literally

Nice ::  (h/t Karl Hand).

disappointed

Wycliffe Hall is next door to my College.  Its Principal gives a surprisingly candid interview.  I'm disappointed, but not surprised, by much of what he says.  I'm uncertain as to why he is proud that Wycliffe Hall is a part of the University of Oxford, given that he rather clearly doesn't share the University's present values, on a range of topics.

A wise man said that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control.  I wonder if that's relevant here?

blogger gone crazy

blogger is screwing up my blog layout.  I don't know why.  Sorry for the inconvenience.


[edit]

I think it's now fixed.   Please let me know if there are still problems with comments.

Review: Fall to Grace

Fall to Grace: A Revolution of God, Self, and Society
Jay Bakker with Martin Edlund


Amazon tells me I bought this book in January, so the fact that I've just finished reading it is a matter of some embarrassment, but that seems to be my common complaint - too many books on my 'to read' pile.  So perhaps I'm missing the boat with this review - many others reviewed the book long ago.  But it's a good book, so here goes.

Bakker's surname will perhaps ring bells: his parents Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Televangelists in the name of "Praise the Lord (PTL) Ministries".  Probably more wholesome than some, the whole thing collapsed in the late 1980s, with stories (well-founded, sending Jim to jail) of financial irregularity, and stories (well-founded) of marital infidelity.  Jay was 13 at the time, went proverbially "off the rails" - meeting his dad out of prison, he describes himself as "eighteen, pierced, and a raging alcoholic".  His dad tried to help him reform - but instead he found himself digging a deeper hole.

Perhaps he over-plays that fall - I guess others have fallen further - and yet, it is an essential part of his tale.  Through the patient help of a friend or two, and the help of a "twelve-step program", he not only cleaned up his life, he discovered a real revelation of God's grace.  In place of the Christianity he thought he had received (despite some insightful pastoral wisdom from his mother, described later) founded on sin, guilt, and judgement, he learned instead a story of grace, of love, of acceptance.

Following this autobiographical introduction, he explores in rather more detail this theme of grace, tracing it through Paul and other biblical authors.  With the zeal of a convert, he describes both the theology and the way it's worked out in his experience.  He explores the ways in which the message of grace embodies the gospel so much better than the preaching of morality.  In one sense, it's pedestrian stuff - but so often it isn't lived, it's just theory.   Bakker puts this grace-laden gospel into practice, in the Christian community he now helps to lead, which meets in a bar and ministers to many on the fringes of polite society - precisely the kind of people that Jesus hung out with.

Besides this general interplay of theory and practice, of theology and a lived-out gospel, he spends a few later chapters exploring the outworking of this line of thinking in a few more detailed topics.  In particular, he revisits the way that the church has treated gay people.  Not only exploring the theology, he describes experiences in a national mission/conversation attempting to dispel fears and misconceptions (and his disappointment at the way Rick Warren and Saddleback church treated them).  He describes how and why the church he serves - Revolution Church - is gay-affirming.  He describes how this approach makes a difference for individual Christians.

This book is on the one hand an immensely personal book - the story of Jay Bakker's journey into understanding God's grace (I'm sure he wouldn't claim to have arrived yet).  And on the other, it is a gentle tour of one of the absolutely central themes of the gospel - one that too often we overlook because somehow it is too generous, too outrageous, too loving, too much at odds with our cold hearts.  His penultimate paragraph is this, it sums up the book rather well:

Grace is all about acceptance.  By accepting grace we accept God, we accept ourselves, we accept each other.

You probably gathered that I rather liked this book.  It's all about God's grace.  What's not to like?