Simply Christian - N. T. Wright
I told MP I would not read this book. That was premature. What I really meant was I would not buy it and it is inconvenient trying to park downtown to go to the downtown public library. That would have been oversharing to explain, not to say I have not overshared before. I'm trying to be good.
But where I stayed this weekend was very close to the downtown library so DW and I walked over there Saturday. We saw Louise Alexander which was nice. I was able to pick it up without a problem. I figured by now my card would be expired but it wasn't. It seems like a long time since I have checked out an HPL book. I am so spoiled by the Rice Library. They have a great collection, I like older books, and they let me keep them for 30 days. HPL only allows 14 days, often too short for me.
Plus the workers at HPL have many times not checked my book in when I return it causing me to have to prove to them I do not owe late fees, that it is on their shelves, or already checked out again. This is maddening as you can imagine. So I never put them in the book slot and always insist on watching them swipe the books as returned. This is often inconvenient and they do not appreciate my attitude. So I have tried to stop checking out HPL books.
So I broke my rule this weekend. I got Simply Christian and one of the newer Cat Who books. Rice has none of the Cat Who books. They also do not have much N. T. Wright and certainly not Simply Christian.
DW got two mystery books on spec. The first one was too gross and she did not get far. The second one she liked better and she finished it Saturday night. Friday she finished her Sue Grafton book "I is for Innocent". Because I have not read it yet she gave me some slight teasers but did not spoil it. She did mention a surprise. I'm OK, by the time I start it I will have forgotten what she said, hehe.
I have issues with N. T. Wright that are at best petty. I would love to think I will hate this book. But I probably will not. I will try not to be too annoyed about this. There has to be a reason why Wright is liked by many people that I respect. These people are from all sorts of Christian perspectives. I would like to find glaring problems with his style or theology. But I probably will not. Less certain to me is whether I will find this book helpful to my faith.
I just finished the short introduction. The title of the book reminds one of Lewis', Mere Christianity. It seems he is attempting to do the same thing Lewis was. I am also reminded of Alpha, the series of talks given by Nicky Gumbel. The introduction says he is trying to do what Gumbel is, explain Christianity both to those outside and inside the faith. The subtitle "Why Christianity Makes Sense" implies he as trying to write an apology here. But the introduction never says anything directly about this. Is this British understatement? We shall see I guess.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Sir Gibbie original version by George McDonald
Sir Gibbie original version by George McDonald
Sir Gibble is almost done. I cheated and snuck to the end with about forty pages to go. So sue me. I guess I suspected how it would end. Sort of. The girl who is the most liked by the author wins our hero despite his best efforts to push her into the arms of his best friend. Nevermind that they are cousins. Maybe not first cousins, the book never says about that. Did the author forget about that? No I suspect not. He may have thought it was an added plus, keep the marriage (and the money) in the clan so speak. Remember this is Scotland.
Sir Gibbie is the original volume. These books have been "translated". And the translated books have been renamed. I cannot remember the modern name. In the original book dialogue that is carried on in "broad Scotch" is spelled out some of phonetically. It is often pretty hard to get the exact meaning but you can get the gist. In a translation there is a little missed as when the man speaks in his this native tongue when being informal and speaks in good English to put down his hearer. I guess this is explained in the authors comments. So there may be no reason not to go for the translation except that I am reading out of a library full of older books. This library does not have the newer versions.
Gibble has qualities of Pollyanna. Anyone remember Pollyanna? She too was a happy child in the face of circumstances. She too took it upon herself to see to it that people's lives turned out well, happily we might say. Except McDonald is also very interested in people's souls, their salvation as well as their earthly well being. So Gibble works to set people along the right path to God as well as to make them successful and comfortable.
I wonder if it works like that. Not as much as McDonald's romance makes it out. Of course this is a romance, one must never forget that. A romance is as much about what they author would like to see reality be as anything else. McDonald would like an almost Christlike figure like Gibbie be able to influence people to faith.
