I invite you to listen to my newest Ambient composition, River of Life. The title reference is to Rev. 22:17: “Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life.”
Technical information: sequenced in Sonar 4. Drum loop is from Sonic Fondry’s Downtempo Beats. Synths are Absynth 3, Psyn, and Cheese Factory.”
This is to announce the first “Emerging Bloggers’ Carnival.” The concept of a “Blog Carnival” is to offer a theme for folks to blog about and then to collect and summarize the entries of those who participate. It’s a fun way for bloggers with similar interests to get to know each other. It’s not a competition — all the entries will be cataloged and none will be judged.
So, I’ll try to give it a shot and propose a theme for the first carnival: Emergent and the Intelligent Design Debate. I’ve you’ve been following the news on the ID debate, there have been some recent, well-publicized examples of ID proponents attempting to incorporate ID into school science curricula, with the expected outcry and backlash from the media and the scientific establishment. So, what do you think of ID, the effort to have ID taught in public schools, the distinctions drawn between “science” and “faith” in the popular media, etc.?
Send me links to your posts, either by email or, preferably, by a trackback to this post. Next Tuesday (Feb. 1), I’ll post a summary of and links to everyone’s posts.
Isaiah 37 records a showdown between the army of Sennacherib, King of Assyria, and Hezekiah, King of Judah. Previously Hezekiah had buckled under to Assyria by paying tribute that included “all the silver that was found in the temple of the Lord and in the treasuries of the royal palace” and “the gold with which he had covered the doors and doorposts of the temple of the Lord.” (2 Kings 18:14-16.) Sennacherib wasn’t satisfied and came back for more, with an army arrayed before the walls of Jerusalem.
This time, Hezekiah did the right thing. After he received a demand letter from Sennacherib’s representative, “he went up to the temple of the Lord and spread it out before the Lord. And Hezekiah prayed to the Lord. . .” (Isaiah 37:14.) The Lord heard Hezekiah’s prayer and wiped out the Assyrian threat. (Isaiah 37:36-38.)
When we are threatened by the troubles of life, how do we respond? Do we simply give in and pay tribute? Do we fight back? Or do we spread them out before the Lord and pray?
Once again, Globe Trekker demonstrates why it’s the best show on TV. Justine Shapiro’s ramble through Southern Italy is as funny as it is enlightening about the local culture. Her impromptu visit with a family in a “trulli,” a conical home in the little town of Arberobello, is side-splitting. If I could just dig out my old rucksack, grab a railpass, and tromp around Europe for a month or so!
It’s interesting to me that many Christians seem to place so much faith in the “marketplace of ideas.” The sub-sub-title of Hewitt’s book Blog, for example, is “Why you must know how the blogosphere is smashing the old media monopoly and giving individuals power in the marketplace of ideas.” (Emphasis added.) (No, sub-sub-title isn’t a typo, the book has two subtitles — go figure.)
The “marketplace of ideas” is a metaphor first employed by Justice Oliver Wendell Homes in a 1919 U.S. Supreme Court opinion concerning the First Amendment. It’s become a central metaphor in free speech jurisprudence. The idea is that censorship is unnecessary because bad ideas will lose in the marketplace to good ideas.
Many politically and intellectually active Christians, particularly those of us who blog, consciously or unconsciously have internalized this metaphor. We believe that we can win the “culture wars” if we gain access to, and perhaps control over, the fora of cultural communication. This seems to me to be on of the central messages of Hewitt’s “Blog”: Christian soldiers and conservatives should get into the blogsphere and flood it with our ideas, which will win on the merits over the pap served up in the mainstream media.
Why should we have such confidence? Scripture gives no hint that good ideas will triumph in the marketplace. In fact, it tells us the contrary: “First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.” (2 Peter 3:3.) Scripture reminds us that the truth we proclaim is “foolishness” to the world:
“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” (I Cor. 1:18.)
In that same passage in First Corinthians, Paul continues with the exhortation that our principal responsibility is not to make arguments or perform miraculous signs, but to “preach Christ.” I love the balance Paul reaches here — a balance that’s as relevant to us in 2005 as it was to the first century church. The “proof” of our faith isn’t in the Catholic Scholastic’s syllogisms, the Evangelical’s neat apologetic, or the Presbyterian’s carefully worded confession; nor is it in the Pentacostal’s signs and wonders or the Charismatic’s emotional immediacy. Read it as Paul says it:
Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength. (I Cor. 1:20-31.)
