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| Please see http://erja1.wordpress.com for all future blogging.
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| On thursday of this past week, I accepted a job offer from First PCA in Greenville, AL to be their full-time youth minister. Nicole and I are super excited about this and will be moving to Alabama during the early part of June.
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| Two years ago (spring of 2005) I took a Philosophy of Religion class. That Christmas-time, right before the class started, was the occurence of one of the worst natural disasters in recent history; the south-Asian tsunami which killed many tens of thousands and destroyed entire communities. For our term paper, we were asked to write a theodicy, specifically in regard to this disaster. I enjoyed the topic because it gave me a chance to explore and flesh out many of my ideas I had been wrestling with the previous semester following the unexpected and tragic death of my older brother. What follows, is in many ways, my own personal working out of the problem of evil as it relates to Christianity. It is not often that I get to write a paper in which I can fully lay out my strongest personal opinion, but in this one I was able to, and that was a blessing I needed. Note: It's 8 pages long, double-spaced, FYI. The paper should be pretty clean, as this is a near final draft, but I unfortunately lost my final copy and can only give you the next best thing. And I'm certainly not going to take the time to go back and edit it right now :) http://www.geocities.com/eric_anderson_tx/Theodicy_paper.doc | | |
| I'm trying hard not to rant and rave all over the internet, but something really ticked me off today. I was walking to my KINE 199 class held in the weight room of G. Rollie White from the bus stop by the Northside parking garage. As I approached Rudder Fountain I saw a big red and white sign stuck in the grass by one of the trees which read, "Warning: Graphic Images Ahead". Looking past the sign, I couldn't help but notice the gigantic15x15 billboard stuck directly in the middle of the Rudder courtyard with huge pictures of aborted fetuses all over it. Walking around this billboard were a handful of Aggies distributing anti-abortion pamphlets and literature. I have no problem with people expressing their opinions and, in fact, I don't really even have a problem with the billboard itself. What I do have a problem with is the smarmy sign they put up to avoid getting trouble. "Well, you shouldn't have been offended by the images, I mean we put up a warning sign so you didn't have to look if you didn't want to!" Yeah, right. I'll just take one look at the warning sign, avert my eyes, turn around and add an additional 10 minutes to my walk by going completely around Rudder Fountain. Give me a break -- either put up a real, sincere, warning, or don't put one up at all. What is the point of putting a warning sign up when by the time you can read the sign you're already close enough to see the images you are being warned about? What is the point of putting a warning sign up for a billboard you intentionally stuck in what is likely the most heavily traversed part of campus? This, to me, seems very much like false sincerity and it irks me. | | |
| Nicole and I watched Fiddler on the Roof the other night; she had seen it as a kid and I had never watched it before. I enjoyed seeing the movie with the benefit of historic background knowledge, because I think much of it might have gone over my head if I wasn't somewhat familiar with the Bolshevik revolution and the political/social/religious situation in Russia leading up to it. That being said, I think the strongest impact the movie left on me was the depiction of the pogrom carried out against the Jews and their small community.
Christians have persecuted Jews for many hundreds of years and no doubt still do in some places. How could the early and Medieval Christians justify their treatment of the Jews? Obviously they did based on their interpretation of Scripture and the idea that the sin of crucifying Jesus was imputed to all Jews everywhere, and that Christians were called to punish them accordingly. But, I mean much more fundamentally -- how could they justify this sort of treatment to themselves and not see the contradiction that murdering Jews and stealing their possessions had with the teachings of Jesus?
I've wondered the same thing before about slavery. How could Christian slaveholders justify their actions with their conscience? Again, they had their intellectual defense in Paul's instructions to early church slaveholders, but they failed to see the disconnect between the barbarity and inhumanity of slavery and the teachings of Christ.
Obviously, I think that many of the Christians who persecuted Jews and who owned slaves were Christians in name only, and were just following cultural norms and expectations of their day and age -- this is true for all peoples I think. But, I would also say that many of these Christians were true brothers and sisters of the faith, they just failed to see (or do anything about it, if they did see) this particular plank in their eye.
So, all of this leads me to the question: what are the sorts of things that our 21st-century American Christianity will be judged for down the road? What is the church's modern-day equivalent of Medieval pogroms and southern American plantation slavery (and it's lingering racism)? Which planks should we be seeking to remove from our eyes?
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