week 4

   

Before next class,

 take the poll on upper right of this webpage>>>>>>>

--------------

How to do the Google trick I showed you:

:
Lots more of these, click here .

 

==Remember this:

 

Remember the two controversial questions on your quiz?:

In  1 Cor 3:16-17, however, Paul is speaking of the corporate body, the church.  The three appearances of “you” are plural:

Do you not know that you (plural) are a temple of God and the Spirit of God dwells among you (plural)?  If anyone destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him.  For the temple of God is holy, and that is what you (plural) are.

The NASB and ESV note this in the margin, but the translations don’t capture Paul’s sense and leave the impression that it’s singular.

The updated NIV, however, nails it:

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?  If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.  Tim Gombis

See 1:01-2:01 in this video:

Yoked together?

What is the context of the “unequally yoked” passage?

up vote3down votefavorite

2 Corinthians 6:14 is the well known "unequally yoked" passage. While the common interpretation is that it is about marriage, the heading translators added in NIV is "Warning against Idolatry", and there was nothing about marriage. Was it ever discussed what sort of event or situation that Corinthian church was in that inspired Paul to write such a passage? What other interpretations exist of the "unequally yoked" passage that Bible scholars have proposed? How did the idea that this verse refers to marriage come from, given that marriage was not mentioned in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, 6 or 7?  click this for more

the virtual candle:

A really virtual candle!

----

Trucker Frank:

Kingdom   -NOT PLACE                         BUT GRACE

-NOT REALM                                        BUT REIGN AND RULE

--

• not realm, but reign
• not place , but person
• not race, but grace
• not just "then and there," but 'here and now" (Matt. 4:17, 6:10) 

---

Remember how Paul..the same Paul who wrote Philemon..used the "S" word in Philippians 3?  In the original Greek he used the word "skubala," which your class Bible translates "rubbish,"  but the word is much close to the 

English S-word 

 More on that word use 

here.

Oh, here's a link to buy the T shirt (or bib or hat..or)

----------
We covered a few of these S words.  The rest next week

Remember this experiment? "Put it together correctly?"

ow many of you could win  big money on this bet on what the text message of the Bible really says:

• It nowhere says there were three.
• It no where says they were wise
• It nowhere says they were men.

And we know for a fact they

weren't at the manger.

And they weren't kings!
Watch this to find out more. This info will help in Bib 314: 

==
We did some more "set theory" exercises

SAINT OR SINNER?We are not fundamentally... by nature... sinners anymore: on the contrary we are, according to v. 11, "washed, sanctified and justified." We are now to be considered "saints." Now hang on a minute, I hear that objection coming. The problem is that we have greatly misunderstood what the Bible means by "saint." One does not have to be dead or Catholic, or perfect to be a saint. One only has to be a biblically-defined Christian. And that means that we have a new nature, given us by Christ! If you really wonder if you are a saint, consider that Paul even calls those far less than perfect Christians in First and Second Californians..um, excuse me. Corinthians ( 1 Cor 1:2; 2:1), 
---------------------------------------

Chapters and verses:

See this great chapter,  Watch for Marvin Smurdly

Read this.  Stephanus created verses on horseback.  His son said they made no sense,

Stephen Langton, in the 12th century, added what we use today as the chapter divisions. He did this into the Latin Vulgate. The tradition is that these divisions were later transfered to the Hebrew Bible. From manuscripts dating back to the fourth century, however, some form of chapter divisions were used. In 1551, Robert Estienne (a.k.a. Stephanus) added verse divisions to his fourth edition of the Greek New Testament, while en route between Paris and Lyons, France. The first translation to employ his versification was the Geneva translation of 1557 (whole Bible, 1560).

see also here for who divisions get us in trouble

Quiz next week

• Remember your field trip to learn what people said about me??  Click  this :

•                     I am moody and I have a nice butt

  for more.
• 
  
• Dave is...
  

Then  we spent a few minutes on. the"Johari Window".  Here's more:.. 

 ..highlighting the fact that we  may not know how obviously our dark side is showing, or even know what it is...but others do:

The Johari window is a technique created by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in 1955^[1]in the United States, used to help people better understand their mental instability. It is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise.
When performing the exercise, subjects are given a list of 56 adjectives and pick five or six that they feel describe their own personality. Peers of the subject are then given the same list, and each pick five or six adjectives that describe the subject. These adjectives are then mapped onto a grid.^[2]
..

Quadrants:

Open: Adjectives that are selected by both the participant and his or her peers are placed into the Open quadrant. This quadrant represents traits of the subjects that both they and their peers are aware of.

Hidden: Adjectives selected only by subjects, but not by any of their peers, are placed into the Hidden quadrant, representing information about them their peers are unaware of. It is then up to the subject to disclose this information or not.

