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Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Christianity

Steps to Open a Bible College

June 19, 2020 by Geoff 1 Comment

One of my dreams used to be to open a small seminary that helped ministers (Sunday school teachers, preachers, parents, etc) learn more fully the skills of the calling. I got my idea from this list in like 2006. It takes something of a vocational school approach. I’ve put the most interesting ones in bold.

I found them in “Charles Spurgeon: His Faith and Works” pp 154-155.

  1. Found a College into which men with an ordinary English education can be admitted without being degraded by comparison with graduates of secular universities. 
  2. Set before the men no ambition after scholarship for its own sake, but keep them to the one aim of being soul-winners and edifiers of the saints—therefore do not aim at degrees, etc. 
  3. Provide for poor men all necessaries—board, lodging, clothes, books, in fact, all they want. 
  4. Keep all this at the cheapest rate, that men may not form habits they cannot afterward live up to. 
  5. Affiliate the College to a large working church. Expect the men to be members, and during the first six months workers in the schools, etc. 
  6. Keep the period of study short, say two to three years. Never exceed this. Men who cannot do in that time, are no great good for rough work. 
  7. Give every man the first three or six months as probation, and constantly weed out the idle, vain, inefficient, or devoid of zeal. 
  8. Keep up the devotional spirit by giving half a day in the week for nothing but prayer. Begin each class with prayer.
  9. Make them live in Christian families, and send round a Christian man constantly to inquire as to habits, domestic, moral, etc.
  10. Make it known by your magazines and papers that men can be received and are wanted. See my yearly Almanac.
  11. Do not embarrass the President with committees, etc.
  12. Sort the men and do not make the studies in each case the same. Some never will learn classics; some will readily.
  13. Have frequent sermonizings, discussions, etc., and encourage extempore speech.
  14. Let a man who is really a good fellow stay till a place is ready for him; and let him come back, if, in his first church, he does not succeed. Keep him with you another term and let him try again. 
  15. With poor men keep up a system of traveling libraries to keep them in books and help them to go on educating themselves.
  16. Let tutors be brethren to the men, not lords. The more familiar the intercourse the deeper the love and the truer the respect.
  17. Call in pastors, missionaries, and successful workers to talk to the men and tell them their experiences. 
  18. Keep the men to outdoor preaching and encourage them to be winning souls while students. 
  19. Make the physical sciences a great point; they furnish illustrations, relieve the severity of study, and enlarge the mind. Change of work is recreation. 
  20. Keep the church praying for them. Interest the church by meetings in which the men speak. Let beginners speak, and then in after months the people will remark their progress, and see the reality of their preparation.
  21. Believe in Dr. Francis Wayland’s ” Principles of the Baptists,” and practically carry them out. 
  22. The Lord, the Holy Spirit direct you, and bless you with his guidance ; follow that guidance, and not my recommendations wherein they fail. 

 

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Filed Under: Christianity Tagged With: christian education

Spartan by Five Iron Frenzy

June 9, 2020 by Geoff Leave a Comment

There are some songs that stick in your head forever. This is one for me. I don’t even know how I came across this album in high school, but I did. Anyway, I think Reese Roper really got articulated something profound in this brief and fairly unpoetic song. Here’s my favorite bit (it starts at 00:59):

Limping through the world
There’s a knowing look or two
Is it just the cripples here
Who understand the truth?
Why is love so painful
Why do we always lose
Paving pathways for the lost
The bitter, and recluse?
He said “Love endures all things”
And it hurt to think it’s true
did it nail Him on a cross
did it crucify Him too?

Lyrics

Billie Holiday on the radio
My sluggish heart is beating seven beats too slow
Another sad song and another shot of blue
Cold and unconcerned are anything but new
He said “Love endures all things”
And it hurts to think He’s right
If I mark the span of failure
Is his burden just as light?

