ken wilson online

Something’s happening in American Evangelicalism. We are waking up from a stupor. We are attempting to fear our founder more than we fear our movement’s group think.  Because He is asserting his proprietary rights over His brand–a brand which has been the subject of trademark infringement for too long.  We are standing up to be counted as  conscientious objectors to the evangelical culture war that has been distracting us from the evangelical mission.
Read the rest of this entry »

Something is happening.  After centuries wrestling with the “doctrine of biblical inspiration” believers have worked themselves into an exhausted lethargy about this book.  We’ve been so busy either debunking or defending it, that we’ve forgotten to simply enter it on it’s own terms to know what punch it packs.  But what I see happening is a growing body of people who have no dog in that old fight.  They don’t approach the Bible with any pre-conceived notions about its inspiration or lack thereof. They could care less about words like inerrancy or form criticism.  They may be completely uninformed about the Jesus seminar and reactions to it. They are outside the camp of insitutional religion, but not outside the reach of Jesus.  They are simply readers without rubrics, responding to the text as it is given to them and they are as disparate a group as Reynolds Price, the novelist, Leon Kass, the bio-ethicist at University of Chicago and Layzie Bone, the rapper.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reflecting, meditating, prayerfully musing on the six days of creation in Genesis, chapter one–taking one day each day every day for three weeks now. Letting the words exert themselves on me. What powerful words they are. Like Day Five, using the Robert Alter translation: “And God said, ‘Let the waters swarm with the swarm of living creatures and let fowl fly over the earth across the vault of the heavens.’ And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that crawls, which the water had swarmed forth of each kind and the winged fowl of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas and let the fowl multiply in the earth.’ And it was evening and it was morning, fifth day.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Prepare yourself for an ordeal. Heh-heh. That’s what the author of one of the books that made it into the almost canon said to those wishing to serve the Lord. What kind of ordeal? The ordeal of community, family, relationships, of being together with others, in, say, a church, or at work, or in a neighborhood, or any other gathering of humans together with other humans. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together says that the enemy of community is the ideal of community. Striving for the ideal community kills the real one. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, ye who may be drawn to pastoral ministry by the longing to escape the real community for the ideal one. Exchanging the pursuit of the real God for an ideal one.
Read the rest of this entry »

There is a grinding inner world behind our eyes and between our ears.  Our thoughts being grist for some mill whose operator we only seem to be.  The thoughts themselves are often wrapped in anxiety, born along by fear, an unnamed and therefor wild dread, or thoughts that seem to suck the beauty out of life into the wormhole of boredom.  And this is why we pray and why we avoid prayer.  We seek to pray because of this, to escape it, or move beyond it; but when prayer simply leads us deeper into this grinding world, we avoid it.  Ecstasy is what we seek, to stand outside of all this, or within it, to peer beyond it.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been nearly two months now of meditating my way through the psalms in a more daily-disciplined way. Man, what took me so long? I’ve made my way through psalm 18, so far. But this post isn’t about a particular meditation so much as a reflection on how much we’ve been missing it when it comes to engaging the Bible. Jesus and those of his generation must have mainly engaged the Bible through times of meditation. They didn’t scarf down the bible through reading long stretches of it at a time. They couldn’t have, not having their own copies. The Bible they had was the Bible they heard from each other and the Bible they had committed to memory, itself a form of meditation. Which brings me, to my point: it’s time that we moved beyond the severe limitations of the words “conservative” and “liberal” as descriptors for the way we approach the bible.
Read the rest of this entry »

Amy egged me on, so here’s more. The brain is where the God action is; if the body is the temple the brain is the holy of holies. The part of the brain that causes so much stress, burn-out, pre-occupation, is the overdeveloped fear-fight-flight response of the autonomic system, the amygdala, and associated structures. It’s the warning-alert system key to survival, so it’s been super-charged, but it goes overboard often. Hands get cold, heart rate increases, blood pressure rises. So much of our “ruminating” our overthinking is a response to this part of the brain doing it’s job too well. You get the nasty email from the co-worker on Friday at 5:30 and it sets you off, and you write and re-write your response to that email all weekend long in your head.
Read the rest of this entry »

Listened to Lauren Winner lecturing Monday night. It’s a lovely thing how God speaks to us–straight into us, me that is–through another. My ears heard such speakings from Lauren: that time is meant to be inhabited rather than spent. (As God himself is meant to be inhabited rather than used.) And that to pray the psalms is to enter the prayer life of Jesus.
Read the rest of this entry »

Second or third morning on psalm 6: I weary in my sighing/I make my bed swim every night/ with my tears I water my couch/From vexation my eye becomes dim/is worn out because of all my foes/Turn from me all you wrongdoers/for the Lord hears the sound of my weeping (7-9). Last night Ebony said it well, reflecting on the model of daily prayer she inherited: “I was expected to pray with weeping and screaming and bleeding, and I just didn’t have the energy for that on a daily basis.” Sometimes you just can’t keep up with these psalmists in the intensity department….
Read the rest of this entry »

This morning psalm 4 meditative reading, verse 4, “Quake, and do not offend./Speak in your hearts on your bed and be still.” An extended time of stupid thinking on “quake.” For all the concern about moral trespass in much of contemporary evangelicalism (for all its foolishness, yet the most vibrant form of Christian faith on the planet right now), there is little exhortation to quake. Somehow this lodged in the morning’s meditation. What does the psalmist know that I don’t that allows him to urge others to quake, as if they ought to? Can, on command? As if quaking is something one does, something that is part and parcel of knowing God.

Lectio seems to invite us to accept the experience of the psalmist and to see the world through the eyes of the psalmist. The meditative part is to suspend disbelief or criticism of the psalmist long enough to simply see the world through his eyes for a time. Like the movie Cloverfield,
Read the rest of this entry »