_awakening

And We're Back.

Sorry about the blogging layoff as of late, as it has been a hectic time in the DeVries household [like when is it not with four kids...]

I figured it was about time for a quick update, so here goes.

While we were in the beginning stages of exploring the position at Azusa Pacific University, a friend of mine called and asked if I would consider a temporary position at the wine store he was working at, called Amazing Grapes Wine Store. Long story short, I thought it'd be a fun opportunity so I jumped at the chance. With the Azusa Pacific position going to someone else, I was approached by the owners of the wine store about staying on permanently. Yeah, so while we're taking a look at what the future holds in regards to my doctoral program and teaching, I'm doing wine buying and sales. It's a pretty sweet job, as I'm learning much about the wine world, all while getting a chance to sample some of the most amazing wines from around the world.

As for Jamie, this has been a big week for her. For quite some time now, and for a variety of reasons, she has been growing more weary of La Galette. She wanted more of a challenge and to be some place where she could advance - both financially and experience-wise. Enter the Montage. We have some friends who have worked in the resort industry and have encouraged Jamie to explore some opportunities there. On a whim, Jamie went to a job fair at Montage and was hired on the spot! Her new job you ask? She's going to be the Fromage [cheese sommelier] at The Loft, where she will be presenting the dining guests with their extensive cheese listing, including 75 cheeses, over 40 different honeys. So, for the better part of the next two weeks she is in training at The Loft.

So if you think about it, as a family we have the wine and cheese thing covered pretty well.

More to come...

I Wonder.

So I was driving yesterday and listening to 91X, which comes in and out depending on where you are in South OC. I went through a section where it went out and on comes a radio preacher making the following statement:

The only questions is this: is your marriage on the rocks, or is it built on the Rock? Because the reality is this... either your marriage is built on Jesus Christ, or it inevitably will find itself on the rocks.

Okay, cheesy Christian jargon aside, I was troubled by this. While I understand the point that this person was trying to make, I was completely turned off by the smug overstatement. There are many people I know, whose marriages are not "built on the Rock," but are experiencing self-giving and wonderfully vibrant, loving marriages. Why do we say these kinds of things? Do we not realize how they are heard by others?

Rather than creating false divisions and condemnation, what if we could help people embrace the positive things in their marriage as tapping into the way marriage was created to work by the Creator, helping them realize that whether they know it or not they are living the way of Jesus.

[Sigh.]

Free is Good.

In the summer of 2005, Jamie and I had a chance to see Coldplay when they came through SoCal. X & Y had just come out and had not been overplayed yet. They were flat out amazing live. Although the entire set was great, the surprise highlight of the evening was a stripped down cover of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire.

Anyway, Coldplay's latest is coming out this summer and for the next week if you swing by www.coldplay.com you can download a new single for free... and we all know free is good!

[HT: Ashdown]

Jesus as Messiah.

One of the standard reasons often given for the rejection of Jesus by the Jews of his day has been that he did not fit the preconceived "idea" of what the messiah should be. While on a large scale this argument can be made, the discussion needs to be nuanced a bit. While it is impossible to speak of a uniform Judaism in the day of Jesus, it is likewise difficult to portray the notion of the messiah as uniform. The reality is that there was a variety of notions of the messiah. Some saw the messiah as a re-establishment of the Davidic monarchy, others saw the messiahs as a kind of prophet in the ways of Moses, while others embraced a priestly messiah to whom even the Davidic monarch would be subordinate to.

While reading for my thesis, John Collins captures this nuance of competing messianic ideas well:

As we have seen, Jewish ideas of messianism were not uniform. There was a dominant notion of a Davidic messiah, as the king who would restore the kingdom of Israel, which was part of the common Judaism around the turn of the era. There were also, however, minor messianic strands, which envisaged a priestly messiah, or an anointed prophet or a  heavenly Son of Man. Christian messianism drew heavily on some of the minor strands (prophet, Son of Man) and eventually developed them into a doctrine of Christology that was remote from its Jewish origins.

The Christology of the early Church was shaped by various factors. The crucifixion of Jesus led to the searching of the Scriptures and to a new, creative exegesis of messianic prophecy. There was a deliberate attempt to claim more for Jesus that had been claimed for any other agent of God. Eventually the creedal formulations were influenced by Greek philosophy. Despite the divergence of their branches, however, Christian and Jewish messianism were rooted in common ground. The importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for the ancient conflict between Judaism and Christianity lies in the light they shed on that common ground of pre-Christian, pre-rabbinic Judaism. [The Scepter and the Star, pp. 209-210]

A few conclusions jump out:

First, to say the Jews "missed" what was plainly made clear in the scriptures is simplistic and naive. Jesus did fulfill some of the messianic expectations of his day, but not others. Second, we have to admit that the early followers of Jesus did search the scriptures to make a case for his messiahship. While this may sound un-orthodox, in reality they were handling the scriptures in the classic form of Jewish exegesis. Third, early Christians brought two innovative thoughts to the discussion of the messiah - the idea that the messiah should suffer and die and the connecting of the messiah with divinity. Before Jesus, these two thoughts were not central to any messianic notion.

So I guess in the end, the Jews of Jesus' day did not reject him because he did not fit some preconceived and uniformly agreed upon notion of who the messiah should be. Perhaps he was more than anyone, including his followers, could have ever dreamed or imagined.

This Tuesday.

Once again, Andrew Sullivan nails it when he ponders what is really at stake this Tuesday in Pennsylvania.

