Welcome! You have accidentally reached the blog of a heteroclite follower of Jesus: dave wainscott. I'm
"pushing toward the unobvious" as I post thinkings/linkings
re: Scripture, church and culture. Hot topics include: temple tantrums, time travel, sexuality/spirituality, U2kklesia, role of the pastor, God-haunted music/art..and subversive videos like these.
Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize–winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition.
We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude of ill-defined situations. Our brain’s job is to try to make sense of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on. Often this means the spontaneous evocation of words, sometimes idioms, sometimes the triggering of nameless, long-buried memories. Why did two-year-old Camille proudly exclaim, “I undressed the banana!”? Why do people who hear a story often blurt out, “Exactly the same thing happened to me!” when it was a completely different event? How do we recognize an aggressive driver from a split-second glance in our rearview mirror? What in a friend’s remark triggers the offhand reply, “That’s just sour grapes”? What did Albert Einstein see that made him suspect that light consists of particles when a century of research had driven the final nail in the coffin of that long-dead idea?
The answer to all these questions, of course, is analogy-making—the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the wellsprings of thought. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most creative scientific insights.
Like Gödel, Escher, Bach before it, Surfaces and Essences will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant core—the incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links to past experiences—this book puts forth a radical and deeply surprising new vision of the act of thinking.
Also on the primacy of analogy/metaphor, I am rereading of Eugene Peterson's "Eat This Book," where he can talk about metaphor being simultaneously so holy that it “signals transcendence an encounter with the One who speaks everything into being’ (98), and also call it “literally a lie” (94)
I remember Cytowic's conclusion the brain only thinks in/as/by/through.to metaphor.
So, it seems to have started becoming hugely popular around five years ago to start a conversation with "So.." as a discourse marker. Not so much as in the question "So?" ("So..do you want to go to the concert?")
...but "so" as an answer or "conversation manager" or "interactional agenda."
One class I teach involves students showing and interpreting collages they have made.
I don't think five years ago any students started their explanations with "So..." Now, almost all of them do, regardless of age.
SOoo.. whatsup with that?
Linguists aren’t alone in spotting the trend. Journalists have caught
onto the discourse marker in the past few
years, spurring articles about the tiny word and its growing use.
The movie “That Awkward Moment” also called attention to the
“so” that starts sentences. Zac Efron’s character coins the moment when a
girl tries to define a relationship as “The So…” as in, “So, what does
our relationship mean to you?” For the characters, the discourse marker
signals trouble. link
(This all reminds me of a previously-discussed shift discussed here: thirty years ago, no one would call the songs sung at a Christian gathering "worship" or "the worship time"...let alone that a "worship leader" meant the song leader. See this and this)
The discussion about "so.." as the new norm/normal often focuses on the grammatical approprietness and/or the thesis that is is lazy speech.
Several links below to help you decide.
Excerpt below from Do you use “so” to manage conversations?:
Researcher Galina Bolden studied recordings of conversations, looking at the difference between the sentence-initial oh and so. In a 2010 New York Times article
Anand Giridharadas sums up insight Bolden supplied via email: “To begin
a sentence with ‘oh,’…is to focus on what you have just remembered and
your own concerns. To begin with ‘so,’…is to signal that one’s coming
words are chosen for their relevance to the listener.” If words like so and oh were
used to arbitrarily fill a pause, they wouldn’t take on such different
functions from each other. Bolden suggests here that the
sentence-initial so is a way for the speaker to subtly cue to the
listener that the following information is relevant to the listener’s
interests. Whether or not the information is actually relevant is for
the listener to decide, though perhaps this cue makes it more likely for
a conversational partner to pay attention. (If you want to learn more,
Bolden’s research is also discussed in this Language Log post.) link
In some of his delightful comments between songs, he introduced us to the concept of hiraeth:
Hiraeth /hɪəraɪ̯θ/ is a Welsh word that has no direct English translation. The University of Wales, Lampeter attempts to define it as homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed. It is a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, or an earnest desire[1] for the Wales of the past.[2]Hiraeth bears considerable similarities with the Portuguese concept of saudade(a key theme in Fado music), Galicianmorriña and Romanian dor.link
From the Paris Review:
Hiraeth. It’s pronounced “here-eyeth” (roll the “r”) and it’s a Welsh word. It has no exact cognate in English. The best we can do is “homesickness,” but that’s like the difference between hardwood and laminate. Homesickness is hiraeth-lite.article
Looking forward to overlapping this with the other untranslatable words mentioned above, and with yerida/aliyah and C. S. Lewis' version of sehnsucht... even with keening and duende.
