Hi folks! Thoughts on the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie and the CU houseparty will hopefully follow soon, but I just thought I’d share this…

Over on the TrueU.org discussion boards, I joined in a discussion entitled “Emotion vs Devotion”, and how many Christians have stigmatised “religion” and “works” in favour of “experiencing God”. Here’s my response…

The problem is that people go to extremes. No, to be more accurate, the problem is that people aren’t extreme enough – they only go to one extreme at a time. Following Jesus encompasses our entire being – intellect, will and emotions. You can divide up the Christian life into three elements that roughly correspond – knowledge, action and experience. All are vital to the Christian life.

Unfortunately, people tend to focus on one at the expense of the others. Knowledge alone without action or lived experience of the reality of God in your life is dead. But high-powered emotional experiences are also of little value to the Christian life if not rooted in the truths of the Bible, and if they don’t lead to practical obedience to God’s will. Equally, if we go out and try and do all sorts of good actions – social work, caring for the poor and so on – if we aren’t doing those out of a love for God, aren’t basing our actions on his word and aren’t proclaiming the truths of the Gospel, then our Christian life is again empty. The genuine Christian life needs all three elements.

The modernist objection to Christianity was in the area of the intellect – “where’s the evidence? where are the arguments?”, and any appeal to action or experience and emotion was dismissed as anti-intellectual. With postmodernism, you get the opposite – people want to see the lived reality of the Christian life, and are inclined to dismiss any attempts to justify Christianity on a rational basis as oppressive power-politics.

We need to fight the battle in that place where the enemy is attacking us. If people’s rejection of Christianity is in the area of the intellect, then we need to engage with them in that area and show the reasonable arguments for our faith. If people’s rejection of Christianity is in the area of experience and emotion, then we need to engage them in that area by showing them the lived reality of life lived following God in a community of believers.

However, we cannot ignore the other areas. Many Christians tried to jettison anything in their faith that wasn’t strictly rational, and so you ended up with a rejection of the miracles of the Bible. Many Christians dismissed of the role of emotions in the Christian life. Both of these were a big mistake.

Many Christians now are beginning to wake up to the need to swing round and show people the lived reality of the Christian faith through personal experience and emotion. That’s the area where the battle is being fought the hardest, and it’s right that we are making sure we are living out genuine Christian community, living the Christian life in a real way that people can see is genuine. We should have still been doing that all along, of course, but it’s right to focus our energies on putting that right. But the danger we must not fall in to, but which many Christians are falling into, is then neglecting the rational side of things. Even if people find it unpalatable, people still need to know the rational side of Christianity, need to know the truth of the faith, just as people still needed to know the emotional and practical side of Christianity when they were demanding just the rational arguments. The danger that emergent Christianity and the so-called emerging church faces is that it is losing its grounding in the firm foundation of the truths of the Gospel.

The challenge is to live whole-heartedly for God – extremists who are extreme in our love for God not just in our minds and and not just in our emotions, but with our entire being – intellect, emotions and will. Our witness also needs to be in all three areas – speaking the truth, acting in obedience, and demonstrating the lived experience of a life of love, peace and joy in service to God.

Saturday evening’s party seems to have been a big success, except for one very unfortunate event. Mid way through the evening, Juliet felt ill and fainted, banging her head. She hadn’t had any alcohol, like most of those therem much to the bemusement of the paramedics! (“It’s Saturday night, and a birthday party, and you’ve not had any booze… yeah, right!”) Someone joked that it wouldn’t be a proper student party without an ambulance being called. Helen went with Juliet, and she was back home after a couple of hours and spent Sunday in bed. Poor Juliet – I hope she’s recovered now.

But it didn’t dampen spirits too much, and we had great fun eating, drinking and playing silly games. My housemate Ian made a cardboard TARDIS in the garden, which I was mightily impressed by! Dave Williamson gave me the handy book How To Survive A Robot Uprising, and there were lots of generous contributions of food and drink to the party. Judging from what they’ve said to me and from the comments in our Visitors Book, people had a really good time, so I’m chuffed.

I haven’t worked out exactly how many people came, but I had a good number of friends There were people from my course, from the Navigators, the Christian Union and from Mack, and some friends of these friends who I enjoyed meeting. Many of the Debating Society were off in Glamorgan at the Novice competition though, so the only fellow Debater there was Swithin, who also goes to the Navs and CU (which means I often see him three consecutive evenings a week!)

I forgot to judge the fancy dress on the night, but I popped round to Becci, Helen and Vicky’s house to award them the wonderful prize of some Crunchie Bites since they collectively made the best effort, though Craig also deserves an honourable mention.

I’ll try and put some photos up soon – taken with my new digital camera, no less!

I need to finish my essay for my Heresy & Dissent module before getting things ready for my birthday party this evening. I’m writing about a source recording the conversion of Peter Waldo, a rich merchant who gave everything up for a life of poverty and preaching. But the Church wasn’t too happy with this evangelical preacher going around preaching from the Bible outside the authority of the church and told him to stop, but he refused and was branded a heretic. So I need to write around 400 words or so before lunch.

For some reason, it seems to be a busy time for birthdays. Yesterday evening three friends I know were having birthday parties – Helen and Becci (a joint party, though their birthdays are on the 7th and the 17th respectively) and Claire Fayers. And I’m sure there were one or two other people with their birthdays around now. As it happens, I share my birthday with Martin Luther, who was also born on the 10th November. All the best people are obviously born in November! ;-)

Back to work…

I’m 20 years old today!