Do we think God is like that, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit? Do they influence people towards faith? Is it as active as Gibbie is or is it more passive? Now Gibbie works behind the scenes so to speak. Often people do not know he is setting up situations. For myself I think it retrospect I can see I helped to set up situations a few times. But I was certainly not smart enough to do it myself. God arranged things not me. I only had it revealed to me later. There may be other times that God used me that I certainly will never be aware of, this side of the grave anyway.
There is another character in this book a Donald (Donal) Grant. He is the young man who did not get the girl. McDonald was very interested in him too. We are told inside this book that the author might write about Donald in another book. It seems he did, three volumes full. I will tackle that one soon, if God allows me to.
A lot can be said about Sir Gibbie. According to something I looked at while working on this entry, Gibbie was a favorite character of C. S. Lewis and that Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was influenced or inspired by Gibbie.
Sir Gibble is almost done. I cheated and snuck to the end with about forty pages to go. So sue me. I guess I suspected how it would end. Sort of. The girl who is the most liked by the author wins our hero despite his best efforts to push her into the arms of his best friend. Nevermind that they are cousins. Maybe not first cousins, the book never says about that. Did the author forget about that? No I suspect not. He may have thought it was an added plus, keep the marriage (and the money) in the clan so speak. Remember this is Scotland.
Sir Gibbie is the original volume. These books have been "translated". And the translated books have been renamed. I cannot remember the modern name. In the original book dialogue that is carried on in "broad Scotch" is spelled out some of phonetically. It is often pretty hard to get the exact meaning but you can get the gist. In a translation there is a little missed as when the man speaks in his this native tongue when being informal and speaks in good English to put down his hearer. I guess this is explained in the authors comments. So there may be no reason not to go for the translation except that I am reading out of a library full of older books. This library does not have the newer versions.
Gibble has qualities of Pollyanna. Anyone remember Pollyanna? She too was a happy child in the face of circumstances. She too took it upon herself to see to it that people's lives turned out well, happily we might say. Except McDonald is also very interested in people's souls, their salvation as well as their earthly well being. So Gibble works to set people along the right path to God as well as to make them successful and comfortable.
I wonder if it works like that. Not as much as McDonald's romance makes it out. Of course this is a romance, one must never forget that. A romance is as much about what they author would like to see reality be as anything else. McDonald would like an almost Christlike figure like Gibbie be able to influence people to faith.
Do we think God is like that, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit? Do they influence people towards faith? Is it as active as Gibbie is or is it more passive? Now Gibbie works behind the scenes so to speak. Often people do not know he is setting up situations. For myself I think it retrospect I can see I helped to set up situations a few times. But I was certainly not smart enough to do it myself. God arranged things not me. I only had it revealed to me later. There may be other times that God used me that I certainly will never be aware of, this side of the grave anyway.
There is another character in this book a Donald (Donal) Grant. He is the young man who did not get the girl. McDonald was very interested in him too. We are told inside this book that the author might write about Donald in another book. It seems he did, three volumes full. I will tackle that one soon, if God allows me to.
A lot can be said about Sir Gibbie. According to something I looked at while working on this entry, Gibbie was a favorite character of C. S. Lewis and that Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was influenced or inspired by Gibbie.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Evolution versus Creation revisited
Evolution versus Creation revisited
We were discussing evolution, the beginning of the universe, how long the universe has been in existence. Phillip Collins in his talk a week or so ago mentioned 15.7 billions years as the age of the universe. He stated it categorically as if that date is set in stone. It's as if we had always known this.
In fact as few as ten years ago I know for a fact a different number was being used. Back then that number was the fact according to some.
I recall that God demanded of Job that Job tell him how he made the universe (Job 38+). He asked Job if he was there. Of course the answer is no. We were not there. We cannot ever understand how God made matter out of nothing. We have no idea how God did it. Even if we accept the idea that the universe began 15.7 billion years ago in a big bang, we don't know why. We cannot really know how. It is a unique, unrepeatable event.
Job 38 is interesting. In a parable like way God asks him if he knows why he set gravity the way he did. Why is Avogadro's number such as it is? And so on ... These are questions that scientists cannot begin to answer so mostly they pretend that these questions do not exist.
