DanSheffield

Herbert E Randall, missionary to Egypt

Ever since my wife and I lived in Egypt in the late 1980s I have been intrigued with the founder of the Holiness Movement Church in Egypt (affiliated with The Free Methodist Church, internationally). A couple years ago I finally had the time to focus on researching and writing up his story.

This past week the article was finally published in the Canadian Journal of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity.

Here is a brief abstract; the full article can be read here.

Abstract

The life of Herbert Randall (1865-1938) leads us through a series of uniquely inter-connecting occurrences on the international stage. From rural eastern Ontario in the newly-minted Dominion of Canada (1867), to the churning spiritual environment within the worldwide holiness/higher-life/Keswick movement (1870s-1920s), the triumphalistic period of the British Empire following the Second Anglo-Sudan War (1896-98), eight years of village ministry during the British occupation of Ottoman Egypt (1899-1906), to his instrumental role in the ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit’ of Aimee Kennedy (1907) [later, Aimee Semple McPherson, flamboyant founder of the International Foursquare Church], and not least, initiating two separate Protestant denominations in Egypt, Randall participates in a perfect storm of historical, social and spiritual events.

Clark Pinnock dies

Dr. Clark Pinnock died on Sunday Aug 15 from a heart attack; he was 73.

I first met Pinnock in his book, Set Forth Your Case: studies in Christian Apologetics, while a student at Providence in the early 80s. Over the years I read many others, A Wideness in God's Mercy, The Openness of God, and most recently, Most Moved Mover. 

I met him in person in 1985 at a prayer gathering at McMaster; a bunch of students gathered on the platform in an auditorium and Clark sitting cross-legged praying for people.

When I was pastoring in Niagara Falls in the early 90s I invited him to come and speak about prayer at a concert of prayer evening.

Then I had him for a directed reading in Ethics at MacDiv in 2000. Once a week I would come and sit at a chair beside his desk and we would discuss the reading content and my reflection essays. He was the moderator at the defense of my master's thesis, and wrote an endorsement for the back of my book on multicultural leadership.

Over the years I have never understood the criticism and vitriol directed at Clark by evangelical leaders. He was one of the most humble, gentle, thoughtful, other-centred persons I have ever encountered.

Over the past decade I would encounter Clark walking or biking on the streets in our neighbourhood (Westdale, Hamilton). He would always smile and acknowledge me, although during the last few years I knew that he couldn't quite place who I was.

Thank you Clark for your contribution to the content of my faith and theology, and for living a God-honouring life before a watching world.

Doug Koop writes an excellent tribute to Clark here at Christianity Today.

Canada oblivious to religion

Article in thestar.com (toronto edition) by a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Canada’s mainstream seems almost oblivious to the role of religion in contemporary life. Although Christmas and Easter are widely celebrated, Canadians seem shocked anew each year when told their holidays mark religious events. “These are secular holidays,” many claim; “surely no one actually believes they are celebrating Jesus’s birth and death, do they?”

This head-in-the-sand approach is ubiquitous.

In the superb graduate program where I now teach, Canada’s finest global affairs students seem virtually illiterate when it comes to their own religion, or to the religions of others. Although they eagerly achieve competence in secular politics, they express little interest in learning the basics of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or Judaism.

This is true even when students express keen interest in promoting development and conflict-resolution in places such as Morocco, India, Sri Lanka or Israel. In these (and most other) countries, faith plays a crucial role, and only the most naive secularist would claim otherwise.

see the rest of this 'awareness' producing article here...

[thanks to Connie for referring me to this article, she says: 'a lot of the people I meet with don't know enough about any faith to reject it']

housing God

A while ago I heard Barbara Brown Taylor interviewed on CBC Radio, then I had a chance to pick up her book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. In one section she talks about Jacob's encounter with God out in the wilderness when he is running away from his family. He makes a little altar there, a place of remembrance -- hence her book title.