And that’s why Tuesday will be so instructive. Hillary Clinton should win Pennsylvania easily. She had a 20-point lead until relatively recently. And if the Clintons are right about their classic Atwater-Rove tactics, she will win by double-digits after throwing the kitchen sink, the boiler, the couch and the septic tank at her opponent.

If Obama keeps her lead to single digits, if he goes on to win in North Carolina and Indiana, if the momentum of the race does not change, something else will be shown.

It will show that the crisis America is in now has made the kind of tactics of the past two decades moot. It will show that the issues of the Iraq occupation, the teetering economy, the unsustainable debt, the collapsing dollar, the constitutional disarray and the moral collapse of the torture programme are now more salient than cultural identity. It will show that the voters actually want to debate something more than lapel pins and who is or is not a secret Muslim or patriot. It will show we are in a new era.

Maybe we’re not. Maybe the old politics and the old patterns have one more turn of the screw to go. Maybe the Clintons are right. And that’s the beauty of democracy. On Tuesday, we will go a long way towards finding out.

The Best of the West?

I once heard it said that baseball is all about managing failure. Where else could you be successful only one third of the time and still be considered an all-star?

Well, this weekend was a learning experience for our Redline team. To date, we've been in four tournaments, going to the championship game in all of them, coming away as the champions in one. Our team has been relatively successful, seeing the majority of breaks that come in every game go our way.

Well, not this weekend.

We played in three games this weekend, losing every one of them. In all three games, we had the lead, clicking on all cylinder, only to see the game lost in a single inning of futility. It was like everything was going well, and then in a single inning you could see it all beginning to slip away. Once the lead was gone, we went flat. Unable to regain the momentum we needed to win, the game slipped away. We lost both our games on Saturday night, first to the OCBA Barons, 9-7, and then to the OC Twins, 5-4. We came back this morning and proceeded to pick up where we left off, losing to the Huntington Beach Vikings, 6-5. Tough, tough loses.

Josh played much like everyone else. He has some stellar plays at first base, but had little at the plate to show for the effort. He hit the ball hard, once flying out to the left fielder on a drive that must have been about 275 feet. He ended up going 1 for 5 with a double, an RBI, and scoring a run.

Looking back on it, it was a good learning experience for the team. They need to know how to handle adversity.

Like it was once said, they need to learn how to manage failure...

Athletics Win.

After two weeks off, our team, the Dana Point A's entered the night tied for first. It was a pretty tight game, but we ended up prevailing 7-6 after a walk-off single in the bottom of the seventh inning. Quite dramatic. We gave up two runs in the top of the seventh to let them back into the game, but the boys came through in the end. With this win, we're in sole possession of first place with a 6-1 record.

Josh did very well last night, making a huge defensive play at first base in the first inning on a hard hit grounder to his left. He also pitched three scoreless innings and went 2-2 at the plate, with a double and a single.

This weekend is going to be all baseball. On Saturday morning our A's team is playing, while our travel team, Redline, is playing in San Clemente at the Best of the West Classic. Two games on Saturday afternoon/evening and hopefully two more on Sunday. What else would we rather be doing?

You can follow Redline here, if you are so inclined.

Krister Stendahl [1921-2008].

The scholarly community has lost another brilliant voice as Krister Stendahl, former dean of Harvard Divinity School and a bishop in Sweden, died yesterday. Stendahl was a foremost voice in re-examining our vision of the Apostle Paul and his writings. Here are a few things that are being said about Stendahl and his influence:

Krister Stendahl, 86, Ecumenical Bishop, is Dead [NY Times]

Krister Stendahl, 1921-2008 [Harvard Divinity School News]

From Wikipedia:

Stendahl is perhaps most famous for his publication of the article The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West. This article, along with the later publication of the book Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, conveys a new idea in Pauline studies suggesting that scholarship dating all the way back to Augustine may miss the context and thesis of Paul. His main point revolves around the early tension in Christianity between Jewish Christians and Gentile converts.

Like many others, I first encountered Stendahl when I read his ground-breaking essay The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West for an independent study I was doing on the New Perspective on Paul. Stendahl was truly one of the first to call into question our "reading" of Paul, noting that perhaps we are too influenced by Western thinking. It was this essay that opened the door for later thinkers such as E.P Sanders, James Dunn, and Tom Wright, who began to explore more deeply and refine the thoughts that Stendahl pondered.

His influence is broad, and his voice will be surely missed.

I Will Possess Your Heart.

Death Cab's latest release, Narrow Stairs, is due out on May 13th. Cannot wait. Plans was in heavy rotation on the iPod for months. Sonically astounding. Lyrically rich.

So as a bit of a foretaste of what's to come...

If the disc is half this good, it will be amazing.

[HT: Todd Littleton]

More Odds and Ends.

While surveying what has been posted in the past few weeks, here are a few things that caught my eye. Thought I'd pass them along...

Herschel Shanks has written an open letter of sorts to his friend, and recently deceased, David Noel Freedman. UC San Diego has also issued a very nice press release on Freedman's passing. It is well worth reading about the life and work of this eminent scholar. We have definitely lost one of the finest.

Chris Tilling recounts his journey from creationist to evolutionist. Now before jumping to some conclusion, read this piece carefully and thoughtfully. Chris follows up the post interacting with some of the comments and pondering out loud whether Jesus was wrong.

JR Woodward recently completed a series of posts on whether conversion is a four-lettered word. The series is absolutely worth the time to read, especially to follow the conversation in the comments. I think JR is on to something.

And lastly... Christianity Today has posted an intriguing article on How to Save the Christian Bookstore. With my disdain for many things attached to the so called "Christian bookstore" [no news here], my answer to the question might perhaps be a little different...