Here is an abstract of, and link to the full document of, Ryan Schellenberg's dissertation. It might be read alongside Brian Dodd's diss.
I am so glad he included some challenges to prevailing view's re: prosopeion AND utilized Sapir!
Note: it later became this book
-----------------------
WHERE IS THE VOICE COMING FROM?: QUERYING THE EVIDENCE FOR PAUL’S RHETORICAL EDUCATION IN 2 CORINTHIANS 10
by Ryan Scott Schellenberg
ABSTRACT
Although it would be an exaggeration to speak of a consensus, a majority of scholars
now sees Paul as a man of relatively high social status. Most often cited as evidence for such
status is Paul’s putative education in formal rhetorical theory. The prevailing logic consists
of two propositions: First,
Paul’s letters can be analyzed according to the dictates of Greco-Roman rhetoric; therefore, Paul must have been well educated in rhetoric. Second, rhetorical education was available only among the wealthy elite; therefore, Paul
must have been brought up in such circles.
A number of scholars have observed that such argumentation fails to consider the
extent to which rhetorical ability exists independently of formal education. But despite this
general observation, there has been no attempt to determine whether the specific rhetorical
competencies to which Paul’s letters attest admit of informal acquisition. In this study, I use
insights from comparative rhetoric and sociolinguistics to get methodological leverage on
this problem and thus to reevaluate the evidence for Paul’s rhetorical education. Using 2 Cor10–13
as a test case, I demonstrate that Paul’s use of rhetoric provides no evidence of formal
education; on the contrary, his persuasive strategies are instances of informal
rhetoric.
After undertaking a history of scholarship in part 1, in part 2 I reassess recent claims
of Paul’s conformity with formal rhetorical conventions in 2 Cor 10–13.
Here I demonstra that many alleged parallels derive from misleading treatment of the
rhetorical sources and
cannot be sustained. Convincing parallels are few
—I isolate four and rather general;
nevertheless, they do merit further explanation.
I seek to provide such explanation in part 3 by offering a basic theory of informal rhetoric and it
s acquisition, and demonstrating the use,by speakers with no knowledge of formal rhetorical theory, of precisely those rhetorical eatures found both in Paul and in the ancient rhetorical sources.
Finally, in part 4, I begin a redescription of Paul’s persuasive voice: Paul’s prose style, his self
-description in 2Cor 10:10 and 11:6, and his “foolish boasting" reveal him to be a speaker both abject and
defiant. LINK, full dissertation
cannot be sustained. Convincing parallels are few
—
I isolate four
—
and rather general;
nevertheless, they do merit further explanation.
I seek to provide such explanation in part 3
by offering a basic theory of informal rhetoric and it
s acquisition, and demonstrating the use,
by speakers with no knowledge of formal rhetorical theory, of precisely those rhetorical
features found both in Paul and in the ancient rhetorical sources.
