Tagged

Steve Tilley has tagged me with the following challenge:

I don't go in for this sort of thing big time but this one captured my imagination. The task:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five other people.

The nearest book on my desk is 'The Marriage Preparation Course Leaders and Support Couples Guide', because we're just about to start one at church. Unfortunately it doesn't run to 123 pages. The next nearest is the Daily Prayer volume of the Church of Englands Common Worship, and most of page 123 is taken up with Psalm 8. Next nearest is the Bath and Wells Diocesan Directory, but I doubt the PCC treasurer in Farrington Gurney wants his home phone number published here.

But - I've a small desktop bookshelf, found in a 2nd hand shop in Barnard Castle a couple of years ago, and all 15 books on it are roughly the same distance away. I choose....... 'The Shaping of Things to Come' by Alan Hirsch & Michael Frost. It's chapter 7, and they're discussing the problems that the sheer humannness of Jesus presents to Greek thinkkers, and to many modern Christians...

"One of us recently had a conversation with a minister whose predominant theological paradigm was that of liberation theology. He was impressed by its central emphasis on the liberation of slaves from Egypt in the exodus. When we engaged him in the topic, he could not affirm that the exodus actually took place in history, because that would have involved God in actually killing countless Egyptians and in being part of the conquest and colonization of Canaan."

They go on to observe that if we make every historical event in the Bible into a metaphor, we wind up with a God who isn't involved in history at all, which is the same result as Marcion, the Docetists, and sundry other early heretics who made necessary the early Creeds.

I tag:
Youthblog
The Big Bulky Anglican
Richard Frank
And a couple of recent commenters:
Joe
Endlessly Restless