I literally just finished my last paper for the spring quarter at Fuller Seminary. I am pleased. I have been think over all the stuff that I have learned in the past three months. It is actually pretty staggering. While you are in school you never really feel like you are learning but when you stop and think about it you realize that your tuition dollars are not being wasted. Mom will be pleased.
One of the best things that happened to me this quarter was being forced to read a book I didn't want to read. They say that you can’t judge a book by its cover but I take a completely different approach to the matter. Two things that I enjoy most in life are books and art and those two things come together for me on the book cover. For me the title and cover tell me whether or not I should read the book. My immediate assumption of
Resident Aliens was that it was another cookie cutter Christian book but as soon as I opened it I knew that I was completely mistaken. It is written by two professors from Duke University, Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon. I got the chance to see Willimon speak this quarter at a conference on preaching and it was great. The books sub-title is 'A provocative Christian assessment of culture and ministry for people who know that something is wrong". It is one of the best Christian books I have ever read. It was one of those reads where I was constantly highlighting and desperate to talk to someone about it. The whole time I read it I was reminded of Lee C. Camps 'Mere Discipleship'. It turns out that they are friends. Well anyway on to the content.
They make an amazing connection here:
"On August 6,1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on a Japanese city. Turning to a group of sailors with him on the battle cruiser Augusta, President Truman said, "This is the greatest thing in history." Truman, once described as "an outstanding Baptist layman," was supported by the majority of American Christians, who expressed few misgivings about the bomb. The bomb, however, was the sign of our moral incapacitation, an open admission that we had lost the will and resources to resist vast evil... Obliteration bombing of civilian populations had come to be seen as military necessity. A terrible evil had been defended as a way to a greater good. After the bomb, all sorts of moral compromises were easier - nearly two million abortions a year seemed a mere matter of freedom of choice, and the plight of the poor in the world's richest nation was a matter of economic necessity."
This is huge!- "We had lost the theological resources to resist, lost the resources even to see that there was something worth resisting."
Some other good quotes:
"In short, there is nothing wrong with America that a good war cannot cure."
"We Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve! A flaccid church has robbed atheism of its earlier pretensions of adventure."
"A church that had ceased to ask the right questions as it went about congratulating itself for transforming the world, not noticing, that in fact the world had tamed the church."
"Dying for this state, as Alasdair MacIntyre has said, is "like being asked to die for the telephone company."
I end with this:
"The theologians job is not to make the gospel credible to the modern world,but to make the world credible to the gospel."
Enjoy and goodnight!