I am, Spartan
Close my heart so tight
Jesus
Save me
From myself tonight

Limping through the world
There’s a knowing look or two
Is it just the cripples here
Who understand the truth?
Why is love so painful
Why do we always lose
Paving pathways for the lost
The bitter, and recluse?
He said “Love endures all things”
And it hurt to think it’s true
did it nail Him on a cross
did it crucify Him too?

(Bridge)
The angels are singing over the plains
The shepherds are quaking, echoing refrains (Echoing refrains)
And all of our slogans designed to take away the pain
Meant nothing to the Son of God that night in Bethlehem

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Filed Under: Music, Christianity Tagged With: Five Iron Frenzy

Memories, Personhood, and God’s Grace

May 28, 2020 by Geoff Leave a Comment

Around this time, I get a bit somber during the days the birthday of a friend who died a few years ago. He was an unusual guy in a good way. And while I feel I’ve never struggled to be clear, I have struggled to be understood as a person (and who hasn’t?). Anyway, my friend [we’ll called him Bradley] understood me and I think I understood him. Many of his life struggles mirrored mind and a great deal of his personal suffering and demons surpassed mine by a long way. While some of his life struggles made it difficult for us to hang out, we saw each other regularly until he disappeared, which led to his untimely death.

I think about Bradley a lot, probably every day. Spontaneously, at this point, I mostly recall the good and the dark spots of his life only come up when I call them to mind. Bradley’s influence on me, particularly in high school, remains to this day. I was a dorky do-gooder with a chip on my shoulder because I was picked on, thought I was funny but nobody liked my jokes, and when I did good things I wasn’t applauded or I was ignored. When I met Bradley, I thought, “Here’s a guy who’s smart enough for me to admire and whatever mischief he cares to get into, he plans a way to do it just for fun.” And so coinciding with my conversion to Christianity, Bradley and I became friends. We were in a band called the Exploding Chaos Parade and had a lot of fun doing it. Our rag-tag group of friends studied scripture together, went spelunking, got in trouble for parading without a permit, learned to write music, pranked the band director, pranked the whole school, and on and on. And so my whole life since, I’ve learned to let social conventions go when they contradict the things that really matter. Strangely, through learning to be more free from Bradley and learning to obey the gospel command to “treat others as you wish to be treated” my social problems disappeared. Since about my sophomore year of high school, I’ve made many friends in all walks of life and I’ve learned to really care about people in their circumstances. Incidentally, at Bradley’s funeral, it was powerful to learn how much he was willing to sacrifice for literally anybody with a need, because he just didn’t care how things looked…unless the appearance of it was part of the joke.

Bradley was and is part of who I am. The Geoff Smith that exists now, as a father, husband, teacher, Christian, son, and brother is necessarily in relationship to Bradley. David Bentley Hart makes this observation more generally, “After all, what is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments, and affinities? Who are we, other than all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom we belong as much as they to us? We are those others.”

In other words, there is no sense in which I am the person that I am without the existence of the other people I have known, and in the case of Bradley or my wife or my parents, I am who I am even in the sense that approximations of these people are in my mind that lead me to make choices wondering what their input would be or how they would interpret my choices or thoughts. This raises a serious question, “In what sense could I be redeemed from death, the world, and sin in isolation of any one of those people?” And it’s a serious question because what it means to be me is necessarily tied up in what it means for Bradley to be Bradley. If I am to be redeemed, what of my memories of those who made me me, how can those memories and the relationships that form them be redeemed except in the redeeming of the relationship itself? Elsewhere Hart described persons this way, “But finite persons are not self-enclosed individual substances; they are dynamic events of relation to what is other than themselves.”

So here’s a syllogism:

  1. A finite person is a dynamic event of relation to what is other than themselves.
  2. Redemption in Christ is for finite persons.
  3. Therefore redemption in Christ for a person must be ultimately inclusive of the relationships that make a finite person themselves.