Blind Spot: Adjectives that are not selected by subjects but only by their peers are placed into the Blind Spot quadrant. These represent information that the subject is not aware of, but others are, and they can decide whether and how to inform the individual about these "blind spots".

Unknown: Adjectives that were not selected by either subjects or their peers remain in the Unknown quadrant, representing the participant's behaviors or motives that were not recognized by anyone participating. This may be because they do not apply or because there is collective ignorance of the existence of these traits.  Wiki

--------

N.T. Wright's  sermon

 below

 (video  link and complete audio  here): his comments about the letter here, and his study questions on pages 55-57 here). 

Think

Moodle below.  Rememeber conversations on CULTURE?
CULTURE:
How many of you are in a cross-cultural marriage? ____
We'll answer all these tonight at some point.

--
How do you define culture?

So many possible definitions:

• Dallas Elder:" Culture is the heritage and identity of a people group which is manifested in their shared language, customs, behavioral patterns, values, beliefs and ideas; and which distinctively define the people group. "
• Paul Hiebert:  “learned patterns of behavior, ideas and products characteristic of a [group of people]."
• Simone Weil:  "What is culture?  The formation of attention."
• Other definitions here
• Interesting  the  definition of culture within a hospital

How about:

   "a way of thinking, feeling, valuing and acting by one or more people."
All marriages/relationships/communications/texts are cross-cultural .

In this video (and in the new book by Sweet and Viola), Sweet makes the case that"the greatest song ever sung" was Psalm 22.....and the singer was Jesus

The Greatest Song Ever Sung from Marble Collegiate Church on Vimeo.

What do you remember about this?

Gospel and Culture

By Paul Hiebert, from “Anthropological Insights for Missionaries”

This exercise is intended to help you test your own theological consistency on a number of issues that Protestants in various denominations have felt important. As a Christian in a cross-cultural setting, you will need to learn the differences between
those elements essential to the church in every culture, and those elements which are not.

Part One

Separate all the items that follow into two categories, based on these definitions:

Essential: These items (commands, practices, customs) are essential to the church in
every age and place. [Mark these. “E” on the list.]

Negotiable. These items (commands, practices, customs) may or may not be valid

for the church in any given place or time. [Mark these “N” on the list.]

1. Greet each other with a holy kiss.

2. Do not go to court to settle issues between Christians.

3. Do not eat meat used in pagan ceremonies.

4. Women in the assembly should be veiled when praying or speaking.

5. Wash feet at the Lord’s Supper (Eucharist).

6. Lay on hands for ordination.

7. Sing without musical accompaniment.

8. Abstain from eating blood.

9. Abstain from fornication.

10. Share the Lord’s Supper (Eucharist).

11. Use only real wine and unleavened bread for your Eucharist meals.

12. Use only grape juice for Eucharist meals.

13. Anoint with oil for healing.

14. Women are not to teach men.

15. Women are not to wear braided hair, gold, or pearls.

16. Men are not to have long hair.

17. Do not drink wine at all.

18. Slavery is permissible if you treat slaves well.

19. Remain single.

20. Seek the gift of tongues.

21. Seek the gift of healing.

22. Lift your hands when you pray.

23. People who don’t work don’t eat.

24. Have a private “devotional time” every day.

25. Say Amen at the end of prayers.

26. Appoint elders and deacons in every congregation.

27. Elect the leaders.

28. Confess sins one to another.

29. Confess sins privately to God.

30. Give at least ten percent of your income/goods/crops to God.

31. Construct a building for worship.

32. Confess Christ publicly by means of baptism.

33. Be baptized by immersion.

34. Be baptized as an adult.

35. Be baptized as a child/infant.

36. Do not be a polygamist.

37. Do not divorce your spouse for any reason.

38. Do not divorce your spouse except for adultery.

Part Two

Reflect on the process by which you distinguished the “essential” from the

“negotiable” items. What principle or principles governed your decision? Write out the

method you used, in a simple, concise statement. Be completely honest with yourself

and accurately describe how you arrived at your decisions. Your principle(s) should

account for every decision.

Part Three

Review your decisions again, and answer the following questions:

Are your “essential” items so important to you that you could not associate with a

group that did not practice all of them?

Are there some “essential” items that are a little more “essential” than others?

Are there any items that have nothing explicitly to do with Scripture at all?

-By Paul Hiebert, from “Anthropological Insights for Missionaries”Church and Culture Survey

Follow-up reading:

here

the Holy Kiss for today..on a bridge and in a bucket

"There is the kiss and the counterkiss, and if one wins, we both lose." -Walter Brueggemann -
---------------
We covered the biblical tradition of the "holy kiss" in our gathering last Sunday.
It was a lot of fun. We started with a game of Hangman;
We had "Holy _ _ _ _" on the whiteboard when folks came in!

