I love N.T. Wright.

Then again, who doesn’t?

Hating N.T. Wright is like hating puppies, a rainbow, or cookies.

If you don’t like the guy, then there’s probably something wrong with you, not him.

Anyway, enough of the N.T. Wright lovefest. Here’s a great interview with him from Religion News Service about his view of heaven and how most of us don’t really understand what heaven is all about.

N.T. Wright asks: Have we gotten heaven all wrong?

John Murawski

(RNS) The oft-cliched Christian notion of heaven — a blissful realm of harp-strumming angels — has remained a fixture of the faith for centuries. Even as arguments will go on as to who will or won’t be “saved,” surveys show that a vast majority Americans believe that after death their souls will ascend to some kind of celestial resting place.

But scholars on the right and left increasingly say that comforting belief in an afterlife has no basis in the Bible and would have sounded bizarre to Jesus and his early followers. Like modern curators patiently restoring an ancient fresco, scholars have plumbed the New Testament’s Jewish roots to challenge the pervasive cultural belief in an otherworldly paradise.

he most recent expert to add his voice to this chorus is the prolific Christian apologist N.T. Wright, a former Anglican bishop who now teaches about early Christianity and New Testament at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. Wright has explored Christian misconceptions about heaven in previous books, but now devotes an entire volume, “How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels,” to this trendy subject.

Wright’s insistence that Christianity has got it all wrong seems to mark a turning point for the serious rethinking of heaven. He’s not just another academic iconoclast bent on debunking Christian myths. Wright takes his creeds very seriously and has even written an 800-plus-page megaton study setting out to prove the historical truth of the resurrection of Jesus.

“This is a very current issue — that what the church, or what the majority conventional view of heaven is, is very different from what we find in these biblical testimonies,” said Christopher Morse of Union Theological Seminary in New York. “The end times are not the end of the world — they are the beginning of the real world — in biblical understanding.”

Still, the appearance of a recent cover story in Time magazine suggests that putting-the-heaven-myth-to-rest movement is gaining currency beyond the academy. Wright and Morse say they have both made presentations on heaven research at local churches and have been surprised by the public interest and acceptance.

“An awful lot of ordinary church-going Christians are simply millions of miles away from understanding any of this,” Wright said.

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As Christians we talk a lot about being like Jesus.

Well, now you can actually be Jesus!

Sort of.

A company called Lightside Games has created a game for Facebook called “Journey of Jesus: The Calling” in which “players travel with Jesus through the Gospels, exploring the world of the Holy Land in that day. From the politics and history, gamers can get an education along the way. They must work together with friends to crate a community and collaborate.”

While you gamers out there will probably pick up on the Diablo III reference in the ad below, if the ad is true and you really do get to fight the devil, then I think I’ve found the first Facebook game I’m actually interested in playing!

Anyway, if you’ve always hated Philippians 2 and you’re just dying to try your hand at being the Lord of Universe, then click on over to the Journey of Jesus Facebook page for more info.

Or if you’re still on the fence about being an animated savior, you can watch the preview below before deciding whether or not being the Messiah is in your near future.

(Found at Christian Nightmares)

This morning God answered my prayer.

Literally.

My wife and I have been praying for a while that we will find a renter for our home in Memphis before we end up in a situation where we’re stuck paying two mortgages. So, every time we pray for a meal, before we go to bed, or even sometimes when we’re just driving in the car we pray that God will sent potential renters our way.

Well, this morning God did just that. As we were just beginning to wake up the phone rang. It was the real estate company calling to see if it was ok for another agent to come by and show the house….right then.

Not in a hour or two, but immediately.

Normally that wouldn’t have been a big problem. However, despite the fact that it is mostly empty, our house was not exactly “show worthy” after a week of loading up the POD for our move. So, we had to say “no” to our potential renters.

In reality, we had to say “no” to God’s answer to our prayers because even though God had answered our prayers, we weren’t ready to respond.

Granted, this isn’t a major answer to prayer (although it is very important to us), but I think a lot of times we just sit around waiting for God to magically answer our prayers, but then when those prayers finally do get answered we’re not prepared to accept God’s miracle.

In my case, we might have finally had someone rent our house today, but we weren’t prepared for God’s little miracle. So, our prayers couldn’t be answered.

In other words, our prayers “worked”, but we didn’t do the necessary work on our end to prepare for what would happen when God actually did answer our prayers.