Excerpts from the chapter in "Science is Culture" (HT, and complete transcript here) by Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga (and related video below)
Excerpts from the chapter in "Science and Culture" (HT, and complete transcript here) by Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga :
TW: I think all this excitement has spawned a replacement for Freudian psychologists. They’ve been replaced by the evolutionary psychologists, whose main interest seems to be to retrofit the theory of evolution on whatever ended up happening. I read an example in your new book of a woman who’s come up with an elaborate theory that music has a survival benefit in the evolutionary sense because it increases the social cohesiveness of populations. I would love for her to read a piece that appeared recently in the New Yorker about a tribe, the Pirahã in the Maici River, a little tributary of the Amazon. This tribe, it turns out, has a language with eight consonants and three vowels. I think they have a sum total of 52 words or something like that. As a result, they have little art, they have no music, no dance, and no religion. They’re usually cited because they seem to be a terrible exception to Noam Chomsky’s rule that all people are born with a structure that enables them to put words in a grammatical form. Not the Pirahã! And they’re not stupid or retarded in any sense. They just had never increased their language abilities — and they don’t want to....
...MG: Do you think all art is about status?
TW: Well, certainly not music. Dance, maybe yes, maybe no. But literature and movies, yes. To me the crucial point is something, which I don’t think even Chomsky understands, about speech and language. Chomsky and many other people are wonderful at telling us how language works, and about differences in languages and the historical progression of languages across the face of the Earth. But I seem to be the one person who realizes the properties of speech. Speech is an artifact. It’s not a natural progression of intelligence, in my opinion — we have to look only at the Pirahã for that. It’s a code. You’re inventing a code for all the objects in the world and then establishing relationships between those objects. And speech has fundamentally transformed human beings.
MG: By speech I assume you mean language and not the actual act of speaking?
TW: To me, it’s the same, speech and talking.
MG: Okay, so what do you think language and speech are for? I mean, it’s probably an adaptation. We’re big animals, and that’s one of the goodies that we got.
TW: I think speech is entirely different from other survival benefits. Only with speech can you ask the question, “Why?”
MG: Right.
TW: Animals cannot ask why. In one way or another, they can ask what, where, and when. But they cannot ask why. I’ve never seen an animal shrug. When you shrug, you’re trying to say, “I don’t know why.” And they also can’t ask how.
MG: Yeah.
TW: With language you can ask that question. I think it’s at that point where religion starts.
MG: Right.
TW: Humans got language and they were suddenly able to say, “Hey, why is all this here? Who put it here?” And my assumption is that they said, “There must be somebody like us but much bigger, much more powerful, that could make all these trees, the streams. God must be really something, and you’d better not get on the wrong side of him.” I think that’s the way it started...
...TW: Every time we go into a room with other people, it’s as if we have a teleprompter in front of us and it’s telling us the history of ourselves versus these people. We can’t even think of thinking without this huge library of good information and bad information.
MG: That’s why the great psycholinguist George Miller, whom we shared a dinner with once, called us the “informavores.” That’s how he wanted to cast us.
When you get up in the morning, you do not think about triangles and squares and these similes that psychologists have been using for the past 100 years. You think about status. You think about where you are in relation to your peers. You’re thinking about your spouse, about your kids, about your boss. Ninety-nine percent of your time is spent thinking about other people’s thoughts about you, their intentions, and all this kind of stuff. So sorting all that out, how we navigate this complex social world, there’s going to be a neuroscience to it, and I think it’s going to be very powerful....
...MG: Well, I think we’re saying the same thing. There is a very clever little experiment that you would be amused by, run by my colleague Jonathan Schooler. He has a bunch of students read a paragraph or two from the Francis Crick book, Astonishing Hypothesis, which is very deterministic in tone and intent. And then he has another group of students reading an inspirational book about how we make our own decisions and determine our own path. He then lets each group play a videogame in which you’re free to cheat. So guess who cheats? The people who have just read that it’s all determined cheat their pants off.
I think people who try to find personal responsibility in the brain are wrongheaded. Think of it this way: If you’re the only person in the world, you live alone on an island, there’s no concept of personal responsibility. Who are you being personally responsible to? If somebody shows up on the island though —
TW: — Friday was his name.