The “proof” of our faith, then, is the person of Christ working in and through His Church. And the person of Christ, along with His Church, will be rejected by the so-called wise and powerful of this world. The “marketplace of ideas” in this sense isn’t a functional market because the consumers of ideas lack perfect, or even decent, information about what they are consuming if they reject the person of Christ. We cannot expect our ideas to “win” in such a market.
What we can expect is the vindication of truth in Christ’s return. After Peter warns his readers about “scoffers,” he reminds them that Christ will indeed return one day “like a thief.” (2 Peter 3:10.) The Kindgom of God prevails, not because of the invisible hand of a marketplace of ideas functioning among enlightened people, not because a mass of Christian bloggers overwhelms the mainstream media, but because Christ returns as king and judge to bring to fruition the work He begain in the Church.
Should we then give up on promoting our ideas, in the blogsphere or elsehwere? No. Peter also tells us we should “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” — with “gentleness and respect”(!)(1 Peter 3:15). And the fact that the Church’s prophetic message will be rejected in the broader marketplace of ideas is no excuse to quit the bold proclamation of the gospel. We must always remember, however, that the idea of the gospel is not a market commodity that we must promote the way Nike promotes basketball shoes. It is the “power of God” and the “wisdom of God,” which we proclaim in faithful expectation of His return.
Version 1.o of the Emerging Blogroll is done. Go to this link to download the text file that contains the script. Click on the link and it will display the blogroll on a new page. Right click on the resulting page, select “view source,” and then copy the code. Past the code into the apropriate place in your blog template, and viola, you’ll have a ready-made blogroll of self-identified “Emerging” sites. For a sample, see the “Emerging Blogroll” on the left sidebar of this site.
If the method I described above doesn’t work, you can right click on the link to download the text file, open it in Notepad or another text editor, and then copy the code from there. If you have any problems with this, let me know, and I’ll try to fix them and/or help out.
For those who still wish to sign up for the blogroll, please send me an email with your blog URL and blog name. I’ll update the roll periodically. Also, keep watching this space for an OPML file that will allow you to quickly add each of the sites on the Roll to your newsreader.
Inspired by the Evangelical Blogroll created by Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost, and following up on a discussion about blogrolls on The Ooze, I’m starting an “Emergent Blogroll.” This will result in a script generated through the Blogrolling service that anyone will be able to paste into their blog template, generating a ready-made “Emergent Blogroll” for your own site.
If you wish to participate, please leave the title and URL of your blog as a comment to this post. I’ll compile the blogroll and post the script code in a later post.
In Isaiah 30, God (through Isaiah) chides His people for wanting to hear only what they want to hear. These are cautionary words for us today as well. They speak so powerfully that I don’t have much commentary to add:
There are rebellious people, deceitful children,
children unwilling to listen to the Lord’s instruction.
They say to the seers,
“See no more visions!”
and to the prophets,
“Give us no more visions of what is right!”
Tell us pleasant things,
prophesy illusions.
Leave this way,
get off this path,
and stop confronting us
with the Holy One of Israel!”. . .
This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says:
“In repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength,
but you would have none of it.”
May we find repentance, rest, quietness and trust.
This is the second in my “Spiritual Perils of Bogging” series. Today I focus on Envy.
Envy is a danger inherent in any “public” work. As an academic, for example, publication is the coin of the realm. All academics compete for space in the presigious journals within their fields. It can be extraordinarily difficult to appreciate the work of other academics without thinking “why should he have gotten this great article placement — I could have done it better.” Sometimes there’s a temptation to criticize and discredit others out of envy. This is particularly the case early in an academic career when life is “publish or perish.”
The same dynamic can apply, I think, in the blogsphere. I know I’ve thought many times, “why does so-and-so get all that traffic? He doesn’t say anything remarkable. I should be the guy mentioned in Hugh Hewitt’s book, not him.” The motivation for maintaining and promoting a blog can become more to compete than to participate in a conversation.
Most of us in the “tail” of the faith-based blogsphere will need to make peace with the fact that we will never get to the fat part of the traffic curve. Maybe sometimes we “tail-ers” will have more of substance to say than the “big guys,” but our responsibility is to keep saying it as well as we can and to make it available as best we can. If God has plans to expand the influence of my little blog He’ll accomplish them, and if He doesn’t, I’ll try to be faithful to whatever His purposes might be.
For those of us who name Christ as Lord, our blogs, like anything else, are His to use as He sees fit. There’s no place, then, for any of us to envy the “success” of other bloggers. “Success,” after all, shouldn’t be counted in page hits, unique visits, or Instapundit mentions, but in faithfulness.