The world wants to be forever young. Unfortunately, it seems that the church is unashamedly on the same quest!
Carl Trueman wrote an excellent commentary on the forever-young syndrome:
"In some ways, today's world is the very antithesis of earlier ages. I always found sixteenth and seventeenth century paintings of children to be somewhat creepy: adult heads on tiny, immature bodies, as if the artists had no real concept of youth and childhood that allowed them to depict faces as such. Strange, isn't it, that the airbrushing techniques so often used in today's glossy magazines seem designed to have precisely the opposite effect: to place young heads on bodies that we know are much older. The concept of old age is perhaps slowly but surely being airbrushed out of representations in the popular media.
"Numerous incidents over recent years have brought the sad effect of all this home to me. As a professor at university and seminary, I have had too many run-ins with students who act like five year olds and, when held to account, express all the pouting resentment that one comes to expect from a generation that demands respect but refuses to put in the time and effort to earn it. You see them on the blogs, screaming their abuse and demanding to be heard, carrying on their tirades long after the threshold of Godwin's Law and any semblance of decency or credibility has been passed for the umpteenth time. They have achieved nothing - but they demand that you respect them!"
Read more...
HT: Frank Turk
I am planning to run a worldview course in the beginning of 2009, in Pretoria, South Africa. It is called the Truth Project, and it is a DVD-based worldview tour. My plan is to run the course from around the 2nd or 3rd week in January. It is a 13 week course, and the lessons can be seen at the bottom of this post.
This is probably the best I have seen on the subject of worldview, and I did attend a Truth Project leader’s training seminar in Johannesburg with the presenter of the series.
I am sure we all know the importance of a Biblical worldview, and while this course will take up some of your time, I can guarantee that it will definitely not be time wasted.
Further, because this is a DVD-based course, it will be held in my own house, or someone else’s house. Each lesson is +-1 hour long, and we will also have time to discuss what we heard in that lesson.
If you are interested, please let me know so that I can start planning. Please feel free to pass this invitation to others whom you think may also want to attend a course like this around Pretoria.
The course is designed for around 12 people at a time, so first come first served.
"He took the blade. It was bright silver. He loved the way it glistened. It felt good in his hand. He cut deep into her chest again and again. He showed no emotion, no recognition of her humanity. She lay motionless, her life gone. He made no attempt to cover the body. Later that night over a beer he openly talked to a stranger in the bar about what he had done. The stranger felt ill.
What are we to make of this? Should someone have called 911? Should he have been ar-rested? Is this a Hannibal Lector story? It all depends. To make sense of it, this narrative fragment needs placing in a larger picture or frame of reference. We need to know more.
Now suppose I were to inform you that the setting earlier that night was a back alley late at night and that the woman had been alive but drunk when she entered it, then you would be entitled to think that this is a case for CSI. The man listening to the story in the bar ought to have called the police. However, if I were to say that instead of the alley, the setting earlier that night had been a CSI autopsy room, then the complexion of the event changes your reading of it. The man with the knife is no serial killer but instead a forensic scientist. Maybe he shouldn’t have talked about the details to a stranger over a beer. But if that was misconduct it was unprofessional, not criminal."
Continue reading Graham A. Cole's article called "DO CHRISTIANS HAVE A WORLDVIEW?"
[You will need a PDF reader to read this article. You can find one here and here.]
HT: Justin Taylor