As importance as it is to mark the places where we meet God, I worry about what happens when we build a house for God. I am speaking no longer of the temple in Jerusalem but of the house of worship on the corner, where people of faith meet to say their prayers, because saying them together reminds them of who they are better than saying them alone. This is good, and all good things cast shadows. Do we build God a house in lieu of having God stay at ours? Plus, what happens to the rest of the world when we build four walls -- even four gorgeous walls-- cap them with a steepled roof and designate that the House of God? What happens to the riverbanks, the mountaintops, the deserts, and the trees? What happens to the people who never show up in our houses of God?

christians in a pluralistic society

Stanford University prof Rene Girard was interviewed about Christian faith in a PC world.
here's a Girard bibliography

What about Christians in a pluralistic society?
RG: Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, the life," and he told his disciples to go out into the world and make disciples. If we give that up, are we still Christian? The idea that if we respect other religions more than our own and act only according to political correctness, peace will break out all over the world is fantasy and delusion. Christians should certainly enjoy the freedom to spread their faith as much as the other religions. Is Christianity really so powerful that it should be forbidden to spread its ideas, whereas other religions should be allowed that same right?

so you are advocating freedom of religious expression...
RG: of course, I think the Christians who do not want to share their faith do not really believe. The fear of religious tyranny is an anachronism, a false issue which puts political correctness ahead of truth. I believe there is a truth, and the only way of telling it is by connecting with people...

As your faith grows, the more you empty yourself of rivalry and self-aggrandizement and the more you feel impelled to communicate to others, with others, the truth you have experienced. This belongs to the essence of Christianity. The idea of silencing Christianity in the name of Christian humility is a Christian idea gone mad...

reminiscent of Polanyi and Newbigin

Charles Taylor on "the new atheists"

One of my favourite Canadian philosophers, Charles Taylor, is interviewed by Ronald Kuipers in The Other Journal (one of my regular reads). Taylor has some excellent comments about the reactionary, reductionist,
views of these "new atheists." The larger interview also addresses Taylor's recent book The Secular Age which gives an overview of the move from a God-centred worldview to a solely rational, scientist worldview.

TOJ: Just to bring us back to the topic of atheism, I wonder if you have any opinion regarding those who are being called the “New Atheists,” say Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, who happen to be quite militant in their rhetoric.

CT: Yes, I happen to have quite a negative view of these folks. I think their work is very intellectually shoddy. I mean there are two things that perhaps I am just totally allergic to. The first is that they all believe that there really are some knock-down arguments against belief in God. And of course this is something you can only believe if you have a scientistic, reductionist conception and explanation of everything in the world, including human beings. If you do have such a view that everything is to be explained in terms of physics and the movement of atoms and the like, then certain forms of access to God are just closed. For example, there are certain human experiences that might direct us to God, but these would all be totally illusory if everything could be explained in scientific terms. I spend a lot of time reflecting and writing on the various human sciences and how they can be tempted into a kind of reductionism, and not only would I say that the jury is out on that, but I would argue that the likelihood of that turning out to be the proper understanding of human beings is very small. And the problem is that they just assume this reductionistic view.

The second thing I am allergic to is that they keep going on and on about the relationship between religion and violence, which on one level is fine because there is a lot of religiously-caused violence. But what they consistently fail to acknowledge is that the twentieth century was full of various atheists who were rampaging around killing millions of people. So it is simply absurd that at the end of the twentieth century someone would continue to advance the thesis that religion is the main cause of violence. I mean you’d think these people were writing in 1750, and that would be quite understandable if you were Voltaire or Locke, but to say this in 2008, well it just takes my breath away.

But then what we need to do, and this is something many religious people fail to do, is to consider why this phenomena of the new atheism is happening at this time. Atheists are reacting in the same way that religious fundamentalists reacted in the past. They are people who have been very comfortable with a sense that their particular position is what makes sense of everything and so on, and then when they are confronted by something else they just go bananas and throw up the most incredibly bad arguments in a tone of indignation and anger. And that’s the problem with that whole master narrative of secularization, what’s called the secularization thesis, that people got lulled into—you know, that religion is a thing of the past, that it’s disappearing, that it did all these terrible things but it’s going to go away and so on—because when it comes back people are just undone.

more article here...

John Donne on misery & happiness

I was referred to the poetry of John Donne this week by some comments from NT Wright...

here's a little piece that struck me, from Meditation XIII

We say, the Elements of man are misery, and happinesse, as though he had an equal proportion of both, and the dayes of man vicissitudinary, as though he had as many good daies, as ill, and that he liv’d under a perpetuall Equinoctial night, and day equall, good and ill fortune in the same measure. But it is far from that; hee drinkes misery, and he tastes happinesse; he mowes misery, and he gleanes happinesse; he journies in misery, he does but walke in happinesse; and which is worst his misery is positive, and dogmaticall, his happinesse is but disputable and problematicall; All men call Misery, Misery, but Happinesse changes the name, by the taste of man.