Henry Imler March 31st, 2008

Meredith and I have recently made good friends with a few couples at our new church. They, like us, are board game freaks. God is good indeed (it is so good to find a welcoming Christian community! I could go on about this for hours, but this post is focused on board games). They have introduced us to several board games. The cool thing is that all of these people are very capable and very competitive!We introduced the group to some of our of our favorites: Sequence and Ticket to Ride (although I think some of them had either heard of or played TtR before, but I forget).

Bohnanza:

I can’t really begin to describe this one. A surprisingly fun and interactive card game about growing beans. I know, sounds absolutely boring, right? I was thinking the same thing. The only thing that got me to play this game was the fact that four of my friends insisted it was a blast. And indeed it was.

It is one of those quirky German games. I can’t quite explain it, but if you know anyone that has it, try it out and then drop $16 over at Amazon and spread the word.

Scotland Yard Detective Game

If Bohnanza was a relaxing and fun time with friends, Scotland Yard is a weekend trip down to your parents to help clear brush. Sure it is fun, rewarding, and at the end of the day you feel as through you have accomplished something worthwhile, but man of man does this game ever drain you emotionally and mentally.

The object of the game is to either hide from the cops as the mysterious Mr(s). X or catch the dirty rotten scoundrel! It is 1 against 3-5 as the players take turns moving about the city on taxies, tubes, or buses. Every 4-6 turns Mr. X surfaces and the chase begins anew. A lot of thought and deliberation goes into this game and if you are dead set on winning the stress piles onto you as it did me. They finally caught up with me after 19 out of 24 turns. You can grab this bad-boy used on Amazon, but I just snatched up the $12 copy.I wanna grab Ticket to Ride Europe, but I don’t want to drop 40 or so bucks on a new copy. Perhaps we’ll do that next month.

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Henry Imler March 31st, 2008

I, like a lot of the Christian side of the blogosphere, have taken more than a fleeting interest in the Enns/Westminster controversy. Westminster Theological Seminary has suspended Professor Peter Enns effective at the end of this school year and will take steps to terminate his employment because of a book he wrote back in 2005 entitled Inspiration and Incarnation (review), which calls into question more conservative models of scripture while remaining wholly “[apologetic] and assum[ing] an evangelical faith in scripture from the outset.”

Christianity Today has a write up on the suspension :Westminster Theological Seminary Suspends Peter Enns.

To say on top of what people are saying about this situation, check out Google’s Blogsearch and Technorati’s watchlist.

For a run down of what the hub-ub is all about, check out Kingdom People :: The Peter Enns Controversy:

1. Enns has been criticized for emphasizing the human nature of Scripture over against the divine.
2. Enns has written that the first chapters of Genesis are firmly grounded in ancient myth, which he defines as “an ancient, premodern, prescientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins in the form of stories.”
3. Enns claims that Scripture is inspired and inerrant, however the way he describes Scripture seems to counter that belief.
4. Enns does not seek to harmonize seemingly-contradictory parts of Scripture because he believes the diversity of Scripture is complementary.
5. Enns rejects the idea of objective unbiased historiography.

Here is an exchange between Paul Helm and Enns about Helm’s review of Enns’ book.

• Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament by Peter Enns Review by Paul Helm
• A Response to Paul Helm’s Review of Inspiration and Incarnation
• Analysis Extra: ‘Inspiration and Incarnation’ one more time

Here is an interesting (and instructive) review of Helm’s review by Cdero’s Weblog entitled Bible Monopoly. Here are the central tenets of Bible Monopoly:

* An unwillingness to deal with the plural complexity of interpretation
* A failure to wrestle with the difficult matters of Biblical scholarship
* A failure to see the provisional nature of scripture
* An obsession with turning honest interaction with extra Biblical data into an evil foe of orthodoxy
* A tendency to use past theologians (the one’s they agree with) as the standard of Biblical interpretation

What do you think about the suspension? I know we have bloggers and readers that range from each end of the conservative to liberal spectrum when it comes to the verbal inspiration of scripture.

IMHO I don’t think that he should have been suspended at all, but then again, I tend to lean towards academic freedom and exploratory hypothetical theology which is left up to the students and readers to discern. I have not been in a position of power where Jesus’ words about causing one of these to stumble really apply as it would as being dean of a seminary. However, our view of scripture is not without its problems and it sounds like Enns has taken an honest and subtle look at the problem… and he is punished for it. Now, it is highly likely that this controversy will only boost his employability and sales of his book (my copy is on its way right now), but he now has to move his family, tear up his roots in a community, and evangelicals get a black eye from our own hand.