If we accept Hart’s definition of a person, I think we have to entertain the possibility that for a person to be redeemed, so too, the persons that made that person themselves must be redeemed. Now, I harbor no doubts about Bradley’s faith or his reception into God’s grace. I just use our friendship as an illustration in this case because the melancholy of the time of year has overtaken me. Now, I do not doubt the existence of hell, the necessity of God’s justice, or the moral prescriptions of Scripture and plain reason. I merely mean to reflect on what it means for an individual to be redeemed. C.S. Lewis imagines even animals in close relationship to saints finding themselves with spiritual bodies in the New Heavens and Earth.

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Filed Under: Christianity, Speculative Theology Tagged With: David Bentley Hart

Fun Footnote: Charles Hodge on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Christocentric Faith

May 6, 2020 by Geoff 1 Comment

When in Berlin the writer often attended Schleiermacher’s church. The hymns to be sung were printed on slips of paper and distributed at the doors. They were always evangelical and spiritual in an eminent degree, filled with praise and gratitude to our Redeemer. Tholuck said that Schleiermacher, when sitting in the evening with his family, would often say, “Hush, children; let us sing a hymn of praise to Christ.” Can we doubt that he is singing those praises now? To whomsoever Christ is God, St. John assures us, Christ is a Saviour. Hodge, Charles. Systematic Theology. Vol 2, 400 n1.

Few read this blog and fewer likely read it for theology. And fewer who read it care about Schleiermacher. But it’s grand to see Hodge put the Scriptures first in his assessment of another’s faith rather than the systematic accuracy of that person’s writings or utterances.

1 John 5:20  And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know shim who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.

 

 

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Filed Under: Christianity Tagged With: Charles Hodge, quotes

David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved

October 21, 2019 by Geoff 1 Comment

I pre-ordered Hart’s most recent book as soon as I discovered it would be released. I like Hart’s work and I found his New Testament translation to be mostly helpful despite its many shortcomings. His new book is thought provoking and contains at least three hard to beat arguments for apokatastasis (the doctrine that God will redeem every last living soul in the end). I’ll write about it in the future. To be honest, I’m nearly convinced.

But this book helped be realize something else about Hart that I had only ever had intimations of, but never quite verbalized.

Hart’s verbal invective is something I used to excuse as the result of reading so much rhetoric from the eras he studies most, a fun way to be in an otherwise stultifying and boring life: academia. I took his rudeness as a sort of acquired by study version ancient honor-shame culture that men of great ambition used to utilize to make important points. Teddy Roosevelt made awesome insults, so did Seneca, Jesus, Augustine, the puritans, etc.

So when people complain about Hart’s verbal abuse, I’ve always taken them to be thin-skinned. If Hart is too mean, then isn’t Jesus?

But thinking back through it, Hart treats scholars with whom he shares 99% agreement as imbeciles if they do not agree with even his most obscurantist viewpoints. This is not mere rhetorical flourish, but an inability to empathize with other viewpoints. More importantly, they give them impression of being the angry lashings out of somebody who feels bullied. Now, who feels bullied by slight disagreements? Typically the physically unthreatening or inept. The man who feels rejected by the physical culture of other men fells that his only weapons are words. Men like this have no other way to hurt people they feel misunderstood by. I’ve met a lot of academics and quite a few of them have this problem. May Hart’s compassion for those who misunderstand him grow in proportion to his belief in God’s grace.

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Filed Under: Contemporary Trends, Christianity

Servant-Leadership or Servant-Greatness?

October 3, 2019 by Geoff Leave a Comment

I read a really good article on Servant-Benefaction here:

The Servant-Benefactor as a Model of Greatness

It’s pretty illuminating for anybody wishing to understand Luke 22.

You can access it freely using “sci-hub.tw/<insert url here>”

Here’s a good line from the conclusion:

Those who aspire to “greatness”, but who are not yet called “benefactors” (v 26a), are advised to follow the example of Jesus, the servant-benefactor par excellence (v 27b), and that of those apostles who remained with Jesus throughout the Passion (v 28).

D.J. Lull

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Filed Under: Christianity

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