Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Didn’t do too much today. Addie did a good job feeding herself yogurt for the 1st time!Made it to Tiddly-Winks in the morning. Addie made her first craft – a shaker – with lots of help from mommy. She was quite taken with the stickers. Dropped David’s lunch off and met a U.S. girl whose husband is presenting a paper for Harvard so they’re in this Cambridge for the week. Offered to walk around or go for a latte if she’s interested. Back home for nap-time. A sunny-er day than some so did laundry – 3 loads! Somersaults before bed… A student told David that Trinity and St. John’s throw the most lavish of the May Balls. Time Magazine actually rated St. John’s as one of the top 3 parties in the world! Tickets are about 250 pounds. We heard the fire works tonight – on and on for like 15 minutes! Found more reasons to dislike Tesco – the brie and stinton cheese I got is tasteless, the lunch meat is 75% rubber, and the floor cleaner that I used on the kitchen, living and dining rooms smells like mosquito repellent. Never again! In the evening we started to watch “Rekindling the Vision”, about a 70 minute talk by Ranald. He’s pretty much going over the same material during our weekly talks together – how our culture has gotten to the point it has. The 1st Revolution was the Reformation. Society lived within the “rule of (God’s) law” for a couple hundred years, within a Biblically-based civilization. Then science started to pick up and was accelerated by the 2nd Revolution, the Enlightenment. It was then, when science was ‘high-jacked’ by the Enlightenment philosophy, that the view of science changed from a way of understanding more of God (modern science started within a Christian framework/worldview!) to just a humanistic, naturalistic view of life. Therefore God has no importance; we don’t need God to understand our world. That’s the “Grand Deception”. While the new ‘modern science’ focused on science, it ignored 1) the fact that you can’t go into the laboratory without a cosmos, an ordered universe (the opposite of which is ‘chaos’) and 2) that you have mankind/persons – not machines – doing science. Our culture is toppling over, and the only thing slightly holding it up is our economy of free enterprise, which won’t sustain it of course. Even non-Christians are saying we need Christianity, but they say so not as a way to have a relationship with our Creator, but because of the moral vacuum we are finding ourselves socially in. At the same time, the church’s view of the lordship of Christ over all of life (that Christ permeates into all aspects of life) has diminished from 100% to nearly nothing by now. This was helped by the pietism of the 17th and 18th centuries, where the emphasis was on the heart/experience (romanticism) verses heart PLUS head/knowledge. Also, private experience was emphasized over public engagement with the culture. By the time Darwin wrote “Origin of Species” in 1859, the church was focused on evangelism and missions. Proclamation of the gospel verses persuasion (Paul in Acts) – both necessary, but the later was ignored. “Evangelism is not a technique, it’s a truth.” Conversion without a change in culture won’t be sustaining-Christianity. You can see how this led to the demise of the church where it had/has no answer for the scientific world of the 20th/21st centuries! So this is how we find ourselves, and he’s giving the why. That’s his talk, “Where From, Where To.” We haven’t gotten to the “to” yet, and I need to finish the video during nap tomorrow so I’m prepared for our talk tomorrow night. If you’re interested in watching the video, I can email the link to you. It’s quite interesting – plus you’d get a feel for this dear man.