MG: Yeah, exactly. Then you’ve got a social group. And the group starts to make rules; that’s the only way they’re going to function. Out of those rules comes responsibility. So responsibilities are to the relationships within the social groups, and when someone breaks a rule, they’re breaking a social rule. So don’t look for where in their brain something went wrong; look at the fact that they broke a rule, which they could have followed. I’m actually kind of hard-nosed about this. I think people should be held accountable for lots of stuff.
TW: No, I would certainly agree with that. In fact, my theory of status is that all of us live by a set of values that, if written in stone, would make not me but my group superior in some way. I think there are just so many kinds of status layers due solely to likeness. You can always find a group that seems to justify whatever you’re doing.
MG: Our species seems brilliant at forming groups — indeed support groups — for almost anything. And no matter what the group is about, no matter what its character, it becomes advocatory. complete transcript here ————————————————-
People sometimes ask me if all the violence in "The Matrix" doesn't bother me.
Part of my answer is "What violence?"....because I tend to translate it all to spiritual warfare (which is appropriate on one level and problematic on another).
No one has yet asked me if the steamy sex scene between Neo and Trinity in the second Matrix film bothers me.
So thanks for asking.
Part of my answer would be "it does" (and it was a cheap grab for ratings).
But again I tend to see it as also a spiritual representation (Neo=Jesus or EveyChristian and Trinity as Trinity, Holy Spirit or church).
Of course, everything is also inevitably semiotics.
In a great book about semiotics (that strangely doesn't mention Leonard Sweet, who literally wrote the book on evangelism and semiotics), Crystal Downing , in a section called "Sex and the Simulacrum," writes:
the change in sexual signs has been noted...in one college textbook: 'sexual desire is no longer a response to a person whom we meet and know face-to-face. Rather, sexual desire is stimulated by images promulgated by the media, and we strive to remake our bodies to fit these images." People have this substituted imaged for reality, submitting themselves to what cultural critic Baudrillard calls 'simulacra': copies of reality for which no original exists...Ironically, our culture's obsession with the body often leads to a denial of the body, offering simulacra instead. -p. 276
T-Bone Burnett (or at least his image) might suggest that
all sex is image to image.
All sex is semiotic simulacra..virtually virtual..really
It doesn't take much trainspotting to catch the simulacra references in The Matrix:
.
The Matrix makes many connections to Simulacra and Simulation. Neo, is seen with a copy of Simulacra and Simulation at the beginning of the story. He
uses the hollowed book as a hiding place for cash and his important computer files, however, Neo's hollowed copy of the book has the chapter "On Nihilism" in the middle, not at the end of the book, where it is in reality. uses the hollowed book as a hiding place for cash and his important computer files, however, Neo's hollowed copy of the book has the chapter "On Nihilism" in the middle, not at the end of the book, where it is in reality. Morpheus refers to the real world outside the Matrix as the "desert of the real", a reference to Baudrillard's work. In the original script, Morpheus specifically referred to Baudrillard's boo link
Ironically, the Matrix's use of Baudrillard may be an "copy of which the original no longer exists." The same article notes however, in an interview, Baudrillard said "The Matrix" has nothing to do with his work.
Marcion, the second century bishop..went so far as to denounce the incarnation calling it a 'disgrace to God' because the human body is 'stuffed with excrement'
Huh? Skubala disqualifies incarnation? That itself is skubala!
Let's instead consider things holistically and pursue the sexuality and SHEKINAH .interface.
And the fact that language about sexuality is semiotic and sign-ificant:
Western culture today seems obssesed with the body, especially the sexualized body. The popularity of 'sexting' has lead to a new kind of crime, "sextortion"...-Downing
New words create new realities (Sapir-Whorf). Since new words can create new crime, and new crime words.. ..can't they also creative creative language and creative inkingdomedness?
..and asking ourselves why we can't at least ask 'banned" questions?