This morning my housemates Ian, Ben, Steve and Tom and I had a cooked breakfast of bacon, egg, beans and toast, and I opened my presents. They got me The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on DVD, so ta muchly for that – I really enjoy that film!

Mum and Dad got me Francis Schaeffer’s trilogy, comprising The God Who Is There, Escape from Reason and He is there and is not silent and a shaver. Becky got me – joy of joys! – a sonic screwdriver, so I can now go around pretending to be Doctor Who with even more authenticity (I’ve already got a leather jacket). I got a new digital camera partly from Grandma and Opa, though I’m making a contribution towards it. I need to get a memory card for it, though. I’ve also had cards, vouchers, cheques and cash from other friends and family, so a massive thank you to everyone! I hope to thank you all individually over the next few days.

So, my teenage years are over. I never was a stereotypical teenager. I’m glad to say that I’ve been able to talk to my parents openly through my teenage years, and have had the pleasure of having them as friends and not just as relatives. I wonder whether that is that really anything unusual. Sure, the pressures of growing up and the gradual shift of power and responsibility as you change from a child to an adult can cause tensions, but it really annoys me that there’s almost the expectation that teenagers will become moody and grumpy and rebel against everything their parents say. It needn’t be like that, and if that’s what we expect of our youngsters, then many of them will live up to that. And don’t get me started on the myths peddled in our society about being a student…

On Saturday I’m having a birthday party at my house from 6pm – if you’re around then you’re welcome to come! Food and drink, fun and games, chilling and chatting. Optional fancy dress as characters from books, film and television. Bring friends, and please bring some food or drink. Email me if you’re planning on coming (see my profile for my email address).

I got back to Cardiff yesterday evening, after an excrutiatingly extended excursion by train (don’t get me started…) But at least I had the pleasant company of Ben Read for the journey, which was good. I really enjoyed visiting home. It’s nice to see my dear family (though Hannah was sadly rather grumpy, partly due to a long-lasting headache, and perhaps also a dash of teenage tempermentality). I always find that retreating home for a rest helps revive my revolutionary feeling – I enjoy chatting with my Dad and discussing how to put the world to rights, or at least the world of Cardiff studentdom!

While reading the paper on the train, I noticed that Gair Rhydd has won Best Student Newspaper in the Guardian Student Media Awards! Great stuff – I’m glad to be contributing to such a fine publication! Speaking of which, I hope to get some more articles published once I’ve got my essays out the way. Though actually working on them rather than mucking around with blogs would help with that. Ah well, back to the bookshelves I go…

In around 45 minutes I’ll be catching the train back up to Dolgellau, to visit home for the weekend. I’ve just had my last lecture of the week, “Heresy and Dissent”, on the repression of heresy, and next week is Reading Week (or “Dossing Week” as it is known in some quarters!)

For some reason I’ve got the ghost of a desktop item floating above the Internet Explorer window… very strange.

Anyway, I better be off to the train station. Ta ra!

One of the main things we do on the Creative Writing module is submit a page or so of work a week and give feedback on each other’s writing. While there’s often a lot that’s very good, the pages of these photocopied works are often littered with sentences that are clunky, pretentious or just plain weird.

From the portentous and pretentious opening line, such as “My tormentor became my muse” to serious pronouncements like “Time isn’t shy to push you further, older”, aspiring writers try and write amazing prose only to find that they aren’t quite as clever as they’d like to be,=.

Anything about artists or creativity is in particular danger of descending into ponciness, such as “The realistic piazza was surveyed with satisfaction at its inadequacy”, and “Sophia reflected her sketch at its abstract nature today, as she was currently experiencing an artistic block”.

I was also bemused by a description of a ballerina that included such gems as “Apprehension compels me” and “The cadences carry her on sound waves over the stage”.

Who on earth says anything remotely resembling “I feel elevated when they try to extract an emotional outburst from me”? And what is “I’m scared that the now will be luminous forever and the next stained by it” supposed to mean?

Ah well. I’m as guilty of the clumsy turn of phrase and silly sounding sentence just as much as the next writer, but I hope that I do not inordinately navigate the fair signifiers of language upon a course of hebetudinously ill-conceived vocabulary in my questing after innovatory literary excellency!

The FIEC youth conference Contagious has had a tremendous impact on me over the six years that I’ve attended it. Not so much a holiday as a Bible-boot camp, it is always a really incredible week of teaching, fun and friendship. It doesn’t shy away from controversial or confused issues – in previous years it has tackled topics such as the Holy Spirit, the Book of Revelation and the Sovereignty of God. Although it doesn’t shy away from the intellectual side of things, it is always very practical, with a strong emphasis on working out what we’ve been learning means for us in our everyday lives. And now this year’s talks (“The Big Teach”s) have hit the Internet.

I’ll be interested to listen to the talks out of their original context. Without the accompanying seminars, question times, fun, singing and friendly environment, listening to recordings of the talks is obviously a poor substitute to actually being there, but I’m sure they are still very helpful and challenging teaching of the word of God.

The theme of the week was Smashing the Idols of the Heart, and I’d highly recommend the talks:

• Big Teach 1: God the Only
• Big Teach 2: Idols – their power and failure (part one)
• Big Teach 3: Idols – their power and failure (part two)
• Big Teach 4: The Jealous God
• Big Teach 5: Jesus the Idol Smasher
• Big Teach 6: Desiring God

The only downside is that these are pretty big files for the length of the talk – I’ll have to talk to the guy who has put them online about reducing the file size, which should be possible at little loss of quality.

Tags: Contagious youth Bible talks