What others are doing

Jason offers a pastoral reflection upon the Christchurch earthquake.

Kate summarises why climate change is bad for biodiversity, otherwise known as the web of life (though as a couple of comments point out, we're really talking about anthropogenic environmental change, not just climate change, as there are other factors contributing to the current precipitous biodiversity decline).

Jeremy is in search of the biodegradable shoe. He also thinks there are three basic paths ahead for the world over this century.

Bill discusses what he thinks might be the most popular tax in history.

David distinguishes (very helpfully) between stuff and things, and while he's dishing out useful advice, he also gives some tips on how to make trillions of dollars.

Halden is a little underwhelmed by ecumenism.

And Brad relates a tale of two Protestantisms, in which O'Donovan sides with the Augustinian English Anglicans against the Donatist Scots Presbyterians (perhaps unsurprisingly, since O'Donovan is an English Anglican who happens to live in Scotland). If nothing after that last comma made sense, don't worry, the post itself is very readable.

Sola Scriptura: use and abuse of a slogan

The Reformation slogan of sola scriptura (Latin for "the scriptures alone") is often invoked during intra-Protestant debates to rule certain claims out of court as "unbiblical". However, it is worth noting that this is often a misuse of the phrase.

Sola scriptura was one of a number of Reformation slogans beginning with the Latin term sola ("alone" or "only"). Others included "grace alone", "faith alone", "Christ alone" and the "to the glory of God alone".* These phrases were used polemically and pedagogically by Protestants to distinguish themselves theologically from Roman Catholics, whom they believed had illegitimately added to each of these crucial doctrines and thereby obscured or effaced the truth of divine salvation in Christ.
*I'd include all the Latin phrases, but then you might get the false impression that I can read Latin.

Thus sola scriptura was historically a claim about the sufficiency of the holy scriptures in teaching us all that is necessary for salvation in Christ, and was generally intended as a critique of Roman Catholic reliance on extra-biblical traditions. However, notice what is not included by this claim. While the holy scriptures contain all that is necessary for salvation in Christ, they do not necessarily contain all that is necessary for, say, conducting open heart surgery, writing a good poem, determining the age of the sun, understanding the culture of first century Palestine or accurately measuring and accounting for long term climate trends.

Christian theologians can and should expound the meaning and significance of the holy scriptures, and in so doing, help to create space for disciplines other than theology, affirming the goodness of knowledge gained in other ways. This is not a denial of sola scriptura, but part of its true meaning.

UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention that Michael Jensen posted some thoughts along similar lines a couple of months ago (though watch out for the ensuing discussion, which gets a little lengthy and somewhat off topic...).

The Reformation and the Bible: against individualism

Having enjoyed that last post and returned to work, I thought I'd give the 123 thing a go on the next book I picked up. Again, a typical statement from a frequent source of quotes on this blog. It was also no surprise, given the small size of the volume and the infamous verbosity of the author, that by the 10th sentence of page 123, you're on page 124.

Initially, the Reformation was an attempt to put the Bible at the heart of the Church again – to give it into the hands of private readers. The Bible was to be seen as a public document, the charter of the Church's life; all believers should have access to it because all would need to know the common language of the Church and the standards by which the Church argued about theology and behaviour. The huge Bibles that were chained up in English churches in the sixteenth century were there as a sign of this. It was only as the rapid development of cheap printing advanced that the Bible as a single affordable volume came to be within everyone's reach as something for individuals to possess and study in private. The leaders of the Reformation would have been surprised to be associated with any move to encourage anyone and everyone to form their own conclusions about the Bible. For them, it was once again a text to be struggled with in the context of prayer and shared reflection.

Eight points for guessing the author; ten for the book.

Christianity for beginners

These made my day, or at least my hour:
An introduction to Christianity.
An introduction to The Da Vinci Code.

In both cases various problematic terms are helpfully defined. For example:

The Protestant Reformation
This is the name historians give to a major labor dispute that erupted in Germany in 1517 when a group of monks hammered a proposed union contract to the door of the pope's house, requesting a 95 percent pay raise. The pope refused to negotiate with the monks union until it agreed to pay to have the door fixed, and the result was the world's longest-running strike. For nearly 500 years, a huge portion of Christians have been on strike from being Catholic, saying they are "justified" in their work stoppage because the pope won't expand the number of indulgences they get per year. Currently, the matter is in arbitration.