They has to guess what four letter word filled in the blank to make this a phrase that appears in Scripture. When i said "yes" to the first guess of "S," you should have heard the comments!

That the Bible explicitly mentions this practice five times:

• Romans 16.16a — "Greet one another with a holy kiss" (Greek: ἀσπάσασθε ἀλλήλους ἐν φιλήματι ἁγίῳ).
• I Corinthians 16.20b — "Greet one another with a holy kiss" (Greek: ἀσπάσασθε ἀλλήλους ἐν φιλήματι ἁγίῳ).
• II Corinthians 13.12a — "Greet one another with a holy kiss" (Greek: ἀσπάσασθε ἀλλήλους ἐν ἁγίῳ φιλήματι).
• I Thessalonians 5.26 — "Greet all the brothers with a holy kiss" (Greek: ἀσπάσασθε τοὺς ἀδελφοὺς πάντας ἐν φιλήματι ἁγίῳ).
• I Peter 5.14a — "Greet one another with a kiss of love" (Greek: ἀσπάσασθε ἀλλήλους ἐν φιλήματι ἀγάπης).

...makes it a classic case study in how to apply
any scriptures that we assume need a cultural equivalent to out taking them literally.
(Though some of our folks took the "holy kiss" literally Sunday..no, not on the lips....I wish I had video..someone post the stories!(:...)

On this issue of interpretation:

• Brian Dodd's discussion of the "interpretive bridge" is helpful (p. 19 here)

as is

• Ron Martoia's posts on the "two buckets" (see "The Two Bucket Theory Examined" here).

I really recommend you read both above links, then get back to us.
They helped us when we tackled women in leadership, and homosexuality.

We learned that, counterintuitively to our guesses from this end of the cultural bridge, it seems the early church's holy kissing was almost always... on the lips!
The reason is powerful: that form on kiss implied equality...a kiss on the cheeks implied one person was inferior. Nothing like a Kingdom Kiss as an acted parable and reminder that in Christ we are equal! Of course, today, when we look at cultural equivalents like the "holy hug", "holy handshake," we might not realize that that, too, began as a Kingdom equalizer:

In fact, handshaking, which can seem quite prosaic today, was popularised by Quakers as a sign of equality under God, rather than stratified system of etiquette of seventeenth century England
-link

Ironically, the kiss of inclusion became a kiss of exclusion (from centered to bounded set):

Just as kissing had many different meanings in the wider ancient world, so too early Christians interpreted the kiss in various ways. Because ancient kissing was often seen as a familiar gesture, many early Christians kissed each other to help construct themselves as a new sort of family, a family of Christ. Similarly, in the Greco-Roman world, kissing often was seen as involving a transfer of spirit; when you kissed someone else you literally gave them part of your soul. The early church expanded on this and claimed that, when Christians kissed, they exchanged the Holy Spirit with one another. Christians also emphasized the kiss as an indication of mutual forgiveness (it’s from here that we get the term “kiss of peace”). These different meanings influenced and were influenced by the sorts of rituals kissing became associated with. For example, because the kiss helped exchange spirit, it made perfect sense for it to become part of baptism and ordination, rituals in which you wanted the Holy Spirit to descend and enter the initiate. The flip side of the coin is that before someone was baptized you wouldn’t want to kiss them. Early Christians often believed that previous to exorcism and baptism people were inevitably demon possessed. Given that they also thought that kissing resulted in spiritual exchange, it’s pretty clear why you wouldn’t want to kiss non-Christians. I sometimes think of this as an ancient form of “cooties.” It resulted in early Christian debates over whether one could kiss a pagan relative, if one should kiss a potential heretic, or if Jews even had a kiss.
-Penn, link

We incorporated insights from these and other articles linked below, and quoted the only book on the topic, "Kissing Christians" by Michael Penn. You'll note some of the articles below include interview with him. We particularly enjoyed some of the early fathers and teachers' comments and guidelines on the practice.

One early guideline, for real (wonder if this was in the weekly "bulletin"):

1)No French Kissing!
2)If you come back for seconds, because you liked the first kiss too much, you may be going to hell!!

Clement of Alexandra (c.150 - c. 215):

"There are those who do nothing but make the church resound with the kiss."

Chrysostom (4th C):

“We are the temple of Christ, and when we kiss each other
we are kissing the porch and entrance of the temple.”

Augustine (4th C):

"when your lips draw close to the lips of your brother, let your heart not draw away."

One interview with Michael Penn:

By Rich Barlow

Whoever said ''a kiss is just a kiss" didn't know their theological history. During Christianity's first five centuries, ritual kissing -- on the lips -- was a vital part of worship, says Michael P. Penn, who teaches religion at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley. In that context, kissing helped Christians define themselves as a family of faith, he writes in his new book, ''Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church" (University of Pennsylvania Press). Excerpts from a recent interview follow.