All of this reminds me about the unnecessary perils of venturing into the academic realm of evangelicalism. I want to be an evangelical scholar. We, as a community, are in desperate need of good scholarship if we are to both remain relevant and respected (listened to). But, if I teach or even consider that which is out of line, I am out of a job and perhaps blacklisted amongst the communities I wish/am called to serve. All of a sudden teaching at a small liberal arts college does not seem all that bad.

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Henry Imler March 30th, 2008

I needs some help something fierce. My meager music collection has gotten stale - any recommendations?

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Henry Imler March 30th, 2008

1. Baseball will still suck.
2. Who cares? See #1.

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Henry Imler March 27th, 2008

^{This will save us.}

You know how it is theoretically possible to create a mini-black hole with a powerful enough particle accelerator? You know how there is also a chance that these mini-black holes, if created might not just evaporate away? You know how we are building a particle accelerator powerful enough to make these things in theory?

Well those people are being sued until we can know for sure that humanity won’t die because some scientist accidentally made a non-evaporating black hole on our planet.

Doomsday Fears Spark Lawsuit.

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Henry Imler March 27th, 2008

My statement was awkward in that form.

-Michel Foucault (Fu-ko not fou-cault - darn those French and their laziness in pronunciation!) on his statement that architecture became political only at the end of the eighteenth century. (The Foucault Reader p. 239)

Wait… you mean to tell me that something Foucault wrote was awkward? Say it ain’t so so, Brother! Actually he is just too smart for me!

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Henry Imler March 25th, 2008

Lets start playing Darwin… who needs sharks? I don’t. And since I have access to guns and pollution, I am the fittest to survive relative to a shark. After all…

A shark is a 24-hour tooth factory attached to an organic outboard motor. The only reason we’re killing them at all is because we evolved the ability first. If even one of those flesh-seeking missiles had taken time out from mincing things with its face to develop a thumb-fin, even now we’d be hiding up trees from giant water-filled roboshark suits.

More rationale behind the extinction of certain animals: 6 Endangered Species That Aren’t Endangered Enough

We are human; we win.

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Henry Imler March 18th, 2008

A comment by Hank on The Way I need Jesus got me thinking. Is there such a thing as a “biblical notion of husband and wife?” What notion are we talking about? Pre-Israel marriage? We gonna pattern it after the marriages in Genesis? Ancient Israel? 2nd Kings? Isn’t that what got us good US citizens up in arms against the Mormons a hundred or so years ago (poly-what?)? Are we gonna talk about the Jewish ideas of what marriage is in the time of Jesus? Are we gonna talk about marriage as it was practiced by the Romans (i.e. baby factories = wives)? Are we going to talk about those writing in the name of Paul when they are giving advice on how to be a couple of equality under the yoke of the empire?

The more I look at actual marriages in the Bible the less I am enamored with the monolithic notion of the so-called “biblical notion of husband and wife.” We need to realize that marriages in our Holy Scriptures are described (not prescribed) in different structures with different power realationships between the parties involved.

We see in the myth of Genesis 3 the consequences of the fall in marriages - women and men will try to dominate each other. This arragement (both women looking to dominate their husbands and husband dominating their wives) is unnatural; God teaches us this in Genesis and He confirms it in the writings of Paul.

It gives me great pleasure to see people attempt to justify our culture’s (or rather the 1950’s) version of marriage where one party dominates the other.

With the coming of the Kingdom of God, we must work to restore the equality inherent in the “two becoming one flesh” by means of our practice and our teachings. What we need to do is rediscover the the pre-fall power relations between husband and wife and make those relations real in our lives. It is up to us to enact the Kingdom of God on Earth - now.

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Henry Imler March 18th, 2008

Author Arthur C. Clarke dies

Clarke, thanks for the good books! My favorite parts of 2010 were Clarke’s descriptions of the indigenous population o Jupiter and the attack on the Tsien.

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Henry Imler March 18th, 2008

is tacos on Tuesday!

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Henry Imler March 17th, 2008

Was Jesus a rabbi? The definite answer is - Yes and No. Wayne Meeks, along with others, points out that the earliest we can trace Rabbinic Judaism is to the academy at Yavneh in the second century CE. To refer to anyone before then as a Rabbi in the big-R sense is anachronistic.¹ Now, Jesus was called rabbi to be sure, but this referred to anyone who taught and was viewed as an authority on the law - it was much more of a general term, sorta like teacher is today.

There really is no good answer as to the currents behind the formation of the Rabbinical school, and by good I mean an answer predicated by definite evidence. We have the experts in the interpretation of the Law, Pharisees, till 70 and then in 170(?) we suddenly have the Rabbis, new interpreters of the Law. It is most likely that P->R happened, but there is no concrete evidence showing that transition. This is not to say that good ole JC was not an expert in the Law, just that we should not throw all of the connotations we have of current Rabbis onto him.