Most readers here will be familiar with Len Hjalmarson's important blog:
..if the new earth is really a restoration and renewal — a new paradise — this time a garden city –
a place of peace, fulfillment and new creation –
a restoration of paradise and innocence (in the best sense) –
How could it be all this apart from new creation in humans and animals? In other words – is there no sexual union in the kingdom? No children? No new people, just we resurrected or restored ones? -sex and the kingdom
And so since I’ve often tried To run them off a cliff like Gadarene swine -mewithoutYou, "Fox's Dream Of The Log Flume" ---
How many times have you seen doll-size (or life-size)individual Christian soldiers in full armor (per Ephesians 6, of course) on the shelves or in the window of a Christian bookstore? Well meaning............ ...but well off the mark. Not as creepy as the John Haggai teddy bear..... ....but (ironically) dangerous, exegetically. For several reasons. One has been dealt with in a previous post (misundertaking spiritual warfare: reading in context and in (anabaptist) communitas):
The letter is to a church community, not an individual. It's not the letter to the Ephesian.
The "you"s are plural throughout. Read passages you thought you had all figured out in that light, especially 2:8-10, 3:16....and the passage at hand. How exactly to imagine the armor on a group calls for...well, imagination. (imagine that! Imagination...in church? This calls for spirituality that is actually Ignatian and SpongeBob-ian). Guy Chevrau, in a helpful book, offers one possibility:
In fact, we do not stand alone. The entire armor passage is addressed not to an individual believer but to the Church. The pronouns are all plural. In Texas they would say correctly, "Y'all stand." The whole metaphor is a corporate calling.. This especially casts the "shield of faith in a new light/. The shield Paul names is not the small, round, garbage can lid.of a shield but literally the thyreos...a Roman soldier would hold this shield in his left hand and the right two thirds of the shield would cover his left side. The left third of the shield covered his fellow soldier's exposed right. When the troops were in position, they created a defensive position called the 'tortoise,' When the legionaires held their shields overhead and the front rows interlocked their shields, they created a kind of shell-like armor. link, p. 138
Even though Chevrau gathers his historical info from a trusted historical source (Rome at War), we still don't know for sure if this is the picture Paul means to evoke. Thus the same problem on the other side of the ditch: the image will definitely preach! And the powerful image (sign) may well stick in our minds more than actually using our faith (the sign-ified)....and other elements of armor) It's the inevitable risk of a visual metaphor/parable/sign... a risk God takes all over Scripture, Jesus takes every time he opens his mouth (Matthew 13:34-35) and Paul takes head on in the Ephesians text.
We in the West have focused on, obsexxed on the individual...thus individual armor. I would venture many USAmerican fundagelicals go through the motions of "Putting on the shield of faith"....without the faith.. Like the character in the mewithoutYou song, "mistook signs for signified." It's faith like a shield, not a "shield like faith." Sometimes, after the metaphor has done its work and subverted us ( see Eugene Peterson's delightful...and still metaphorical.... definition of metaphor: "a loud fart in the salon of spirituality"), we can then in the (metaphorical!) language of the song, drive all said signs/demons of a cliff, so that only the signified signified remains. Peterson's Message Bible is amazing on this passage. . It's not as sassy and sexy as most translations, which encourage us ti get jazzed up and armored up for some war games... but it is a necessary correction. Note it completely refuses to even mention the signs (pieces of armor). The emphasis and onus is thus off the armor, and all attention on the real reality.
0-12 And that about wraps it up. God is strong, and he wants you strong. So take everything the Master has set out for you, well-made weapons of the best materials. And put them to use so you will be able to stand up to everything the Devil throws your way. This is no afternoon athletic contest that we’ll walk away from and forget about in a couple of hours. This is for keeps, a life-or-death fight to the finish against the Devil and all his angels.13-18 Be prepared. You’re up against far more than you can handle on your own. Take all the help you can get, every weapon God has issued, so that when it’s all over but the shouting you’ll still be on your feet. Truth, righteousness, peace, faith, and salvation are more than words. Learn how to apply them. You’ll need them throughout your life. God’s Word is an indispensable weapon. In the same way, prayer is essential in this ongoing warfare. Pray hard and long. Pray for your brothers and sisters. Keep your eyes open. Keep each other’s spirits up so that no one falls behind or drops out.