Science does best when it observes physical events that can be controlled and repeated. Science is at a loss when it dabbles in origin theories. Origins by their very nature are unrepeatable events. We can only hypothesize, guess as it were.
So what we have in the Bible in Genesis is an origin account. Several unrepeatable events are revealed. Most Christians think these things were revealed by God. He explained them to man in a way that he could understand. And don't think we, in our sophistication, are much different than the original readers of these stories. We can take God's word for it or not. If we do not then we have lost some faith.
Someone else, it may have been Colson again, mentioned something else that is interesting. Blind evolutionary forces is such a large universe over such long time periods should have created other worlds with other life forms. Life forms with self-consciousness such as we have. There have been many millions of dollars spent trying to find and contact such life forms. SETI and such endeavors have been absolutely unsuccessful at finding anything remotely likely. In fact I am not aware of anything like our solar system anywhere on any of the stars they have examined. I think they closest thing to planets found to date are some seemingly dead stars rotating around another star. These dead stars are usually pretty big. Now it could be that at such long distances it is hard to see something as small as a planet the size of earth. But it not for lack of trying that they have not found direct or indirect evidence of planetary systems. Most theories of solar system development would as a corollary theorize that lots of stars would have planets around them. But this does not seem to be the case.
It would seem that if blind evolution could product complex life forms like ourselves in one little corner of the universe it could do so in many places. Perhaps they are just too far away to be contacted but so far nothing at all hopeful has come to light. Science fiction likes to ponder many worlds with advanced civilizations and ways to communicate and travel to a fro. But so far reality has proved very different.
We were discussing evolution, the beginning of the universe, how long the universe has been in existence. Phillip Collins in his talk a week or so ago mentioned 15.7 billions years as the age of the universe. He stated it categorically as if that date is set in stone. It's as if we had always known this.
In fact as few as ten years ago I know for a fact a different number was being used. Back then that number was the fact according to some.
I recall that God demanded of Job that Job tell him how he made the universe (Job 38+). He asked Job if he was there. Of course the answer is no. We were not there. We cannot ever understand how God made matter out of nothing. We have no idea how God did it. Even if we accept the idea that the universe began 15.7 billion years ago in a big bang, we don't know why. We cannot really know how. It is a unique, unrepeatable event.
Job 38 is interesting. In a parable like way God asks him if he knows why he set gravity the way he did. Why is Avogadro's number such as it is? And so on ... These are questions that scientists cannot begin to answer so mostly they pretend that these questions do not exist.
Science does best when it observes physical events that can be controlled and repeated. Science is at a loss when it dabbles in origin theories. Origins by their very nature are unrepeatable events. We can only hypothesize, guess as it were.
So what we have in the Bible in Genesis is an origin account. Several unrepeatable events are revealed. Most Christians think these things were revealed by God. He explained them to man in a way that he could understand. And don't think we, in our sophistication, are much different than the original readers of these stories. We can take God's word for it or not. If we do not then we have lost some faith.
Someone else, it may have been Colson again, mentioned something else that is interesting. Blind evolutionary forces is such a large universe over such long time periods should have created other worlds with other life forms. Life forms with self-consciousness such as we have. There have been many millions of dollars spent trying to find and contact such life forms. SETI and such endeavors have been absolutely unsuccessful at finding anything remotely likely. In fact I am not aware of anything like our solar system anywhere on any of the stars they have examined. I think they closest thing to planets found to date are some seemingly dead stars rotating around another star. These dead stars are usually pretty big. Now it could be that at such long distances it is hard to see something as small as a planet the size of earth. But it not for lack of trying that they have not found direct or indirect evidence of planetary systems. Most theories of solar system development would as a corollary theorize that lots of stars would have planets around them. But this does not seem to be the case.
It would seem that if blind evolution could product complex life forms like ourselves in one little corner of the universe it could do so in many places. Perhaps they are just too far away to be contacted but so far nothing at all hopeful has come to light. Science fiction likes to ponder many worlds with advanced civilizations and ways to communicate and travel to a fro. But so far reality has proved very different.
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