I think for a lot of us prayer is like a magic lamp and God is the genie hidden within. If we say enough prayers, or rub the lamp hard enough, then God will pop out of make everything magically better in an instant.

But prayer almost never works that way.

Most of the time God answers our prayers by opening a door for us to walk through. But if, like I was this morning, we’re still laying in bed in our pajamas when God comes to answer our prayers, then those prayers won’t be able to be answered because we’re not ready to walk through the proverbial door….or hole in the ceiling.

Do you remember the story in Mark 2 about Jesus healing a paralyzed man? Jesus had gone into Capernum to preach. Not surprisingly, the house where he was preaching quickly filled up and was busting at the seams with people, so much so that no one else could get in. This was huge problem for a paralyzed man who heard Jesus was coming to town and had come to the house hoping to be healed.

But a packed house wasn’t the end of the story because the man was prepared for God to answer his prayers.

Being paralyzed, the man had several friends help him get to the house that day. Once they arrived, they saw very quickly that there was no way to get their friend to Jesus, but apparently they were prepared to do whatever it took to get their friend’s prayers answered. I say “apparently” because once they saw they crowd they pulled their friend up onto the roof the house (I assume with rope) and then cut a hole in the roof of the house (I assume with some sort of saw) in order to lower their friend down to Jesus.

Now, unless these guys were first century MacGyvers, then I have to think that they brought the rope and saw with them or, at the very least, they had strategized ahead of time and knew what they might need to scavenge together in order to get their friend his miracle. In other words, they were prepared for God to answer their prayer.

And that is exactly what happened.

Mark says, “When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” The paralyzed man experienced a miracle that day because he was ready to walk out the door on his own, before God ever answered his prayers.

This is the sort of faith and preparation we need to have when we pray.

Our needs may be great, and the only solution may be a miracle, but if we are going to take the time to pray to God for help, then we should do so believing that God will answer us, even as we do everything we can to make that miracle happen.

While today was certainly a lesson for me in home ownership, even more so it was a reminder that if I really want God to answer my prayers, then I need to do everything I can to be prepared for them to be answered. Otherwise, I’m living as if I don’t really except them to actually be answered and then if they are, I won’t be ready to accept God’s miracle.

So be prepared for God to answer your prayers because you never know when the answer might come.

Grace and peace,

Zack Hunt

Recently, Vanderbilt University, in their ongoing attempt to summit the height of political correctness, created a policy that forbids school sanctioned campus organizations from excluding members who do not share their particular set of beliefs.

So, for example, should an atheist inexplicably decide to join and run for office in a group like Fellowship of Christian Athletes, then according to campus policy they would have to allow that person, who holds views contrary to their own, to potentially become president of their organization.

All of this, of course, is done in the name of tolerance.

Tolerance has become a very popular buzzword these days. Many times, tolerance is a great and noble virtue. It’s tolerance that allows us to live in a pluralistic society without constantly picking up arms and going to war.

But there’s an ironic thing about so much of the so-called tolerance we see bandied about today.

It’s actually not very tolerant.

Take, for example, the aforementioned non-discrimination policy from Vanderbilt. In their attempt at tolerance, they actually end up in a position of intolerance. In effect, Vanderbilt has banned its students from holding an opinion on anything. In other words, their ideology of political correctness won’t tolerate ideology.

Of course, the hypocrisy of the contemporary tolerance movement extends far beyond the campus of Vanderbilt University.

We may extol the freedoms of speech and religion, but if people dissent from popular sentiment we are quick to vilify those that disagree with us as being “intolerant bigots”. Yet, in doing so, we become the very intolerant bigots we decry.

I think our problem with tolerance is that we don’t really understand what tolerance means. I think, for most of us, we equate it with passive acceptance of our own or another’s views. We don’t require them to verbally affirm what we think, but we only consider them to be tolerant of us if they don’t voice their disagreement.

That’s not tolerance. It’s fascism.

The truth about being tolerant is that it means you have to sometimes accept that fact that people who disagree with you aren’t actually depraved, ignorant, hate mongering bigots. They’re people, just like you, who happen to disagree with you on certain things. And if we are really going to be the tolerant people we claim to be, then we have to affirm this disagreement as acceptable, even when the disagreement centers around our core beliefs.

So long, of course, as the disagreement doesn’t center around basic human rights like freedom or the ability to simply live.

Which leads us to the other level of hypocrisy in our pursuit to be completely tolerant people.

Tolerance isn’t something we should always strive for.

