered 700gm on our toilet scale.”
One small step for man, one giant leap for oversharing.
This is a pretty funny story about how internet conspiracy theories spread. It all started with a serious Wired story about a vaccine that may mitigate stress related hormonal damage to your brain.
Headline: Under Pressure: The search for a stress vaccine.
It became a four hundred word tabloid story about a vaccine for stress.
Headline:Jab that could put a stop to stress without slowing us down.
Then a little conspiracy committee decided that what was going on was some sort of clinical trials of a mind altering, brain eating, drug that would be a tool of the nefarious one world government.
Headline: Establishment Media Pushes Brain Eating Vaccines.
This last group encouraged readers to search “brain eating vaccine” on google – and it quickly hit the google trends charts. One day I’m going to spend a bit of energy blogging specifically about the words that are on that chart at the time to see what happens to my traffic.
My good friend Chris is a seahorse expert. Somebody made a minidoco about his work in the waters of Sydney. It’s pretty cool.
Seahorses in Sydney Harbor from Maiara Da Rocha Skarheim on Vimeo.
We all know that some foods were made to go together. Perhaps the most appropriate way to recognise this is in ampersand form. Like these:
There are more here from designer Dan Beckemeyer. Via The Jailbreak.
Here’s how to make an infographic. In case you’ve been wanting to jump on that particular viral bandwagon.
Via here.
This was the last session and concluded with a nice little summary of how these thoughts can be used in meeting culture with the gospel.
Self-rule and self-mastery
If we are to exercise dominion over creation then that should start with the creature closest to us – ourselves. This is one of the things that distinguishes us from the animals. Animals don’t exercise self-control. We can train them, but they are driven by instinct. We are humans who are less than human because we do not exercise dominion over ourselves.
Esau, the hairy baby, is portrayed as a beastly human – a hunter who is at home in the wild. Jacob is more “ideal” – but he has to cover himself in goat skin, like an animal, in order to trick Isaac.
Esau lives on instinct, like an animal. He sells his birthright to satisfy his hunger. He’s not exercising self control.
This opens up some interesting angles on our culture – we define what it is to be human in degrading, instinctive, animalistic terms – “if it feels good do it” is the modus operandi of animals. Does our advertising sell the human experience or a sub-human experience?
Christian ethics – like abstinence before marriage – is decried as unhuman. It’s a case of exercising self-control.
We need a rich and diverse presentation of the gospel to reach our culture – because not every angle will hit every person.
The good news of the gospel is our hyper-restoration. We’re not just restored to Adam’s status but beyond. We go past the pristine. There’s a way out of our beastialised humanity. There’s a way for us to exercise dominion over creation, and ourselves. The gospel reconceives what it means to be human. The question “What does it mean to be human?” is a great way to address our culture with the gospel.
The good news of the gospel is not just about Christ – but about Christ and his Spirit. We’re often Christocentric in a way that forgets the Spirit. It can seem like evangelicals are a bit embarrassed by Jesus’ humanity – we like to focus on his divinity. Our definition of true and normal humanity is skewed – we talk about our reality, normal humanity, as though our fallen selves are the norm. Perhaps Jesus’ humanity is the norm – and is in line with our created identity (ie that which we were created to be prior to the fall). Jesus is the true bearer of the divine image. The true human (in his sinlessness). It’s not super humanity but true humanity. It’s where we’ll be in our resurrected state. Sin is the aberration. We say “to err is human” but that’s really a definition of what it means to be fallen humans.
Jesus may, in fact, be no more than humanity as it’s meant to be. The resurrected Jesus is as humanity was always meant to be.
The writer of Hebrews reads Psalm 8 as a prophecy about the Messiah. “We see him for a little while made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honour.”
True humanity submits to God’s authority – which is what Jesus did, in the extreme, at the cross.
The writer of Hebrews doesn’t limit this picture of glorified humanity to Jesus alone – but puts it as the destination for humanity through Jesus – the purpose of Jesus’ resurrection is to bring many sons to glory. Jesus suffered, died, and rose again so that we might become like him as “sons of God” – not in a vague liberal sense that we’re all sons of god, but to be what Adam was supposed to be.
The doctrine of glorification (eg Romans 8) – we need to think about this doctrine as a now but not yet doctrine – yes, it’s our condition in the age to come, but the power that will transform us (the Holy Spirit) is already at work in us. Mostly it’s not yet. But that power of transforming us into glorified people is already at work in us. The Spirit’s work in us is to make us human in a way that God’s breath into Adam made him human. We’re being made a new people, now glorious.
When we are speaking about what it means to live as true humans Jesus should be our starting point because he is the “true human.”
Ethics
Living as true humans has to mean living in Christ. Once you come at it this way, Christian ethics are simply to live humanly (rather than animalistically).
If we are to understand our fallen humanity as “beastly” where we live without self-control and on instinct. Peter uses the analogy of “brute beasts” when describing those who blaspheme – “creatures of instinct born only to be destroyed”…
Our tendency is to live by instinct. We should, instead, be living via the fruit of the Spirit, a redefinition of what it means to be human (Galatians 5), where self-control gets a Guernsey. Paul’s language in 1 Corinthians 9, with an athletic comparison, also uses self-discipline as a key for life as a Spirit empowered human. The new human is united to Christ and empowered by the Spirit and so is beginning to exercise the dominion that Adam was meant to exercised over creation.
Self-control is about every area of our lives – not just about sex. It’s about our tempers, about controlling our tongues, about controlling our diets, it’s about controlling our passions. This is counter-intuitive in our culture, which regards self-control as an unnecessary prohibition. Our world looks at self-control and calls it a vice (cf Romans 1).
When we look at the fruit of the spirit we should think “this is what it means to be human, no more and no less.”
Fresh angles on evangelism.
We live in a world where everybody is questing to be truly human.
Every religion and ideology, every political vision, is built on the question of what it means to be truly human.
Our political debate is just an expression of what it means to be truly human. The health care debate in the US is also underpinned by what it means to be truly human. The debate about gay rights, our popular culture (eg Twilight), just about every expression in our world is undergirded by this question of what it means to be truly human. We say that the definition of true humanity focuses on the question of Jesus Christ – who shows us what it means to be God, and also what it means to be truly man.
We say “consider Jesus” the one true human, defining humanity by any other starting point is defective. We, as Christians, should be modeling what it means to be human. We are the ones living the truly alternate lifestyle. Our task is to live humanly and model what it means to be truly human.
We are united to Jesus and have begun the process of becoming truly human. We don’t get up and pronounce that we’ve got something that others don’t – but we do model this fuller picture of humanity. As we become more “godlike,” as the Spirit transforms us, we become more human, and then we become advertisements for the gospel.
Our gospel message is redefining and modeling humanity in a way that is hopefully attractive to the people around us.
Deuteronomy – when Israel keeps the law the nations go “oh what a wise God you have…”
Australia is ahead of the US in terms of being a “post-Christian” society – the US is moving that way and grappling with the question of what that will look like.