Tim Abbott

The Story of Everything

Thanks to Jonny Baker for flagging up this wonderful live animation of the big picture story of the Bible by Rich Oster.

[If you can't see the video or you're reading this via RSS click here.]

More background on this at CMS Pioneer Mission Leadership Training

I can see an immediate use for this as part of an RE day we're running soon.

iMonk - Why I’m Not A Young Earth Creationist

I'm part of a Christian Impact study group that meets occasionally to review and reflect on films and books from a mainly missional perspective. This time we're reading Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament by Peter Enns.

In a similar vein, this re-post from some years ago popped up on Internet Monk (the blog of the late Michael Spencer, now maintained by friends) where he explains Why I’m Not A Young Earth Creationist. In it he explores the tricky subject of Biblical interpretation of a pre-scientific text in a scientific age. There is some healthy debate in the comments section too. Personally, I'm with iM & Chaplain Mike on this one.

The Bble in five lines

Argghhh... I've been tagged with one of those meme things again.

But as it's from Banksy (and before that the good Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley) I thought I'd have a go. The rules are:

Summarise the Bible in five statements, the first one word long, the second two, the third three, the fourth four and the last five words long. Or possibly you could do this in descending order. Tag five people.

Here goes:

Light
A nation
Exile and division
The word made flesh
Your kingdom come unto eternity

Rather than tagging people I'm going to invite anyone reading this who wants to have a go to, well, have a go. Leave a comment so we know you took up the challenge and know where to look for your inspired theological brevity.

Genesis

Matt Stone on Genesis: An Authoritative Myth?
including what I found to be such an inspiring quote from Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament  by Peter Enns that I went straight to Amazon and bought it.

Jesus and the dinosaurs

Thanks to Dan Kimball for posting this.

We laughed. We nearly cried. We printed it out and stuck it on the wall.

I'm really not sure what to make of it. I think it could be subtitled, "where fundamentalism meets paleontology". But I'm not really sure.

Dan wonders whether this was truly from a Christian children's colouring book. I hope not...
I'm still confused...

You could also see Dinosaur Comics!

Jesus Film in anime

The Jesus Film has been dubbed into over 1000 languages and is probably the most watched film in history. But it's starting to look a bit dated. So the people behind it have started a project to create an anime version, reusing the many existing soundtracks in all the languages it's been translated into.

The Visual Translation Project is the homepage to the whole project.

They've uploaded some concept videos to YouTube. These are just visuals, not finished animation, but are designed to give a feel for the idea. The film is likely to take about 2 years to complete and in the meantime The Visual Translation Project is actively seeking feedback here. There's also a survey which includes five different sample styles to choose from.

This looks like a great way to update what is honestly a rather dated production - we've avoided using it in schools out of embarrassment. So we'll be watching developments here with interest.

Bible Geocoding

A few people have picked up on this. Bible Geocoding from OpenBible means you can now find every place named in the Bible on Google Earth. You can view places for the whole Bible, or individual books. And if you don't want to open up Google Earth, you can view the information for individual books in a browser window thanks to Google Maps.

But there's more... An atlas of place names with their linked Bible references. And links to photos of locations in the Bible. However, they do admit, "These photos use the Flickr and Panoramio APIs and are thus of varying quality—many of them just happen to be of people or places near the ancient locations."

Then there's overlays of historic maps which integrate with Google Earth terrain data.

The whole site is well worth a look.

[graphic: OpenBible]

Feminism and scripture

An interesting post from Scott McKnight exploring issues raised in John Stackhouse's new book Finally Feminist.
I've always said I don't have a problem with women in leadership. I know many women who are superb leaders, and quite a few men who are not. I think the issue is fundamentally about quality of leadership, not gender.
But as well as exploring the issue of gender and leadership, Scott identifies in Stackhouse some  important ideas that influence the way we approach our understanding of scripture. On the whole, I find them very helpful. As you might expect, there is a lively discussion following in his comments section.

In a similar vein, John Stackhouse on his own blog asks, Does the Trinity prove anything about gender? Not much.  He concludes:

Many theologians (I among them) strongly endorse circumspection when it comes to the attempt to use one of the great mysteries of the faith—the internal life of God in the Trinity—to shed light on some other doctrine. Some doctrines do require deployment of the doctrine of the Trinity to understand them properly—most notably Christology, soteriology, and pneumatology. But the question of gender seems to be one of those theological subjects not much improved by reference to the Trinity—as is evidenced by the fact that everyone seems to be able to selectively access this doctrine in the interest of contradictory understandings of gender.

The God who is speaking

Just came across this quote from AW Tozer in Turnings by Guy Chevreau.

I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling for the scriptures of truth. A silent God suddenly began to speak in a book and when the book was finished lapsed into silence again forever. Now we read the book as a record of what God said when he was for a brief time in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our heads how can we believe? The facts are that God is not silent, has never been silent. He is by nature continuously articulate.

Guy goes on to say; "Because our heavenly Father loves us more than we will ever love him, he is forever caling and drawing us deeper in his love. This, more than any other call, is that which he is initiating, and to which he invites us to respond."

Bible printing in China

An article in The Times on Saturday about the phenomenal growth of Bible printing in China.

Such is the demand in China for Bibles that Amity Printing can scarcely keep pace. Early next year it will move into a new, much larger factory on the edge of the eastern city of Nanjing to become the world’s single-biggest producer of Bibles.