The most helpful commentator I know on Ephesians is Tim Gombis:
In Ephesians 6:10-18, then, Paul is not merely addressing individuals but the entire gathered church...
Okay, we's heard that already. But keep reading! Gombis maintains that
. .....Paul does not derive the armor of God from his pondering of the armor of a Roman soldier, therefore, but from a consideration of the Scriptures.... ....The church engages in warfare in ways that defy and overturn our expectation
The clincher:
Our warfare against the powers takes place on a mundane level....Strategic acts of love and self-sacrificial service to others are cosmically significant. ---all quotes from his book
Drat! To "do spiritual warfare," I might just have to (get to) do something as non-dramatic as..
drum roll, please..
Love my neighbor.
But in fact, as mundane as that is, Gombis holds that it IS dramatic..in the biblical sense.
And that is the whole point (His book is "The Drama of Ephesians," buy it yesterday).
And start some mundane, messianic, dramatic...and sign-ificantly subversive warfare to beat the devil.
The first two questions are partly true. For example, simply reading the previous verses (unheard of!) suggests the primary answer to #2: "This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world." The devil is mentioned nowhere in the context.
It's the third question I'd like to focus on.
I wish everyone could read biblical Greek and Hebrew.
But speakers of language like Spanish GET the idea of a plural "you."
In fact, you should learn spanish JUST to read 1 John 4:4:
Ustedes, queridos hijos,
son de Dios y han vencido a esos falsos profetas, porque el que está en
ustedes es más poderoso que el que está en el mundo. link, context
"Greater is he who is within you all" doesn't do it justice. Just ask anyone from Texas. "How are y'all doing?" usually means a single 'you". To ask about a group, it's "y'all of y'all."
I sometimes suggest to Spanish speakers that the "singular plurals" of the Bible are almost like an "Ustedes va" --a grammatically incorrect phrase, the "you" is plural and the verb is singular-- a community as one, not one (individual) as the community as English forces us to think.
On the singular plural, see A Crash of Rhinos...a Committee of Buzzards. It is ironic and should be obvious that one of the groups we can learn the most about spiritual warfare is Anabaptists/Mennonites, nonresisitants and pacifists! How do folks who don't "do war" actually "do war" with the devil. Secondly, they GET community/communitas. I was privileged to spend a week in community (ahh) studying spiritual warfare and worldview with a great Mennonite Brethren scholar, Paul Hiebert. I may upload some of his notes. There are also at least two helpful related resources:
Direction: A Mennonite Brethren Forum, Vol 29, No. 2 (online here )which includes an article by Hiebert (here)
------------- Not to mention....okay I will... that high up on the list of misunderstood scriptures is the "spiritual armor" of Ephesians 6: "take up the shield of faith," which we usually read as addressed to an individual. But it's addressed to a group/church...grammatically and theologically. -- Related:
I am sure some of you (besides Keltic Ken, elder elder and Happy Lee, pastorapostle) remember George Carlin's R-rated "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" (Google them at your won risk, and don't tell your pastor), In that spirit ( and in memorial tribute the theologian George Carlin), I humbly submit to you I humbly submit to you : 7 Dirty WordsYou Can't Say in Church!
!!
Of course, wise saints will note at least three problems with that title:
-We should be hesitant to use the word "should." Especially, "Don't should on yourself")
-The followimng seven are not technically seven words, but seven phrases (But if we call Jesus' seven last phrases "the secen last words of Christ," let's give it a pass
-The last two words of the title break on of the seven rules (but hey, it got you to read the post, right?)
As Carlin did, I will first boldly lay out the "heavy seven." and then commnt on them.
