Two candles that we burned side by side melted down to look like this. Cute or creepy?

The tree across the road from our flat is still shedding leaves, leaving a colorful carpet on the green grass. So I wanted to capture this carpet before it turns brown. We have added this photo to our photography website, where all the photos are on for sale and will be personally signed and delivered to your front door! You can still order 2 and get a 3rd free, or order 1 and get a 2nd for half price!

Christian Today just ran two articles that show Christians pursuing integral mission. While we were in Mexico working with Armonía, we wrote a lot about integral mission (and here), and how we cannot separate word and deed in gospel ministry. Read this article about the work of Misión Integral in Oaxaca or this one on Floresta, both showing creative ways of participating in God’s integral mission. Or using the metaphor we have been talking a lot about lately, are these not fitting ways to improvise our role as Christians in the world today?

When you step into the bacon section of grocery stores in Scotland, you will be pleasantly overwhelmed by your choices of delicious bacon. You could buy streaky bacon, back bacon, or middle bacon, and you can get in cured, smoked, or a variety of other ways. We are partial to back bacon, which when cooked up with a full breakfast might look something like this (not my picture):

In the theodrama, God as Triune is author, main character, and director. The Holy Spirit is the Director of the theodrama in the sense that he enables our participation through the gift of faith and union with Christ. In addition, the Spirit also directs our participation in the theodrama by giving us gifts and by prompting and directing us as we seek to improvise our roles in fitting ways.

We also receive direction from local assistant directors: pastors, elders, teachers, mentors, and spiritual directors. All of these people play the role of assistant directors in the theodrama who are involved in preparing the actors and getting them to work well with one another. In other words, pastors, teachers and other leaders in the church are gifted and charged with the responsibility of helping the Christian community develop readiness to improvise fittingly in the theodrama.

All of this, of course, raises many questions. What kind of authority does the Spirit-Director yield in our improvisation of the theodrama? What is the relationship between the Spirit’s sovereign direction and our freedom to improvise? What is the nature of the Spirit’s prompting and direction in the lives of Christians, and what is required to discern the Spirit’s direction? How can we cultivate responsive attentiveness to the gifts that the Spirit has given to the church?

Does anyone want to take a stab at reflecting on any of these questions? Do you think it is helpful to conceive of the Holy Spirit as director and pastor, teachers, and other church leaders as assistant directors? I look forward to your thoughts.

There are very tight gun laws in the UK, which means that I probably will not be going out to hunt pheasant anytime soon, even though I see them almost every time we go on a walk in the country. Just thinking about it makes me salivate. Oh how I miss the days when I could grab my gun and go walking out on the land to fill the freezer with delicious meals!

Sadly, even though there is little gun-related violence in Scotland, knife violence is a real problem, which I guess goes to show that people will find weapons to commit violent acts, no matter what the laws prohibit.

We went to a poetry reading the other night hosted by the program in which Wes is studying. We were chatting with the poet afterward with a group of post-graduates. Upon noticing Wes’ arm around me, he asked if we were “partners” (a term I’m still getting accustomed to. Even when I tell people Wes is my husband, people will still refer to him as my partner).

Since he already knew that Wes was doing his Ph.D, he asked what I was doing. I told him I was working at a restaurant to pay the bills. “So,” he mused, “you are getting your Ph.T.” Awaiting my quizzical look he continued, “Putting Him Through.” Twinkle in the eye.

So, I guess that’s what I’m doing. Getting my Ph.T. Wish me luck. :)

The other night we were lamenting not having our board games that buried deep in storage in the US. But then a thought occurred to me: why don’t we just play the game without the game? With a little creativity, it is actually quite easy to reconstruct the board and pieces needed to play some of our favorite games.

Crosscribb: A variation on the card game of cribbage, you can use other cards as place-markers, and you are ready to play!

Black box: You can create the grid on a piece of paper, and write different symbols next to each line in order to mark your “rays.” Just make sure to use a pencil in case you mess up.

Quoridor: Again, just create the grid on a piece of paper, and use a little household item like an eraser as your playing piece. Use a marker to draw your “walls” on the grid as you play.

Yatzee: All you need are some dice and you can easily make the chart on a piece of paper.

You can get creative with many other games as well! Of course, you cannot do complicated games with a lot of pieces and special cards, but playing some board games is not impossible after all. Can you think of some other games that you can play without the games?

