Couldn't Help Noticing

Accordance training seminars

If you love your Bible and your Mac, no doubt you are already familiar with Accordance. It is the leading Bible software for the Macintosh platform and is used on a regular basis by the team here at Matthias Media (although Windows users don't need to be envious; you can also use it on a PC with an emulator). However, Accordance is a bit like an iceberg: the features we use are only just the tip, and an enormously powerful tool lies largely unutilized below the surface.

In July 2008, Roy and Helen Brown (from OakTree Software, the publishers of Accordance) will be running a series of free training seminars in Australia and New Zealand to help users get more out of Accordance. The four seminars in Australia are:

Users are encouraged to bring their own laptops to follow the projected demonstrations. You will also be able to purchase Accordance and upgrades on the day.

You can register for any of the free seminars by writing to seminars AT accordancebible DOT com. More information can be found at:

http://accordancebible.com/about/shows.php

Thugs, victims or celebrities

(From Alison Mitchell, children's editor of The Good Book Company, UK.)

If you're a youth or children's leader, stop for a moment and think of three words that sum up your group.

Now compare those words with the ways young people are increasingly represented in the news:

A study published recently by Brunel University analysed how youngsters appeared in more than 2,000 television news programmes over a month and found a very bizarre picture. In 82% of news stories featuring young people, they appeared either as the perpetrators or the victims of crime, usually involving violence. For the non-crime stories, the most typical reason for showing a young person was as a celebrity.

I wonder if you came up with the words ‘thug’, ‘victim’ or ‘celebrity’. No? But that's how most young people are portrayed these days.

The quote above comes from a BBC News report which goes on to say:

The author and social commentator, Frank Furedi, sees this anxiety-ridden depiction of teenagers as a sign of deeper fault lines in society ...

When all other adults and other people's children are seen as a threat, he says it means that the adult generation withdraws from any contact with young people—and bringing up children is “privatised” to the parents. Without any communication between the generations, adults become fearful and distant towards the youngsters hanging around, he says. In return, young people grow up starved of the influence of adults.

“It means that adults are leaving the life of children. It's completely unnatural.”

If young people are increasingly growing up “starved of the influence of adults”, our roles as youth and children's leaders are all the more important. I see two challenges here: to ‘influence’ the young people under our care responsibly and well, and to introduce other adults in our church or neighbourhood to these young people we know and love so that they can see that they're not all thugs, victims or celebrities!

Can we?

In the fascinating rise and rise of Barack Obama, we see a resurgence of what the Americans call ‘liberalism’ and what we Australians don't really have a decent name for, apart from the vague designation ‘leftist’. It's a moral and political philosophy that takes an optimistic view of mankind and the human heart, and believes that if we all start afresh, work together, and change the way we do things, then together we can build a better America, a better Australia, a better world. Yes, we can.

According to liberalism, the real obstacle to human progress is ‘the system’. It's the multinationals, big oil, corporate greed, the military machine, and the corrupt government insiders that ensure business as usual. It's the Establishment—the Man. If only the right people could get hold of the levers of power, everything would be better.

Many liberals or leftists tend to abandon this faith as they grow older as their optimism about the goodness of humanity gets mugged by reality. The playwright David Mamet, writing recently about his own drift from being “brain-dead liberal”, puts it down to a realization that his two core beliefs—that society is bad and needs changing, and that people are good at heart—were both insupportable:

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

Mamet is in no sense a Christian, but his observation of life at this point is one we share. The Bible teaches us that people are not good at heart: every part of us is tainted by sin. Nevertheless, neither we nor the world are totally and unremittingly evil, and in the goodness of God, we often manage to work together to do and build good things (if not perfect things), and to live together with a degree of harmony—but only to a degree, and never without suffering and compromise. It's not the system that's the problem—such that if only we completely changed it, everything would be fine; it's the people.

As GK Chesterton so famously wrote when asked to comment on what was wrong with the world, “I am”.

New documentary airs some old conclusions

Philip Cooney, one of our Briefing readers in Wentworth Falls NSW, Australia, wrote in to draw our attention to Kelsey Munro's preview of John Dickson's The Christ Files (The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Guide’ 20 March 2008). Philip calls it “a useful example of postmodernism, post-Christianity and an unbelieving heart”. After outlining and summarizing the content of the programme (“ ... The Christ Files is pitched as a neutral, academic exercise to see what is known about Christ as a historical figure”), she concludes with this very telling assessment:

It starts out well but moves from outlining historical references to Jesus to selectively interpreting them in support of founding Christian myths. The conclusions Dickson draws will come as no surprise to the Anglican diocese or Dickson's own Centre for Public Christianity.

Judge for yourself: The Christ Files screens tomorrow (Good Friday) on Channel 7 at noon.

Visions of God

All sorts of people have claimed to see visions of God, of Christ, of Mary or of the saints over the centuries. And, from time to time, the Roman Catholic church has endorsed such visions and used them to encourage people in their allegiance to the Roman church.

But Martin Luther, the great Reformer and opponent of Roman Catholic teaching, also saw visions—sometimes in considerable detail. Here he describes one such appearing:

And the more steadfastly to confirm me in this resolution, to hold solely by God's Word, and not to give credit to any visions or revelations, I shall relate the following circumstance:—On Good Friday last, I being in my chamber in fervent prayer, contemplating with myself, how Christ my Saviour on the cross suffered and died for our sins, there suddenly appeared upon the wall a bright vision of our Saviour Christ, with the five wounds, steadfastly looking upon me, as if it had been Christ himself corporally.

How does he respond? The pious Roman Catholic would surely have been extraordinarily impressed by seeing such a vision of glory. Not Luther:

At first sight, I thought it had been some celestial revelation, but I reflected that it must needs be an illusion and juggling of the devil, for Christ appeared to us in his Word, and in a meaner and more humble form; therefore I spake to the vision thus: Avoid thee, confounded devil: I know no other Christ than he who was crucified, and who in his Word is pictured and presented unto me. Whereupon the image vanished, clearly showing of whom it came.

(Martin Luther, ‘Of Christ's Work’, Table Talk, CCXXXVI.)

Luther had absorbed Paul's teaching to the Galatians well: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.” (Gal 1:8). No matter how impressive the messenger or how great the vision, our assurance as Christians comes from the gospel that we read in Scripture and from nowhere else.