Spoiler alert, and "bad language" alert! (:
minister
worship leader
worship service
pastor (as a title)
church (as a building, or as "in church" or "going to church"
sermon
children's church
Wow, that was tough , just typing those! I feel I should wash my mouth out with a bar of (Christian) soap!! Sorry for the pro-profanity nature of that list.
Okay, since some may be seeking explanations..
Better yet, an explanation about the explanations:
In no way is what I am about to say a dissing of you,your tradition, or call. Some of my best friends (and I) often say/do these things. But language matters. And these are matters that matter so much to me that I have given up these words (and not just for Lent). Heck, I have even worn a clerical collar, and here's a pic to prove it (but you need to click the backstory here)
To kick off the list, the classic "I Love Lucy" routine comes to mind:
Etiquette Teacher "There are two words you should never use. One of them is 'swell,' and one of them is 'lousy'.
Lucy: "Well, what are the words?"
Fred: "Tell us the lousy one first!".
I think in many ways the "lousiest" word comes first below; strangely (and unobviously to some), it may well have done the most damning damage!
Here now, at least, are the heavy seven
1)MINISTER: In many circles and traditions, this is term is used synonymously with "pastor."
But besides that is not a biblical word, what does it denote/connote? The Bible does use the related word "ministry," but ONLY when it makes the point that all saints/members are in ministry, and thus ministers.. The task of the pastor et al is to equip the other saints for the "works of ministry." Ephesians 4:1-11 couldn't be clearer.
2)WORSHIP LEADER: Almost everyone nowadays knows what this phrase means:
As recently as twenty eight years ago, nobody in the world would've have understood the phrase "worship" as meaning music.
But the whole world has changed. Now it is the norm for the word worship to equate to "the songs we sing before the sermon and the other stuff."
And everyone knows a "worship leader" is the music leader.
No one would have defined it that way for the last ..uh, several thousand years.
Que paso? Whatup with that? Who switched the price tags?
That is no small shift.
Don't hear what I'm not saying. I love to worship via music. But worship..to begin with Romans 12:2...is far bigger and broader.
Language matters.
A strange shift began not that manyyears ago, Ask most evangelical or charismatic Christians in USAmerica about the place of "worship"in a gathering. For some strange reason, the word has come to be synonymous with "the songs sung early in the meeting." "Good morning! After the worship, the children will be dismissed, and Pastor Steve will share from God's word" We even call the person leading the singing the "worship leader."Whazzup with that? Of course, this definition is foreign to Scripture, and to the church in all history and places..until our lifetime in the West. Google "worship is not music" for some clues as to how this hijacking happened. Related: Why do we also thing a "worship" gathering (after the music, or "worship set")is for teaching?: -Robert Webber, Continued here, ht; Len
In the early church the public worship of the church was a prayer of praise and thanksgiving directed not to the people but to God. Seeing worship as prayer is a paradigm shift from the current presentational notion of worship. Today worship is frequently seen as a presentation made to the people to get them to believe in the first place, to enrich and edify their faith, and to bring healing into their lives. But the ancient church did not design (a contemporary word) worship to reach people, to educate people, or to heal people. Yet in their worship, which was a prayer of praise and thanksgiving offered to God, people were indeed nourished by offering God’s mighty acts of salvation as a prayer to God for the life of the world. The point is, of course, that worship as prayer shapes who we are. But how so?...LINK
Not long ago, our church had some documents to fill out for the IRS (Why in the world is church connecting with IRS?.. But that's another post and topic for another day). So I said to one of our leadership team, "can we have you sign a form after worship?"
Later, as we were signing, she said "I wondered wbat happened. You said we should sign after worship, so when we didn't sign after worship, I figured you forgot."
I had ansolutely no idea what she meant.
Then it hit me. In many circles (and in her previous chiurch, the songs that are sung early in the gatherings are called "worship" or the "worship time" or "worship songs." So she thought i meant "after the music," and I meant "after the gathering (Of course, my definition was ecen more problematic...(Collect $100 and go to Dirty Word #3 below )..
