Ok, the idiocy of Christian fundamentalism strikes again. This Ben Stein fellow (whoever he is, I have no clue) made a propaganda filmdocumentary about how scientists who believe in intelligent design are “expelled” from the world of science. Apparently the movie is crap, the producer of the movie did a great disservice to any thinking Christian scientist and he even managed to come across as a hypocrite for his own alleged “freedom of speech” agenda by having a biologist who was featured in the movie expelled from the premiere… On top of that the blog-o-sphere has a new reason to (rightfully) poke fun at fundamentalists.
Der Grimme-Online-Award prämierte BILDblogger Stefan Niggemeier dokumentiert auf seinem Blog wie die Call-TV Firma Callactive mit massivem Rechtsdruck gegen eine kritische Online-Berichtserstattung vorgeht.
Die Landesmedienanstalten halten es scheinbar nicht für sinnvoll sich mit den statistischen Unregelmäßigkeiten im Programmablauf der Quiz-Shows nachts auf MTV, Nick, etc, die den Verdacht eines gescripteten Ablaufs nahe legen zu befassen und Blogger & Forennutzer die diese anprangern werden von Callactive abgemahnt.
There’s not too much to add to this, I just want to share an anecdote I witnessed at a worship seminar held for the worship team of a major church (considering German measures it’s a mega church). The church has two worship services, one in the morning, which is aimed at the “regular” church going people (young middle class families up to older middle class folks) & one in the evening, which is aimed at the younger people (teenagers, young adults, college students). The morning service is based on a more liturgical framework, in which worship music is divided up into several blocks and they usually have only one or two songs. The evening service has a longer worship block consisting of anything from 5 up to 8 worship songs. I usually went to the latter.
During the seminar a team leader of evening service made a snide remark aimed at the worship culture of the morning service, which resulted in some serious (but much needed) debate about what worship is and what worship is not. The thing that struck me most, was the trust into their own musical skills worship teams develop. I am definitely not exempt from this, even though I consider myself to be a highly mediocre musician (you know the kind, talented enough to make people admire you at open stage, but too lazy/”grounded into reality”/whatever to ever go anywhere with it). At a certain point, the statement was issued that we, the worshippers from the evening service, could help the other teams, from the morning service, to develop a more fulfilling worship experience…
Wow, what kind of arrogant notion have we gotten ourselves into? I am all for musically well-made worship and I am more into free-style worshipping over strict liturgy. Often I catch myself thinking the thought, that if only we “more experienced” worshippers could show another worship team (or if I’m at home in my pietist church heritage: if we could free them from this boring liturgical stuff) than they’d be so much better off. I don’t even know if the metaphor with the splinter in my brother’s eye fits anymore for this kind of spiritual diarrheea. Jesus was quite clear on that: It doesn’t matter whether we worship God by means of ancient liturgical tradition, where every hand movement is scripted and has some semantic value that correlates to the colors of the accessories the pastor/priest/preacher wears or led by a hip pop band with a crisp guitar solo on a Fender strat, neck/middle pickup position, tube amp very slightly overdriven (just on the edge between clean sound & crunch) and a healthy dose of delay (you all know that worship song solo sound, they all sound so much the same I often wonder whether the spirit favors U2).
God wants us to worship in spirit & in truth and to come to him with a humble & broken heart. I can’t speak for other worshippers, but measured by this standard… I’m probably more often than not a crappy worshipper.
I’m no theologian, I study mathematics & literature (that’s a cool combination, isn’t it ?) and theology always seemed an oxymoron to me. Trying to grasp & describe God with human reason appeared to be more than odd. God was something I placed outside of the realm of logic reasoning.
When I read Ratzinger’s script of the infamous lecture he held in Regensburg I stumbled upon a beautiful thesis, in which Ratzinger emphasizes the fact that God is ‘logos’ and therefore not outside of rational reasoning and logic but rather constitutes it. As a result of this, I concurred, we don’t need to bring our reason to God, but we can rather accept God’s ‘logos’ to work in us and theology suddenly becomes way more than an inadequate attempt at trying to describe God in academic statements, theology becomes a way to find words that catch a glimpse of his reality.
At this point the whole thing is still merely a theoretical idea and an idealist’s perception of theology. When I look at the heated debates around theological issues in history as well, as a quick google search for “creatin & evolution” or “homosexuality & bible” might bring up, it seems as if theology is just about one side claiming to be right to smack the other side (which is obviously totally off track, because they misread the bible or don’t take it seriously enough or take the wrong passage to literal, while neglecting other more relevant passages… yackyackyada). Sometimes, Christians seem to be so intensely concerned with believing the “right” stuff that God suddenly becomes secondary. All at once, it’s about my point of view, my interpretation more than about catching that glimpse of God’s reality. And maybe we’re not far away from denying someone else’s plausibility or even the sincerity of his faith.
What I find intriguing about Jesus is, that he gave the whole aspect of theology a certain twist. When the pharisees stepped up to him and asked him all kinds of trick question to probe him for orthodoxy, he let the whole charade of set up intellectuality fly right back at them. Theology is not about trick questions and legalistic paradoxes. It is not a tool to judge someone else’s orthodoxy (as convenient as that might be). I read a nice piece by Joe Martino on the relevant christian blog (link) about those nice little theories we set up, using the bible as intellectual backup, thumping passages that promote our point of view just to prove we’re right. A former roommate once stated that he loved those theological debates where they would whip out their bibles and then you’d know why he always had a Schlachter translation around (that’s a quote! Schlachter is German and translates to butcher or slayer). Theology suddenly became about “slaying” your “opponents” POV.
Joe Martino tops his piece of with a completely different approach on the relevance of theology and states that the rules for whoever “wins” the theological debate are quite simple. It’s not about being right. It’s about God. And the measurement for whether it’s about God is NOT the right amount of bible verses thrown around. The measurement for sound theology is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness & self control. That’s a completely different take on the whole thing, isn’t it? That’s where God’s logos is at work.
Posted by room2blog 
Posted by room2blog 
Posted by room2blog 
?) and theology always seemed an oxymoron to me. Trying to grasp & describe God with human reason appeared to be more than odd. God was something I placed outside of the realm of logic reasoning.