The truth is there are many things in the world which we simply should not tolerate. We shouldn’t tolerate oppression. We shouldn’t tolerate injustice. We shouldn’t tolerate poverty. We shouldn’t tolerant senseless violence. We shouldn’t tolerate hunger. We shouldn’t tolerate the exploitation of people.

When we reject these things as acceptable realities, then we are refusing to tolerate their existence and that makes us intolerant. But that’s a good thing.

Despite what you may have been led to believe, tolerance is not the height of virtue. Certainly it plays an important role in the functioning of a healthy society, but if it stands alone as a chief and guiding virtue, then, as demonstrated at Vanderbilt University, it only ends up in an unhealthy intolerance.

As Christians, we face mounting pressure from both inside and outside our churches to be more tolerant. Our critics quickly point to Jesus as a sort of quintessential example of tolerance which we as Christians should exemplify, lest we become hypocrites.

But a closer inspection of Jesus, one which wades through the popular mythos in order to actually read the gospels, reveals a Jesus who was very intolerant.

Jesus refused to tolerate the status quo. He refused to tolerate oppression and injustice. He refused to tolerate legalism. He refused to tolerate death as a final answer. And, like it or not, Jesus refused to tolerate sin.

Jesus was certainly a man who willing to sit and eat with his enemies, but in doing so Jesus wasn’t affirming the status quo which he clearly rejected. Rather, Jesus understood tolerance as a way of life in which his disagreement with the other was voiced not through condemnation and exclusion, but through his incarnating the alternative kingdom he professed.

I think that if the church is to find a way forward through the milieu of a pluralistic society, then it won’t be through a passive acceptance of the prevailing culture, nor will it be through condemnation and protests. The path of tolerance for the church will be found in embodying the kingdom life she proclaims. In that way, the church becomes a living testament to an alternative way of being, demonstrating its reality to the world, rather than wasting her time engaging in hateful rhetoric with a world that will not believe in the kingdom of God until they see it beginning to dawn before their eyes.

This doesn’t meant that the church will no longer be labeled as intolerant, for in embodying the kingdom of God she chooses a particular way of being in the world and, by extension, rejects others.  However, I think that following such a path allows the church to exist in the world with integrity, while allowing those who reject the kingdom to continue to live as they choose.

This is the sort of tolerance that we see Jesus embodying in the gospels and so this is the sort of tolerance we as the church must pursue as well.

Grace and peace,

Zack Hunt

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, then you know about President Obama’s groundbreaking announcement that he supports gay marriage.

Well, naturally William Tapley, aka The Third Eagle of the Apocalypse, aka the Co-Prophet of the End Times, decided that he needed to weigh in on the subject.

According to Tapley, Obama’s support of gay marriage stems from a past, possibly incestuous, “homosexual encounter” which Tapley claims Obama describes in his poem “Pop”.

Because obviously that is the most rational conclusion one can make about a poem written by a teenage Obama about his grandfather.

Anyway, here’s Tapley’s exegesis of the poem followed by the text of the poem itself so you can decide for yourself what Obama “really meant”.

In either case, there should be no debate that William Tapley continues to earn his place on Anderson Cooper’s Ridiculist.

And here is the text of the poem in question….

“Pop”

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me;
I stare hard at his face, a stare
That deflects off his brow;
I’m sure he’s unaware of his
Dark, watery eyes, that
Glance in different directions,
And his slow, unwelcome twitches,
Fail to pass.
I listen, nod,
Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,
Beige T-shirt, yelling,
Yelling in his ears, that hang
With heavy lobes, but he’s still telling
His joke, so I ask why
He’s so unhappy, to which he replies…
But I don’t care anymore, cause
He took too damn long, and from
Under my seat, I pull out the
Mirror I’ve been saving; I’m laughing,
Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face
To mine, as he grows small,
A spot in my brain, something
That may be squeezed out, like a
Watermelon seed between
Two fingers.
Pop takes another shot, neat,
Points out the same amber
Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and
Makes me smell his smell, coming
From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem
He wrote before his mother died,
Stands, shouts, and asks
For a hug, as I shink, my
Arms barely reaching around
His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ‘cause
I see my face, framed within
Pop’s black-framed glasses
And know he’s laughing too.

A few years ago there were billboards that popped up all over the place that purported to be quotes from God.

Remember these?

Well, apparently Satan is now the one renting billboard space.