Q: Let me start with the basic question: Who kissed whom?

A: In the first two centuries [AD], men may kissmen, women women, but also you would have men and women kissing one another. In future centuries, there continued to be a debate over who should kiss whom. In later years, Christians will no longer have men and women kissing each other, but only men men, women women. [Christians had] debates on whether or not priests could kiss the laity, on whether you should kiss a non-Christian relative in the normal, everyday situation, even debates over whether Jews have a kiss or not.

Q: When in the service was the kiss performed?

A: Our earliest references would be a kiss that would follow a communal prayer. Later on, it gets increasingly associated with the Eucharist and also occurs in part of the rites of baptism and in ordination rites. You have Christians kissing each other as an everyday greeting or also martyrs, before they're killed, kissing one another.

Q: What was the theological significance?

A: In antiquity, a kiss on the lips was seen as transferring a little bit of one's spirit to the other person. You have a lot of early -- I kind of think of them almost as Greco-Roman Harlequin -- novels that speak of the kiss as this transfer of spirit. Christians modify it a bit, to suggest that when Christians kiss each other, they don't just exchange their own spirit, but also share a part of the Holy Spirit with one another. So the kiss is seen as a way to bind the community together.

There's another side, though. There was a concern that kissing an individual who has promised to join the Christian community but isn't yet baptized should be avoided, because the spirit that would be transferred wouldn't be a holy spirit but a demonic spirit. So you have the kiss working as this ritual of exclusion.

Q: Did Christian leaders worry about the erotic overtones?

A: We have only two explicit references to this concern. One says, essentially, to kiss with a closed and chaste mouth, which suggests that a few of these kisses may have been too erotic. The other one warns against those who kiss a second time because they liked the first one so much.

Judas kissing Jesus [to betray him] terrifies them a lot more than eroticism. There's this evil intention behind it. Early Christian writers use the kiss of Judas to warn that it's not just how you practice the kiss, but what you're thinking. If you kiss another Christian while keeping evil in your heart against them, you are repeating Judas' betrayal.

Q: When did kissing fall out of favor?

A: In the third century, men and women are no longer to kiss one another. Early Christians met in what we think of as a house church -- you meet in someone's living room, essentially. Starting in the third century, when Christians [worship] in a public forum, this familial kiss is less appropriate. It's also a time where Christianity becomes concerned with making sure women and men are categorically separated. In the fourth century, that clergy and laity become increasingly distant. You start having prohibitions against clergy and laity kissing one another.

The ritual kiss never entirely died out. We still have it as an exchange of peace [in Christian services]. We see it in the kissing of the pope's ring. In Catholicism, a priest may kiss a ritual object.

Q: What would Christianity have been without the kiss?

A: What I find exciting is to see how what we think of as trivial is so central to early Christian self-understanding. Our earliest Christian writing, Paul's letter to the First Thessalonians, talks about the ritual kiss, albeit briefly. We have hundreds of early Christian references to this ritual. For these authors, it was anything but trivial.

-LINK
----------------------------

ARTICLES:

• -Ritual kissing key for early Christians

Wikipedia article on Holy Kiss

Kiss and Tell the Gospel

Michael Penn explains what the early church meant by the "holy kiss."

On Kissing: A Q&A with Michael Penn

-PUCKER UP by Martin Marty

GREET ONE ANOTHER WITH A HOLY KISS (PDF)

The Holy Kiss of Love: Are We Keeping This Command?

I Corinthians 16-II Corinthians 1: Greet One Another with a Holy Kiss

---RECURRENCE: 

a word, phrase, or idea is intentionally repeated throughout a text. 

- Invisible Gorilla: selective attention

Invisible Gorilla: selective attention

I recommend  showing this video to a group or class ,and doing it this way.
Show the first  (Regional Emmy winner) video  below starting at 4 second mark, telling the group that no one should say anything, or make any noise, while watching; just concentrate hard on following the instructions:
 


 You can see why calling it the "Invisible Gorilla" test might jinx things(:

Here is the backstory: 
More? Click: theinvisiblegorilla.com/

How about this version:
 \ TED Talk   by Daniel Simons:

Christopher Chabris'  talk at Google about Invisible Gorilla:
 Here's a great spoof version:

Of course people have made endless variations: 

YouTube search: "selective attention"
YouTube search: "invisible gorilla"

WIN A PRIZE! Watch this short video Dave filmed at 15,000 feet up in the Andes mountains in Peru. See if you can catch

an important leadership principle in this clip. Post your guess as to what is it is HERE before Week 5 class.

----===================