http://www.joethorn.net/2009/03/26/theology-pub-6/

However after I lost that physical community my faith began to dwindle. Some bad habits crept into my life that I should never have opened the door to. In the last few years I have walked through the valley of the shadow and I feared evil instead of God. It’s time to come back and keep this site running even if the Pub Night in it’s physical form is not up and running. So bear with me as I journey back to a healthy place.

My friend Jason Blair has begun to reinvent the Two42 website.  His revitalizing of Two42 has given me the inspiration to bring Theology Pub Night back to the virtual world.  So here goes I will be gathering some information for a topic my wife and I discussed just tonight and will be posting it on-line as soon as possible.

Check out Two 42 www.two42.net

Nathan

Christ is risen!

My point if one was to convert to Jewdaism now at later state in life not having any prior conviction or ancestry connection would be ridiculous.  So you can’t think that you will gain the same blessing if you come in at a later date to the decree.  It just doesn’t make sense that any one would think that they would gain some sort financial gift as a result of becoming a Jew. Just a thought!

The failing, of course, is that one could be led to believe that the verses most often published on the internet are therefore the most important verses. My own view is that the most important themes in the Bible come not from picking individual ’soundbite’ verses out of context, but by looking at the overall message of entire books. Surely that is how it was intended to be read.

Feel free to post your own devotional thoughts on 2 Chronicles 31:7. It would be great if we could bump it up to the top 5. This would perplex a lot of people, which I’m all in favour of.

Not that I’d suggest mischief or anything(!), but it would be fun to game the system a little bit.

–

I know I’m asking for a fisking for this, but that never stopped me before.

For all these stories I read about Catholics going Protestant,
Evangelicals going Catholic, etc., I wonder how much any of them has to
say is a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the
Tiber. Theological differences aside, so many “converts” stories center
around perceptions of dead religion in one camp or the other. Maybe
(not for every example, to be sure) the case is that they had been
laboring under the delusion that the religion they were personally
practicing was dead, and that when they had their “conversion,” they
had to move to another tradition to get away from everything that
represented their deadness.

I see this tendency in myself, too. I’m an evangelical. I was saved in
college, and the people who were ministering to me were evangelicals. I
grew up in a mainline, so obviously I thought the mainline was full of
non-Christians and dead spirituality. (This is an attitude I have
repented of.) Later, going back to my childhood church, I heard the
gospel clearly in the liturgy. The problem wasn’t with that church, it
was with ME. I was dead, and now I’m alive, thanks be to God. Had I
gone to that church regularly at the time God was getting my attention,
I might still be in that tradition. Of course, now that I’ve had plenty
of time to steep in the Evangelical tea, I’ve slowly perceived problems
there as I read “the dead guys.” This is making me want to go back to a
liturgical form.

When you bring someone’s theological convictions into all this, it gets
messier. I hear beloved brothers and sisters make comments to the
effect that they are praying for a Catholic neighbor to get saved. This
makes me sad. I think to myself, maybe they need saving, and maybe they
don’t. Why don’t you talk to them about Jesus and see if they trust Him
or not? The same thing could work the other way. I checked out a
Catholic book store in my neighborhood a few months ago, since the
evangelical Christian bookstores around here certainly don’t have much
in the way of the early Fathers and church History. The person working
there was a former Baptist turned Catholic who, upon learning that I
was an evangelical, spent the rest of our conversation subtly
witnessing to me of the Catholic faith.

I know there are many real problems of theology and praxis between
Christian denominations. Still, there must be some way to see
Christians for who they are, without resorting to picking on
denominational errors(!) that probably don’t disqualify us from the
Kingdom.

Granted little things like you better pray hard that this thing doesn’t blow up in your face is more of a common threat phrase. Yet I still feel like there is a reason people make these types of comments. Maybe it’s just human nature to think about God in time of stress. However my theory is that people see something you as you interact with them and they start to feel more willing to share there lives with you. A casual conversation about music such as the blog before this can lead to many open doors.

I was talking to my PM the other day and I had showdown playing on my computer. He asked if I liked listening to that kind of music. I said of course but it’s not what you think. Then I told him it was Christian and he nodded his head. I said I would rather listen to this type of music if it had a more positive message other than kill your mother. He kinda agreed and then brought the subject to nine inch nails. Ok thats cool they have a lot of good songs that are not all bad. Regardless this got me in the door. Then he said I should meet his wife because she was a big Christian music fan. She has gone to sonshine several times and loves the scene now my foot is way in the door. More to follow as I feel him out to see where they both stand spiritually and why!

The more I experiment the more I come up with conversation starters and trust gainers.

Nathan

On with the story…Dave and I got talking about music through course of a thousand conversations. I mentioned my one sided listening habits as they pertain to pop music. My upbringing has fostered a bias towards the christianese music. My mom and dad really did not appreciate secular (in there words the worldly music). I fought to even listen to DcTalk when I was 13. They didn’t like the idea that DcTalk would even use the word SEX in on of there songs. Granted here’s how the lyrics went “I don’t want, I don’t it want your sex for now”. The song goes on to talk about waiting until your married to have SEX and all forms terrible stuff right! I mean seriously people whats wrong with um bop um bop bop um bop come on. Not that I like Hanson but you get the point thats what I was listening to when DcTalk was BIG.

So too make a short story longer than it really needs to be heres what we talked about after my clouded skewed view was exposed. I made that comment that I really did not mind the secular genre. That being said, I mentioned that I maybe own like two CD’s of other artist. By other I mean the worldly ones, now I sound like my parents. So any hoot, I said there was a disconnect in my mind that there could be a Christian who just happened to be a secular artist. There are a fair number of people who go mainstream or start out not having any affiliation with the so called evangelical filtering system. They may not have there music in the Christian book store but they can still believe can’t they.

Dave having come from a catholic background was not really even exposed to the Christian music scene that much. So his comment was well there’s music we sing in church and there’s the music that is played on the radio. Fair enough but what if you there is an alternative to mainstream radio and secular music. See thats the tricky part because there is a huge industry built on bashing innocent secular artist’s by saying there music isn’t moral enough to listen to so we listen to “Relient K instead of Blink 182″ sure there are some artists out there that are terrible at dumping filth into songs. But if we are to take music for music and lyrics for what they are then we have no case. There is an incredible wealth of music in the mainstream industry that has a very good message. My eye’s were opened to the short wave world I live in trying to make Christian music my staple diet.

I guess the moral of the story is that there are Christians in the world who make music. Not just Christian music and not always completely theologically based, but music not the less. So it’s my challenge to all of you who have been boxed in by the Christian music scene to explore the world of music a little more. Look at music for what it is and why it’s there and find something new that has depth and value outside of the Christian book store.

Nathan (Guardian of Pub Night, and the free theological expression of saints over and large glass of Guiness).