Knowledge and wonder #1

The trans-continental journey aboard a train of thought often begins with a nagging idea in the back of one's mind. Wouldn't an eternal heaven become boring after the first few millienna?

If all the things that one might know is a finite set, then surely at some point I shall know them all. Even allowing for the possibility that in my glorified body there are some things that I may still be too dense to understand, the set of things that I may ever know will still at some point become known by me. Where's the fun in that?

Until, I began to wonder if my current experience of learning about God will hold true in heaven too.

When I was a child, I used to think I knew a lot about God. But then I started to go to Unichurch. After a few years there I thought I knew most things there were to know about God, then I went to bible college. Then I thought I knew most things you should know about God, then I started having to rely on Him in full-time ministry.

So, I considered the idea that my experience would continue into eternity. That as quickly as my knowledge of God might grow, my understanding of how much more there was to know about him would increase at an even greater rate.

At the moment, the only way that I can understand enjoyment in heaven is to consider the idea that my wonder would increase more quickly than my knowledge.

How do you think of heaven? There are plenty of bits and pieces in my mind to do with knowledge and wonder that haven't quite fallen together yet, so I'd love to hear your crumbs of wisdom.

A Christmas prayer

Merry Christmas everyone! :)

Thought I'd share a snippet of the prayer I'll be praying this morning at church.

Who else has a god like you? What other god would subject himself to the indignity, the mess, the limitedness, the pain and the shame of living amongst our fallen world as a human creature? 

Which other god can say to us of our experiences: "I know. I understand."?   

Which other God has walked our path for us, and qualified us so that we have no need to work our way up to God but are already in his presence? 

None. God, that's why there is no one like you. You are amazing from so many angles. We look forward to seeing you in the flesh in heaven, to be ruled by someone who is just that good.

I do my little turn on the catwalk...

When I first saw it, I was unsure what to think of Christian Fashion Week.  Was it a monstrous artefact of Western cultural Christianity having embraced materialism to its hilt?  Perhaps a delightful celebration of the glory of God in creation?  Or perhaps an industry-based para-church ministry?

I'm very much interested in finding an appropriate theological framework for aesthetics, so my interest was mildly piqued by the possibility of a genuinely Christian event focussed on all things sartorial.  So, I did all I could do being a male under 6 foot and with a waist rounder than 34 inches: I checked the internet.

Here's a selection of what I found.  What do you think of it?

Description of the main event:

"The runway is set for the very first Christian Fashion Week ® Fashion Show, giving designers the forum to showcase their most creative attempts to cater to the Christian fashion community. The night is filled with fashion, music, lights, flashing cameras, and industry VIPs."

From the event's vision statement:

"Christian Fashion Week ® is a mission to stand for dignity on behalf of our communities, families, and fashion consumers."

Finally, we come to the designers.  And in a statement that summed up the subtext of the rest, the final designer on the page stated their reasons for participation:

"I want to reach other markets in the Fashion Industry."

Christianity as a new market.  Quite understandable for the designers involved, but it's hard to see the organisers as anything but coming from the same place.  Especially when I saw the casting call.

Uck.

Moving in some very true spaces, and running from some

Blog posts like this one seem to tear me up a bit.  They probably shouldn't.  After writing this post I'm sure I'll have integrated my thinking and feeling on this in a way that'll enable me to even perhaps enjoy this kind of writing.  But I'm not there yet.  We're only at the start of the post.

The thing is, I think that there is a sense in which these piece is so truly true.  The lady who writes this has found some genuine wisdom.  She's engaging in the realities of human experience in a truly deep way that rejects caricatures that we'll often find in either lazy exegesis of texts, in our church cultures or in fundamentalist dogma.

I was witness a while ago to a conversation where two gentlemen were arguing/discussing the nature of the human will and limited atonement and salvation, etc.  (All the joyful kind of stuff, you know)  And one of them said to the other, "But you're sovereign!".  To which the other responded with a detailed questioning of doctrine moving towards a biblical proof of the sovereignty of God.

But what I was thinking in my head and heart when the first guy spoke was,

"Yes.  You're right.  There is a sense in which you are so, so right and it really matters that we recognise our own sovereignty.  And yet, there is now way the other guy is going to hear what you're saying as true.  And I completely understand that too."

The more I go on, the more I open up and am malleable to new patterns of thinking.  And at the same time the more deeply rooted I become in the gospel of the Lord Jesus and His rule by His powerful word.

Yet, so far, I'm still a shade uncomfortable when other people who are on that same journey are a klick or two to one or the other side of where I am.  And I wonder what that means.

I'm sure it means lots of things about my sin, insecurities and prejudices.  Surely, it must.  But I think it also means some things about my convictions about the gospel, and its supreme importance.  Even if the way I experience that is utterly different now.

P.S.  I'm not trying to say anything negative at all about Deborah B. Edgar.  The title of the post isn't about her blog post.  That's just where the train of thought/emotion started.