Riding home in the drizzly dark this evening, the wet and wildness was beginning to wear on me. Then I came home and read Inversnaid, a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins, the last stanza of which reads:

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Long live the wet and wildness. Long live Scotland.

If you are interested in the question of how the Bible relates to your life as a Christian, then Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology (Zondervan, 2009) is a book for you. Here are the four views in brief:

• Principlizing (Walter Kaiser): We move beyond the Bible by looking at the text, extracting principles in the text, then applying those principles to particular situation today.
• Redemptive-historical (Dan Doriani): We move beyond the Bible by engaging in careful exegesis, synthesizing the biblical data, and applying the Bible in ways faithful to the biblical narrative.
• Drama-of-redemption (Kevin Vanhoozer):  We move beyond the Bible by improvising on the theodrama to which Scripture witnesses in ways that are fitting to the canonical text and contemporary context.
• Redemptive-movement (William Webb): We move beyond the Bible by discerning the redemptive movement meaning in the Bible toward an ultimate ethic, which we seek to live out in our daily lives.

First off, this book probably should have been titled Moving Beyond the Bible to Ethics, since the authors deal almost entirely with ethical matters, including euthanasia, women in ministry, homosexuality, abortion, stem-cell research, slavery, weddings, gambling, architecture, transexuality, war ethics, and corporal punishment. So if the relationship between the Bible and theology sounds boring, don’t worry! This book deals with where the rubber meets the road: daily Christian living. This book shows that the Bible is really relevant to the practical issues of our lives, even if there is debate about how it is relevant.

Kaiser’s principlizing approach is good because it takes the authority of the Bible seriously, and is relatively easy to understand. In practice, however, principlizing does not look so simple. If you cannot imitate Kaiser’s fancy exegesis, you would be easily discouraged, and one wonders if the resulting principles are really all that timeless. Every other scholar admits that there is some level of principlizing in their method, but none of the other want to reduce the movement from the Bible to daily life as extracting and applying principles. So Kaiser is helpful, but not helpful enough.

Doriani’s redemptive historical approach adds important elements because he urges us to interpret and apply the Bible within its narrative structure and progression. In addition, Doriani recognizes that we cannot apply every genre of the Bible in the same way (e.g. by extracting principles), but we must be sensitive to the way the Bible presents the history of redemption. That being said, Doriani’s method is not that different than Kaiser’s, and one is still left to wonder how the average Christian can apply the Bible in faithful and fitting ways.

Vanhoozer’s drama of redemption approach is my favorite of the whole bunch, but it suffers from a lack of clarity and metaphor confusion. Allow me to simplify his view: the Bible bears witness to the drama of God’s redemption, a drama in which we are participating today. In order to play our part in the drama, therefore, we need to develop wisdom to improvise in ways fitting to Scripture (our script) and to our particular situations. Of the four views in the book, Vanhoozer’s received the most praise, despite being a little in the clouds. And I think if you take the time to think through his metaphors, you will find a rich resource for participating in the drama of redemption today.

William Webb’s redemptive movement approach probably received the most criticism, and for good reason. For one, it is not entirely clear what Webb means by “redemptive movement,” and I think Vanhoozer come closest to describing it as redemptive contrast, both between the Bible and its cultural context and within the Bible itself. Basically, Webb argues that if we view the Bible in light of its context, we will realize that it present a better ethic than the cultural context in which it is situation, even if this is not an ultimate ethic. Therefore, even though the Bible does not condone slavery, we need to discern the redemptive movement to realize that it is appropriate for us to have an abolitionist ethic today. I can’t go into further details of regarding other problems with Webb’s approach at this point, so I would encourage you to read his explanations and the responses yourself.

Even if the particular nuances of each view may be confusing, reading this book will help you to become a better reader and doer of Scripture, more self-aware and methodical regarding how to move from the text to applying it in your own context. You will also benefit greatly from the reflections by Gary Meadors, Mark Strauss, Al Wolters, and Christopher Wright, all of whom add great perspectives to guide you in processing this important material. Of course, the book does not deal with every possible view of moving beyond the Bible to theology and ethics, which explains why other important elements such as character formation, interpretation and application within community, and the role of the Holy Spirit are touched on at points, but not emphasized enough. Regardless of its weaknesses, however, Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology is an important book regarding one of the biggest questions with which Christians should be wrestling: how does the Bible relate to our lives today?