In 2007 I had my first book published. I went to my 10 year college reunion. Experienced another savage fire in the mountains.

I renewed contact with a valued professor from Fuller who invited me to pursue PhD studies. I applied. I took a class from this professor on Moltmann, read all of Moltmann’s major books, wrote a paper on Moltmann, was invited to give a presentation on Moltmann at a conference in 2008. Moltmann read my single book, wrote a wonderful little blurb for it, read my humble beginning attempts at writing about his work, and I received a PhD recommendation from Moltmann.

I took a class on the missional church with Alan Hirsch, who had just weeks before graciously consented to write the forward to my book. In the class I was curiously appointed to be the teaching assistant and I graded a lot of papers, immersing me even more in various views of emerging/missional theology and practice. I had left the church behind and I was back in the middle of it. People even invited me to join a weekly conversation about God and life, which I’m still wary to see as church, but am hopeful it might be a burgeoning spiritual community.

2007 was the year of re-engaging with the world more actively after several years of distancing. I had left the church to pursue Christ. I had left community to pursue wholeness. I had left rational pursuits to pursue dreams. God pulled me away and then in 2007 seemed to push me back a bit.

But only a bit. I end this year feeling halfway in all my being.

My application is submitted. But not accepted. I have no money for a PhD but that is the one opportunity pushed before me. I find a lot of encouragement, but all is vague and diffuse and lacking practical substance. I follow the open door as I wonder about doors that never seemed to open as I thought.

All year I felt more distant from God in my discipline and focus than in years past. I end the year noticing how much more at peace I am, feeling much more emotionally and spiritually mature. I became bored with angst in 2007.

I found new friends, became disenchanted with old friends, both leading me to discover friendships without expectations, accepting what is there and when. Loves were lost and found and misplaced and wrongly placed and resolved and left unresolved.

I end the year with nothing in my life more tangible than what I had at the beginning of the year. I end the year with everything in my life more hopeful than what I had at the beginning of the year.

I found great approval at high levels and great approval at the lowest, still lacking that far more broad middle place leaving me both curiously noticed and greatly ignored. I don’t know which is more real and valid.

I end 2007 feeling it was a good year, a year of openings and a year of beginnings and a year of possibilities and a year of progress inside and out.

I have high hopes for 2008, that what was begun will find new life, and what hasn’t yet started will begin.

Happy end of 2007. God bless 2008.

And thus the Great Creator said, “…Man disobeying,
Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins
Against the high Supremacy of Heav’n,
Affecting God-head, and so loosing all,
To expiate his Treason hath naught left,
But to destruction sacred and devote,
He with his whole posterity must dye,
Dye he or Justice must; unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.
Say Heav’nly Powers, where shall we find such love,
Which of ye will be mortal to redeem
Mans mortal crime, and just th’ unjust to save,
Dwells in all Heaven charity so dear?”

He ask’d, but all the Heav’nly Quire stood mute,
And silence was in Heav’n: on mans behalf
Patron or Intercessor none appeared,
Much less that durst upon his own head draw
The deadly forfeiture, and ransom set.
And now without redemption all mankind
Must have bin lost, adjudg’d to Death and Hell
By doom severe, had not the Son of God,
In whom the fullness dwells of love divine,
His dearest mediation thus renewed.

“Father, thy word is past, man shall find grace;
And shall grace not find means, that finds her way,
The speediest of thy winged messengers,
To visit all thy creatures, and to all
Comes unprevented, unimplor’d, unsought,
Happy for man, so coming; he her aide
Can never seek, once dead in sins and lost;
Atonement for himself or offering meet,
Indebted and undone, hath none to bring:
Behold me then, me for him, life for life
I offer, on me let thine anger fall;
Account me man; I for his sake will leave
Thy bosom, and this glorie next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly dye
Well pleas’d, on me let Death wreck all his rage;
Under his gloomy power I shall not long
Lie vanquisht; thou hast given me to possess
Life in my self for ever, by thee I live,
Though now to Death I yield, and am his due
All that of me can die, yet that debt paid,
Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave
His prey, nor suffer my unspotted Soul
For ever with corruption there to dwell;
But I shall rise Victorious, and subdue
My Vanquisher, spoiled of his vanted spoil;
Death his deaths wound shall then receive, and stoop
Inglorious, of his mortal sting disarm’d.
I through the ample Air in Triumph high
Shall lead Hell Captive maugre Hell, and show
The powers of darkness bound. Thou at the sight
Pleas’d, out of Heaven shalt look down and smile,
While by thee rais’d I ruin all my Foes,
Death last, and with his Carcass glut the Grave:
Then with the multitude of my redeemed
Shall enter Heaven long absent, and return,
Father, to see thy face, wherein no cloud
Of anger shall remain, but peace assur’d,
And reconcilement; wrath shall be no more
Thenceforth, but in thy presence Joy entire.”