3)WORSHIP SERVICE: Once again, the phrase is not found in Scriipture...or is it??
"this is your reasonable SERVICE OF WORSHIP: that in view of God’s mercy, you should offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God" (Romans 12:1-2, KJV/NIV hybrid)
Hmm, the phrase occurs, but only in a text and conrext of 24/7 Christian life; wherever you take your body (including the bathroom; see this and Kraybill's quote:The altar of a church building is no closer to God's heart than the restroom"
THAT is your reasonable 'service of worship.
Sounds reasonable.
So it sounds reasonable that we should restructure our language.
Nothing wrong with meetings (as long as they are "meatings," and prepare us for a lifestyle of worship
4)PASTOR (as a title): The word is good! But it is never, not once, used in the Book as a title. Nor are the other "fivefold gifts." Paul never self-identifies as we identify him: "The Apostle Paul." He's "Paul, an apostle." And nearly every time he starts a letter with that identification, he quickly qualifies it with "a slave of Christ Jesus, by the will of God." See "Apostles as Slaves": by Brian Dodd
What have we done in making central to church a word ("pastor") that is literally NOT MENTIONED ONCE IN THE BIBLE
Peterson translates Jesus this way. I wish he had gone all out and included the word "pastor":
5Their lives are perpetual fashion shows, embroidered prayer shawls one day and flowery prayers the next. 6They love to sit at the head table at church dinners, basking in the most prominent positions, 7preening in the radiance of public flattery, receiving honorary degrees, and getting called "Doctor' and "Reverend.' 8"Don't let people do that to you, put you on a pedestal like that. You all have a single Teacher, and you are all classmates. 9Don't set people up as experts over your life, letting them tell you what to do. Save that authority for God; let him tell you what to do. No one else should carry the title of "Father'; you have only one Father, and he's in heaven. 10And don't let people maneuver you into taking charge of them. There is only one Life-Leader for you and them--Christ. 11"Do you want to stand out? Then step down. Be a servant. 12If you puff yourself up, you'll get the wind knocked out of you. But if you're content to simply be yourself, your life will count for plenty.
I am breaking nroken records here, but (again) the word is not in the Bible (our popular titles like "Sermon on the Mount" are not in the text.
Jeremy Myers:
"there is not a single passage in Scripture which commands or even provides an example of the current popular pattern of gathering in a building on a certain day of the week to listen to one person stand up and talk about the Bible for thirty or forty minutes.
It is just not there." -Jeremy Myers, full article, do read it
I sometimes say in meetings, "All American pastors know that the Bible knows nothing of a weekly meeting where a pastor preaches a sermon."
But I wonder. Do you think they (we) all really know the Bible says that, or are we so blinded but what we think it says that we read it into the Bible (eisegete)?"
The point here is that "the sermon" needs a new name to show how open-source the whole event is. The very word the Bible uses for the word "preaching is dialogizomai...hhhh, do you see any Engllsih words we derive from that Greek word?
What's hilarious, and terribly telling is that my neighbor bought it, joking that he could use it to "lecture to my teenage son!"
7)CHILDREN'S CHURCH
I love children.
And sometimes even in our tribemettings, we send the kids out for their own time.
VIDEO EVIDENCE:.
BUT the whole point is to share with the whole group something they learned when they rejooin us. And when they stay in the "redular service": (don't make me say "BIG CHURCH!".
As Carlin said about his original seven: "Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war."
Since Cooke and Goodell (in the book above) make much use of their subtitle,"permission is granted to do church differently in the third millenium," I can't imagine a better way to end this rant than to offer you permission...within the parameters of Scripture and leading of the Spirit, to comment on, and come up with your own list of "seven dirty words."
As Carlin also said about his list:
Words are all we have, really. So be faithful to the Word (Jesus), and the Word that points to Jesus (Scripture),
and pray and play with words.
It might just change as much as everything about the culture of your church.
