Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Want to be Secret Service Administrator?

Well I have found an MI6 SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) site that tests your aptitude as a SIS administrator. It had five sections - communication, numeracy, attention to detail, prioritizing and finally data ordering. If you think you've got what it takes well check it out here.

On similar news it was interesting to see that MI6 is using facebook to find new recruits. I'll leave you the link and let you guys check it out.

Cheers

Jimmy

Monday, September 29, 2008

Ever Wondered What Were The Best Commentaries?

For any of those studying to the Bible and are left to wonder which commentaries are the ones you want to read, and which ones need to be left on the shelf. Well I have come across this very useful site: Best Commentaries. I'm not an expert on the series nor do I know a lot of the authors, but I have found this helpful. It lists the commentaries by author, series or book. If your browsing 'by book' it will put them in a rating system so the perceived best one is at the top and descending from there. It will also show you up and coming commentaries. I was happy to see Tim Meadowcroft in the top 13 for Daniel (he was thirteenth, but above many other peeps, including Calvin and Alan Harman), a guy who lectures where I'm currently studying. Anyways, thought I'd share this with the world.

Cheers

Jimmy

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Road Rage

Found two bits of interesting news. First being a high speed cop chase that exceeded 85mph (136km/h). After 27 traffic violations the cops stopped him by using the PIT maneuver. The car lost control and hit a pole, the driver was barely hurt. While not fast in relation to other cop chases, it turns out the guy was an 11 year old kid. Check it out here.

The second were some crazy women who kept running out in front of motorway traffic. They ran out once, one got hit but it musn't have been serious cause the police were talking to them soon after. During their chat with the officer one of them bolted across the road again and the other one followed. One got nailed and the other one just kept running into traffic, even crossing the centre barrier into more traffic. She even punched over a policewoman. It took a number of people to detain her (like 8 or 11 or something). Crazy, I want to know more about what was going on for them. Whether they were mentally unstable, wanting to committ suicide together, high on drugs, depressed, traumatised or just straight crazy. Anyhow, check it out for yourself here.

Hope all your days are going well! Peace.

Jimmy

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Reading the Bible

Well I have just had a listen to some guy talking about hermeneutics. You can check him out here if you want: Blue Letter Bible . I have also put up a post in the forum about it and some of my thoughts.

I’m about half way through a book on the emergent church. I will put up a blog about it in the near future.

Stay Golden

Jimmy

Click here for the forum post

Update

Well I have put up some of the article type things I wrote on this blog in the forum over on my other site. Feel free to have a comment - even a critical one..

Stay Gold

Jimbo

http://jimmynz.informe.com/portal.html

Monday, September 22, 2008

The Church

I'm currently working on an assignment which is looking at understanding the church by understanding the Holy Spirit. It doesn't take long to realise that it is not possible to only understand the church by understanding the Spirit, but also by understanding Christ. The church is the body of Christ, but the Spirit is the life of the church. It is what unifies us and brings Christ into the church and us to Christ. But what is the church? The church is the gathering of believers, not a building or even structure of people. If there is only one person in the world that believes in the reconcilatory work of Jesus, is that church? It seems to suggest not as one person is not a gathering. Church is understood then as two things; 1) it is a fellowship of believers and 2) it is a product of the gospel. The scriptures proclaim the good news, that is, the redemptive work of God and Jesus in bringing reconciliation to the world. As a result of people partaking in this reconciliation by believing in the work of Jesus a church is created. Thus the church is not authoritative of the scriptures, but the scriptures are authoritative of the church. But the scriptures have to point to Jesus and are thus subordinate to him. God as his work in Jesus that is the good news is the pinnacle of this structure that lands church at the bottom. One has to believe in the work of Jesus before they truly believe in the divinity of the scriptures, and thus the church as a gathering of people unified by the Spirit brought together for their same belief that Jesus brought reconciliation.

