A Shadow of reality

Yesterday I went to the play Shadowlands, based on the story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Gresham. In it Lewis grapples with the "why of suffering" as he sees his beloved Joy die of cancer:

Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.

The play was beautifully performed by Crossbow productions. Dressing the actors in black and using a largely black set and costumes helped bring out the idea that this life is but a "shadow" of a reality that is to come, where there will be no more death and suffering and pain.

Plane movies 2

I just flew SFO to Auckland. Again on 13 hour flights it is amazing what kind of movies one thinks is good.

I found Wild Target hilarious. But, to some it may be a rather off-beat comedy.

The Bounty Hunter is quite funny and entertaining. It contains a hot relationship and marriage tip: just admit you were wrong and take responsibility.

Redeeming the time

In his Doctrine of Creation, Karl Barth has an interesting discussion of the significance of time in creation. As is often the case, he has a Christological interpretation. Here is an excerpt:

In the death of Jesus Christ the old has passed, but only in such a way that He Himself and His death and the whole witness of the Old Testament concerning Himself and His death are not just past but are still present and future. And in the resurrection of the same Jesus Christ something new has appeared, but in such a way that He Himself and His resurrection and the whole witness of the New Testament concerning Himself as the Resurrected are not only future but are also present and past.

He does not extinguish time; He is "the first and the last and (so) he that liveth" ( Rev. 1¹⁷). He normalises time. He heals its wounds. He fulfils and makes it real. And so He returns it to us in order that we might have it again as "our time," the time of the grace addressed to us, even when we had lost it as "our" time, the time of the sin committed by us. He thus invites us in faith in Him to become contemporaries of genuine time, so that in Him and by Him we, too, have real time. Really to have time is to live in Him and with Him, in virtue of His death and resurrection in the present which is the turning point in which the sin and servitude and condemnation and death of man (and with it also "our" lost time) lie behind us as the past...

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 3.1 Doctrine of Creation, p. 74

Such a perspective should affect how we read the "days" in Genesis and the "thousand years" in Revelation. Real time (i.e. the time of greatest significance) is not defined by atomic clocks, fashion fads, or the passing of governments, but rather by the Resurrection and Return of Jesus.

Happy to be wrong

I am rather dubious about governments bailing out ailing industries. Some of the problem I have with this is the inconsistency of business leaders and conservatives who are constantly calling for less government regulations and a "free market" but won't miss a heart beat when they demand/beg/ask the government rescue them after they have mismanaged their company (and paid themselves huge bonuses....)

When the US government agreed to bailout Chrysler and GM I thought this was like pouring water down the drain.... Hence, I was surprised to see they have recovered. I am happy I was wrong. There is a good op-ed piece:
The auto industry lives. Can we admit that government intervention worked?
by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr.

A message from The Message

This morning I went to church at Christ the King in Anacortes, Washington, my wife's hometown. Some of Robin's friends are on the staff. The talk was mostly on Psalm 23, but made some use of Psalm 18 from The Message. It is interesting to contrast the ESV direct translation:

⁴ The cords of death encompassed me;
the torrents of destruction assailed me;
⁵ the cords of Sheol entangled me;
the snares of death confronted me.

⁶ In my distress I called upon the LORD;
to my God I cried for help.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry to him reached his ears.

to the embellished paraphrase of The Message:

^4-5 The hangman's noose was tight at my throat;
devil waters rushed over me.
Hell's ropes cinched me tight;
death traps barred every exit.
⁶ A hostile world! I call to God,
I cry to God to help me.
From his palace he hears my call;
my cry brings me right into his presence—
a private audience!

I am not a big fan of The Message (my wife is). But, I think it is sometimes good to be jolted out of familiarity with the text.

The beginning and the end of time

Genesis and Revelation are the book ends of the library of the Bible. They can also be the most problematic in interpretation. Yet they can be used to understand each other. Several years ago I gave a sermon at church on Genesis 2 and I found it helpful to connect it to Revelation.

It is interesting to read Karl Barth's exegesis of Genesis 1:16-19:

¹⁶And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. ¹⁷And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, ¹⁸to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. ¹⁹And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

It is not about astronomy or photons or twenty-four hour days or atomic clocks. Rather it is about the theological significance of time, history, and judgement. After discussing Job cursing the day of his birth, Barth concludes:

Job's wish that the day of his birth might never have been is equivalent to the wish that the light of the heavenly bodies might never have shone upon it. It is when there is no light of the heavenly bodies that there is no day, time or history. This then is the actual content of the threat of judgment but also of the corresponding promise of Is. 60 and Rev. 20-21. The wisdom and patience of God which has founded human history has a definite goal, and the finite time granted to man in relation to this history has actually an end.

As the death of Jesus is the goal of that history, it is also the end of time. As all prophecies point to Him, they necessarily speak of the last time this side of His resurrection and return, of the end of time this side of the dawn of the new creation. And they do so by uttering their terrifying warnings but also their friendly promises, not about the end and dissolution of the constellations, but about the end and dissolution of their shining and therefore of their ministry. This ministry of theirs reaches its boundary with the personal entry of God on behalf of His creation, with His own shining as the eternal light, with the resurrection and return of Jesus. Thus the meaning of the work of the fourth day, the meaning of the fact that God found it good (v. 18b), emerges clearly ..... For here again, but this time subjectively, we have to do with the material point at issue- the creation of day, time and history.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 3.1, Doctrine of Creation, p. 167-8.

I am not my brothers keeper

Since I am in the USA I got to read a hard copy of today's New York Times. It has a short piece on Peter Hitchens and his new book, The Rage Against God: Why Faith is the Foundation of Civilisation.

The story of Peter's gradual adult conversion from atheism to Christian is fascinating.

He is the younger brother of atheist, Christopher Hitchens, author of the best-seller God is not Great. A generally sympathetic review in The Guardian by Rupert Shortt, states that Peter Hitchens goal is to:

expose what he holds to be three major fallacies underlying God Is Not Great:

that conflict fought in the name of religion is really always about faith;

that "it is ultimately possible to know with confidence what is right and what is wrong without acknowledging the existence of God"; and

that atheist states are not actually atheist.

The review does criticise Peter Hitchens (a social conservative) for glossing over the fact that Jesus is a radical, ending:

Authentic Christianity is as subversive of social convention as of the God-as-celestial-headmaster caricature on which so much atheist polemic is based. A fuller account of the creed would make more of love than of law or judgment, and have plenty more to say about the figure of Christ. Hitchens's picture is lopsided in important ways.