I often loose sight of that distinction when I hear the term Rabbi thrown about, especially in conjunction with Jesus and Paul. I don’t think this is limited to just myself.

1. Meeks, Wayne A. The First Urban Christians. 2nd Edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. p. 33. [↩]

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Henry Imler March 14th, 2008

Scored another desk today.

There is one guy left to prank and I know what I would like to do to his desk. He is an American with Irish heritage - the kind that never lets you forget that he has Irish heritage and freaks out if you conflate Ireland and Scotland… so I am thinking of putting a lot of Scottish themed things labeled as Irish things on his desk However, he won’t shut up about how he is going to get be back soooo bad that it will take most of the day to put everything back together. Two things I wanna say here. First, everything I have done would take a person about 10 minutes to fix (or I waited around and helped them get the stuff back together quickly), so I don’t think he gets this manner of etiquette and that is frustrating. Secondly, while I have something in the initial stages, I might just not do anything. That would be funny because he could never have his revenge that he keeps talking about.

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Henry Imler March 12th, 2008

You can tell I am intelectually (and mentally, and physically) exausted when I only post quizzes and memes:

1. What translation of the Bible do you like best?
Depends on what I am doing. For personal use, I like the NLT because I am a vernacularist. When it comes to indepth academic study, I go with the NRSV and the NASB.

2. Old or New Testament?
While the correct answer is both, in reality, I go with the New Testament. I am a Christian and not a pre-rabbinic Jew, so the NT gets the nod when I am asked.

3. Favorite Book of the Bible?
Romans, hands down… and Genesis and John.

4. Favorite Chapter?
John 3

5. Favorite Verse?
Romans 8:1

6. Bible character you think you’re most like?
Depends on who you ask - I am sure some ’round here and other parts would liken me to those pesky prophets of Baal. But, self identification? Lamech, because when I have lived 182 years I want to become the father of a tike named Noah. That, or I am skirting the question because I don’t like throwing myself onto those people.

7. One thing from the Bible that confuses you?
Paul and the Law - What gives?

8. Moses or Paul?
Paul, all the way.

9. A teaching from the Bible that you struggle with or don’t get?
The stuff that the people writing in Paul’s name tell women to do.

10. Coolest name in the Bible?
Not in the Bible, but the coolest renaming of anyone in the Bible is God himself, when certain Gnostics equate the OT God with the demiurge and name him Yaldabaoth. I know he becomes the evil creator of matter and is holding all of us back and that we need to gets that knowledge, but I still want to name one of my children after him.

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Henry Imler March 12th, 2008

This morning I went to an interesting, although poorly executed, Belief Net meet and greet breakfast put on by the Center on Religion and the Professions here at Mizzou. Afterwards I checked out Belief Net and found their quizes section. I took the Belief-O-Matic out for a spin, with interesting results:

1. Orthodox Quaker (100%)
2. Eastern Orthodox (95%)
3. Roman Catholic (95%)
4. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (91%)
5. Seventh Day Adventist (87%)
6. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (85%) How I self-identify

Orthodox Quaker?!?! I think my answer to the non-violence and social action questions rose OQ to the top of my list.

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Henry Imler March 11th, 2008

Given that I can now cut open heads (sorry Meredith, Grant, Ashley, and Bre) with my heroes ability, I am starting to wonder about porting that to other TV shows….

For instance, my Kids in the Hall ability would be:

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Henry Imler March 10th, 2008

The My Heroes Ability is my lone facebook application… `cause it is freaking Heroes. I just leveled up to level 7, which meant that I had 30 skill points to spend, which means that I can learn this bad boy:

Yes.

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Henry Imler March 6th, 2008

This is an old Christian song that I just love.

Let it Go by the Newsboys.

…this bitterness you hide
it seeps into your soul
and it steals your joy
’til it’s all you know
let it go
will you forgive?
will you forget?
will you live what you know?
He left his rights
will you leave yours?
you won’t understand it
let it go
will you forgive?
will you forget?
will you live what you know?
beneath the cross
you hear His words,
Father, forgive them,
and you know
you can’t understand it
let it go…

Damn thats hard to do - but I think well worth it.

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Henry Imler March 6th, 2008

When I woke up this morning I owed some people 3,150 dollars.

By 1pm, I owed them nothing.

I returned to the library the 18 books for which I was being charged $175 each to replace.

I checked half of them back out.

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Henry Imler March 5th, 2008

H/T: Scott Parsons.

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Henry Imler March 4th, 2008

This one comes from my good friend LaRue:

And then I was like, “Mr. Dawkins, the 1950s called; they want their logical positivism back.” And he was like, “You worship leprechauns.”

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