I continue posting short video clips of Dr. Craig Keener on both miracles in biblical times and in the present day.
Below, he shares about a blind leper being healed of his blindness. Continue reading
Healing Blindness
Reply
Author Archives: ScottL
Modernism & Scripture
I love Scripture. Dearly love it. I love to read it, love to study it, love to reflect on it, love to teach it, love to hear God speak in and through it. I was drawn to this book just over 15 years ago, on that radical day of transformation when I entered into new creation in Christ. And from the beginning I have been a part of God’s people who also hold Scripture with the highest regard. In one sense, I would be somewhat baffled if one says they love Jesus and did not love Scripture.
As a side caveat, and as I have mentioned before, I am no philosopher (nor historian or scientist). I function mainly in a shepherding-teaching role within the local church context. I touch somewhat deeply into theology. But my goal is to, in some way or fashion, help God’s people build a biblical framework to help them engage in their world today. Not the word of the first century or the 16th century or the 20th century. The world of today.
Having said that, I think the best way to engage our world today with biblical teaching is to read it with a first century understanding (as best we can!) and then appropriate such teaching within a 21st century framework. No, this is not about letting culture dictate to us. Rather, it’s simply about letting God’s dynamic and organic revelation become real today.
Moving forward in my just over 15 years of Christian life, while my love for Scripture has remained very strong, my general theological and philosophical perspective of how to engage with Scripture has gone through a paradigm shift. I’ve become less and less committed to the more modernistic, Cartesian, empirical approach to knowing truth and have begun to slowly embrace a more postmodern, practical realist approach to knowing truth.
A modern approach centres everything in objectivity. Subjective truth is not a firm foundation. Objective, verifiable, evidence-based truth is firm.
Sounds good, right?
I mean, God is absolute truth and Scripture is his word. Thus, Scripture must be absolute, or objective, truth.
Well, I’m not so sure it works out that way. Continue reading
Re-reading The Shack
Five years ago this month, William Paul Young self-published a book that would become a New York Times bestseller, selling a million copies in just over one year. Of course, that book is known as The Shack. I first read the book in the late summer of 2008, posting a more positive 3-article review – article 1, article 2, article 3. I gave a more detailed, in-depth review due to some of the negative hubbub created within the evangelical church, which as with Rob Bell’s Love Wins, it probably created more sales than it deterred.
Over the past months, I have been drawn to pick up the book again, read it afresh after all the craze (both positive and negative) has died down. Maybe I am being drawn back to the book as Mack was drawn back to the shack where his daughter was horribly slain. I have no such tragedy in my life that compares to that of the storied account ofThe Shack, but I do expect to learn as I re-engage with the book this time around, something about God and his good purposes in the midst of tragedy.
We shall see.
On a side note, it grieves me to read of the lawsuit that took place in 2010 over the royalties for the book. It seems Young and former partners of Windblown Media, Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings. Nevertheless, I pick up the book with the anticipation of engaging with God as I turn the pages.
Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?
I am no philosopher, nor historian, nor scientist. I am simply a teacher-shepherd looking to help people understand God and his kingdom, especially within our world today. Still, at times, I find it interesting to engage with these fields. So this week, I have begun reading James K. A. (or Jamie) Smith’s work, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church. And I have appreciated the little I have read concerning postmodern thought in these two books: God’s Word in Human Words by Kenton Sparks and How (Not) to Speak of God by Peter Rollins.
This whole discussion around postmodernism is and has been a touchy subject within the church for the past decade, with not a few evangelicals identifying postmodernism as inherently evil.
But is it?
Jamie Smith comes from a very strong reformed background, teaching philosophy at Calvin College. Yet, as a philosopher, and still knowing his theological roots, Smith takes up the challenge to show how postmodern thought is not intrinsically wrong and can actually be helpful for the church as we move forward more and more in the 21st century. Continue reading
Raised from the Dead
Craig Keener continues his discussion around the reality of the miraculous today, this being connected to his newest released work, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. Here, he particularly recounts the story of his own sister-in-law who was raised back to life after being dead for 3 hours. He also discusses other accounts of raisings of the dead.
What’s interesting is the way in which Keener discusses these. Remember, he has had his theological perspective changed because of his own studies and because of God’s work of miracles in his own family, being married to a Congolese-African woman. But Keener does not approach this like a typical ‘super-charismatic’. He is very calm and collective as he recounts what took place and he maintains a strong theological anchor. Continue reading
