Virtually Paul

The Australian public doesn’t click with Jesus?

Apologies for trying to provoke your interest with the post title but something that I saw online today got me thinking big time.  I don’t know if you picked up the 3rd or 4th tier news story in the last couple of days about some church putting up a “Jesus loves Osama” sign out the front? (Matt Glover has already mentioned it.) Digger has a bit more to say about it as well but his site is in the middle of transferring to a new domain so I can’t link the post.  What you may not know is that on a certain quite prominent Australian website (which may or may not force itself to be the default homepage in the default browser on a popular operating system)… yes, well… a website, which shall remain nameless… ran a poll with the question:

Are churches right to say ‘Jesus loves Osama’?

Out of the 185,000 odd clicks that the poll had received when I last looked, I was unsurprised but at the same time kind of intrigued, to find that about 82% of respondents voted “No.” (If you’re a uni student, that’s a HD… so “No” did pretty well for itself.)

You wouldn’t have thought that something like this would surprise me. But it did. Maybe it’s the church kid in me. See, I’ve grown up in an environment where, even if people did an absolutely pathetic job of practicing what they preach, the essence of the Christian message - the Gospel of grace and forgiveness - was always something that I’ve been hearing about. It actually hadn’t occurred to me that most people actually don’t have the same experience. After 23 years as a church participant, I’m very accustomed to the idea of forgiving the undeserving and the guilty. In fact, if Jesus doesn’t love Osama, then he isn’t who Christians think he is. That’s how deep it goes.

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity says:

Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.

I’m only just beginning to feel like I understand what it really means to “Love your neighbour as yourself”. I guess I expected more from everyone else. I guess I expected people to see that, as humans, we really stand to benefit far more from hating actions rather than hating other people.

Book Review: Habits of the High-Tech Heart - Quentin J. Schultze

Schultze uses this book to take an in-depth look at the role of information technologies within our society, the purposes for which we use them and the resulting impact that this use has upon the quality of our lives. Appropriately, Schultze focuses on the usage of information technologies rather than criticising their use. His discussion centralises around an objection to ‘informationism’ as he attempts to demonstrate how technology is used to communicate without a sensitivity to human needs.Schultze’s basic contention is not unlike Postman’s critique of the role of television in society. Schultze believes that our society has sacrificed a conscious choice towards a virtuous, community-oriented and fulfilling existence, for one that is marred by a false consumer-driven hope in our technological ability to satisfy our needs. He quite effectively illustrates that the virtuous traditions of ‘revealed religion’ are the missing link needed to “reconcile our embellishments of technological ability with the reality of what it means to be human.”

Book Review: Preaching to a Postmodern World - Graham Johnston

Graham Johnston does a wonderful job of communicating the framework for postmodern thinking to a target audience of Bible-believing preachers. The text effectively recontextualises the communication of the Gospel message into the ruins of the modern era, where many are no longer willing to believe in the scientific-rationalist independence from faith that was the hallmark of the baby-boomers. Johnston’s analysis of the resulting postmodern culture shows a way forward for Gospel communication, while warning preachers that their listeners will fail to hear the message if it is not communicated in a way that is sympathetic towards their worldview.

This book was a refreshing change in tone from some of the other reading that I’ve done this semester. I felt as though I indentified with the author moreso than in my encounters with the other texts. I could perhaps attribute this to a cultural bias, given that Johnston is a fellow Australian. However, I think this sense of identification was most enhanced by Johnston’s use of illustrations which richly and effectively illustrated his points.

I found another review which made me wonder whether the book will actually be able to challenge modern thinking in experienced preachers. I suspect that the reviewer, Sam Horn, is likely to be a greater authority on the subject than I, given the letters “Ph.D.” after his name. However, I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d completely missed the point, given that the conclusion of Horn’s review spent most of its time criticising Johnston for using an illustration containing homosexual practices.

“In fairness to Johnston, a careful reading does not reveal a pro-homosexual agenda or even acceptance. However, neither does he clearly state his stance against homosexuality and given the nature of the illustration, one would expect at least a caveat of disclaimer somewhere in the paragraph.”

Horn seemed to miss Johnston’s point about the postmodern objection to unequivocal moral pronouncements from the institutionalised church. Whether Johnston thinks homosexuality is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is entirely beside the point. It’s about time that the church realised that people want our love first and our opinions on morality second (if at all).

Hopefully Johnston made a few preachers squirm ever so slightly in their reading chairs.

Great Quote: Habits of a High-Tech Heart

“How could the software of a billion-dollar company - Microsoft - become susceptible to a simple virus program that probably hundreds of thousands of moderately savvy programmers could have written?”

-Schultze, Q.

Book review on the way…

Review Links: Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3933.html

http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2004/09/26/amusing_ourselve.php

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/05/20/163817.php

http://www.rogerwaters.org/nowthis.html

http://www.answers.com/topic/amusing-ourselves-to-death

Book Review: Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman

I had to read this book for college as part of my Communication Principles subject. At first, the title was somewhat of an irony. The first half of the book was quite boring. As I was thinking about what I’d put in this book review (an edited version of which I will have to hand in formally), I considered assigning it to the genre I like to call “constipated anglican waffle”. The book, however, sufficiently redeems itself.The first section is devoted to a thorough examination of the relationship between cultural conversations and the media used to conduct them. Postman makes observations as to the context within which a culture communicates and the shape of the society which results. Focusing predominantly on American history, Postman examines in detail the transition from the local community, where the written word was champion as the primary mode for ‘public discourse’, through to the emergence of the ‘global village’, which began with the invention of the telegraph and evolved towards television. As it was written in 1985, it does not even begin to touch on the application of Postman’s ideas to the internet. However, this is a logical extension of his argument and one worth considering once one has read through his ideas. Postman’s primary contention through his largely comparitive discussion, is that a print-based culture is more intelligent than a television-based one. He examines in detail the way in which the printed word facilitates the discovery of truth through the critical analysis of ideas. This, he says, better facilitates education and informed opinion. By comparison, Postman believes that the nature of television is one which, simply by association, encourages education, politics and religion to lose their core messages and assimilate into the entertainment landscape on the box. Refreshingly, Postman does not criticise television for being entertaining. Rather, he criticises our society for expecting it to be anything but entertainment. His underlying concern is that our culture will willingly sacrifice its capacity for intelligent thought for the illusion that television keeps us informed. The book does not make for the most thrilling read, which is probably a good thing from the author’s perspective, seeing that Postman proclaims entertainment to be the death of culture. The fact that you and I both have some expectation that a book will be entertaining, probably actually strengthens his argument to an extent. I’d recommend it for anyone interested in thinking about how the Christian faith is communicated within our culture, particularly through the use of print and electronic media, simply because I have never seen these quite relevant ideas presented (or even discussed) in any other place. You can download the MPEG of this blog post… …just kidding!