So how is church supposed to function then? A proclamation of the good news from the scriptures is needed as that is what the church came out of. But what else? Is it necessary to turn up on a Sunday, sit in a pew and have a preacher talk to the people about the 'right' way of doing things. Sing songs and then at the end maybe make a couple friends and go home again? We talk about sending people out into missions, but what about the whole church as sent on missions? Is it required of us to sit in the pews quietly and take in what the preacher says or can we have a discussion about it instead? This comes out of my own personal experiences. I feel that if my faith was a muscle, then all church services are doing on Sunday morning are trying to relax and pacify the muscle while it is being trained how to flex by the preacher. What I hope for is a place where everyones faith muscles are free to flex themselves, where they can own what they do, and we can grow in our own ways, not the preachers ways.

Some thoughts,

Jimmy.

P.S. I'm looking at building a forum over time as a place to discuss this. There are already plenty of places to do this, but I thought I'd give it a go as well.
http://jimmynz.informe.com/forum/theology-f9/ecclesiology-t9.html

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Reading the Bible

I've been reading around hermeneutics recently trying to get a feel of
where it is all going. I don't know who reads this (if anyone), but I was wondering how
we all read the bible? A survey was recently done in New Zealand
around reading the bible. 11% of Christians in NZ read the bible
daily and 13% read it weekly (http://biblesociety.org.nz/global-news/
bible-unread-bestseller/). This is pretty dismal. Is it our faith,
our worldview or the way we read the bible or something else that has
produced these results? How should we read the bible? I believe that
the bible offers the reader a possibility. A different way of doing
life. When I read Isaiah 40 - 55 (the Servant Songs) I see a way of
living that Christ fulfills and the church is to live like this until
Jesus' return. This is a textual reading where I develop 'who' the
character is in relation to 'what' and 'why'. Take Hezekiah for
example, his first 8 days in office he re-opens and re-furnishes the
temple of Yahweh. This shows 'who' he is as a person, same as the
Servant as mentioned previously in Isaiah. But this presents other
problems, do we read the OT in an attempt to discover what the author
is trying to portray? what about the authors context? or do we read it
as how the audience would perceive what has been recorded? Should we
read it as literary text and move from the author? Or does meaning
only come from the reader? Apply all these questions when trying to
interpret the Servant Songs in Isaiah and a never ending problem is
produced.
Where I am at is that the text is only given meaning when the
reader actually reads the text. There is a relationship between the
text and reader, the text is given meaning and is changed during
reading. In the same way the text changes the world of the reader.
And the reader cannot interpret the text without formulating some way
of interpreting what the author is trying to say in the text, or the
world in which the textual content is set. Instead of approaching the
text objectively, we need to own our presuppositions and be honest
with ourselves and the text. Perhaps instead of scrutinizing over the
text, the author and it's origins, perhaps we should read the text and
it's content. As the content develops a story is played out, like a
picture being painted. Upon observing this picture both reader and
text is changed. But let's not throw out the baby with the bath water
because this has the potential to become a highly liberal reading,
e.g. God is not love, but hate. So we are required to intelligently
inquire into the text, it's context, background, author as to grasp a
more grounded understanding of the text. This is to prevent a liberal
reading of it, but not make bible reading so specialized that people
give up before they start.

Just some thoughts. Feel free to give feedback, even critical
feedback is good.

Jimmy.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Google's Chrome

Hey customers

Well thought I'd leave something useless. You'll find time wasting games at Kongregate.com.  Much better than miniclips.com.  I started using Google Chrome the other day, it's not too bad. Quite buggy though and not all that appealing.  Get sick of the blue real fast, however it is simple and does what ya want (most of the time).  Most of the time it crashes with Adobe Shockwave or Flash (in light of this don't use Chrome to access Kongregate or Miniclips).  When it does freeze i've found right clicking the window thing on the bar on the bottom will bring it back to life.

Just got handed another assignment, this time on Maori worldview.  Was a bit annoyin, so I skipped class and wrote the assignment. Will hand it in today.

Happy day

Philip.