(via)

My only question is: when are Buddha, Allah, and Vishnu going to get their act together and start putting up their own billboards?!

So you think you’ve heard it all, then you read a story like this.

To be fair, the “de-gendering” of Christ in the context of eucharistic theology is a wonderful and fascinating subject.

The “de-gendering” of Jesus of Nazareth, however, seems like a rather ridiculous cry for attention.

The debate over female clergy is an extremely important one, but I’ve got to think there are more, um, rational(?) ways of going about it.

Academic claims Jesus Christ was (possibly) a hermaphrodite

(Via The Periscope Post)

Jesus Christ’s gender is something we all know. Isn’t it? Dr Susanna Cornwall, of Manchester University’s Lincoln Theological Institute, has written a paper in which she claims that it is impossible to know whether Jesus was male or female, reported The Daily Telegraph. Called “Intersex & Ontology, A Response to The Church, Women Bishops and Provision,” she says that we can’t say with any certainty which one he was – and in fact might well have been a hermaphrodite. The fact that he didn’t have children, for example, she claims, makes this all the more persuasive.

The claims come against a continuing argument about the possibility of women bishops in the Church of England. Cornwall’s paper is designed to make the Church pay more attention to people with intersex conditions, and was written in response to a paper arguing against women bishops. Commentators are split: is Cornwall blasphemous, or saying something important?

“We cannot know for sure that Jesus was male – since we do not have a body to examine and analyse – it can only be that Jesus’ masculine gender role, rather than his male sex, is having to bear the weight of all this authority,” said Dr Cornwall.

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Apparently, Catholics have a lot more fun at their Bible studies than Protestants do….

(Via FloridaToday.com)

Written by Lyn Dowling

VIERA — Early on a Tuesday evening, the 20- and 30-somethings start to drift into the intimate little lounge at the back of Florida Wine & Spirits. They chat about work, kids and other aspects of their lives and the eternal questions of the happy hour for young adults: whether it would be wiser to purchase wine by the glass or simply buy a bottle and what sort of beer is on tap tonight.

Proprietor Jeremy Norcross suggests a good red, recommends a new amber beer and then sets about opening a bottle and pouring a round. Finally, a man in a plain, collared shirt puts down his beverage and speaks: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son …”

This is Theology on Tap, a monthly ministry of St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Viera, and it is so popular that workers from the package store move extra chairs into the lounge so that more people can be accommodated.

“We started with six people, and now we have about 20 people (at each meeting),” said Valerie Farrell, a local resident who heads St. John’s young adult ministry.

That is as pleasing to Norcross, the new owner of Florida Wine & Spirits, as it is to the people of St. John the Evangelist.

“I’ve only hosted one program because I bought the business in March, but I think it’s an interesting program,” said Norcross, who inherited the program from the previous owners of his store. It has been there less than a year. “Not much happens in here on Tuesday nights, and so I think it is good for business.”

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Mark Driscoll has made his views on women in authority pretty clear.

But this guy makes Driscoll look like a feminist in comparison.

So who is this guy?

His name is Jesse Lee Peterson and according to this site he is the founder of a group called Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny.

Catchy name.

In an interesting side note, Fox News talking head Sean Hannity apparently sits on the advisory board of that organization.

Why? Who knows.

When Kirsten Powers tried to confront him about it in this video he dodged the issue.

But that’s beside the point.

Regardless of if, like Mark Driscoll and John Piper, you consider yourself a “complimentarian” or, like Jesus, you’re an “egalitarian“, this sort of rhetoric should never be spewed out of the mouth of a pastor.

It’s ridiculous, hateful, and absurdly un-Biblical.

Which is exactly why he fits in so well as a guest on Fox News.

[Sorry, cheap shot. I couldn't resist. ]

First, it was Pride and Prejudice that got the zombie treatment.

Then, we learned that Abraham Lincoln was in fact a vampire hunter.

Now, it seems that the nativity story is getting a remix of its own.

From best selling author, Seth Graham-Smith, comes Unholy Night, an imaginative retelling of the nativity story in which the three wise men are actually three murderous thieves who escape from Herod’s prison, accidentally run into Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus as they are fleeing Herod’s slaughter of the newborns, whereupon the three thieves “have no choice but to help them escape to Egypt.”

I’ve gotta imagine this book is going to go over really well with the fundamentalists. [insert sarcasm font]

Anyway, check out the trailer below and let us know what you think.

Playful fun or blasphemous Biblical butchering?