His words here ended, but his meek aspect
Silent yet spake, and breath’d immortal love
To mortal men, above which only shone
Filial obedience: as a sacrifice
Glad to be offer’d, he attends the will
Of his great Father.

~John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III

Merry Christmas!!!

It’s my mom’s birthday! Happy birthday Mom!!

A person couldn’t ask for a more wise, more caring, more loving mom.

I got a wee little blurb in the Wheaton Alumni magazine about publishing my book! I’m doing my part to keep the Wheaton tradition alive!

I officially applied for a PhD in theology at Fuller Seminary, to study the Moltmann and the Emerging church. The paper I posted below might very well be the outline of my dissertation. Assuming I can pay for this education, of course. Right now I have utterly no idea how I’m going to pay for it. But I am pretty sure I’m going to get accepted at least. So that’s a start.

Why such confidence about that? Well, God has been good. All this time away from the normal path got me to reading and thinking and progressing in a creative way. Early in 2007 I took a class on Moltmann taught by Dr. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen. After the quarter he invited me to apply, saying I needed to do so. So I have, and he’s written a recommendation. Dr. Eddie Gibbs, one of my favorite and most valuable professors at Fuller, an expert in emerging church and church growth, has graciously writing the second recommendation.

And I got this in the mail today:

Dear Patrick Oden,
Thank you for your letter and your papers. I have already sent a recommendation to Fuller Seminary in your favor. What you have written on my method is good: I don’t have much of a prefixed method that I would have to follow every time. Your paper on “the emerging church” raised my interest. I have heard about this new phenomenon but have no experience. I am looking forward to your study, and shall learn from you.

If I am free I shall listen to your presentation at Duke on “an emerging pneumatology”.

Enjoy the blessings of Christmas and go with the Spirit of Hope into the new year.

Yours in Christ, Jürgen Moltmann

So, three pretty good recommendations. That’ll do.

A nice Christmas eve. Still a lot of work and a lot of money are necessary. But it’s a nice day to be sure.

Merry Christmas to all! May God’s blessings shower upon you in manifold ways!

Have you seen the movie Millions?
I saw it for the first time this past week. Honestly I was a little disappointed. Not by the movie but because Netflix sent it instead of The Simpsons movie. At some point someone recommended Millions, I added it to my queue then, likely a few months or more back, and it’s time came.
I was very much not disappointed by the movie. I was utterly appointed. (shouldn’t that work?) Actually, in a way I was because it turned out to be a Christmas movie of sorts. Christmas in both setting and Christmas in theme. Not the theme of rush to the store to buy the last figure and endure all sorts of mayhem. The theme of giving. The theme of overcoming consumerism to find something richer and deeper.

And both Francis and Clare of Assisi have cameo appearance, the former with birds, the latter with a cigarette

I’ve decided, for a couple days at least, to post the revised article I finished a couple of weeks ago. I’m curious to hear some responses, especially from the emerging church side of things. Because there isn’t a settled emerging/missional theology I’m picking and choosing as I go from a selection of writers who I see best getting to the heart of what’s going on in a positive, rather than deconstructive, way.

It’s also the case that as I turn more academic in my writing I don’t want to be an academic writer… ever. I want to develop a style that can be dynamic, adjusting one way or another depending on the particular audience, but never leaving one side out altogether. So I’m curious about a broad reading.

I’m going to leave the link up only for a week or so mostly because I don’t want the link I’m posting to be broadly accessible for very long.

Please let me know your thoughts, if you get download it, either as a comment here or an email to dualravens at yahoo dot com.

I’m writing a new paper that bounces off some of the ideas in this one so I’m curious to see how those idea work.

Have a merry Christmas week!

Scientists figure out traffic jams.

For a few years I was in daily traffic. All that time in traffic got me thinking about what caused it and what to do. I came up in my mind exactly what they are talking about in this article. But unfortunately I was a theology, not a physics, student so couldn’t publish my intuitive findings.

The wave increases in intensity as others adds to the slowing, making small increments into eventual stops. So the answer to this is to be a positive force, by maintaining following distance, advancing in speed when possible and otherwise serving to refocus the traffic speed to it’s right pattern. One person can’t fix it but if everyone does then it’s fixed and slowdowns are alleviated.

Of course, being a theology student now I think how this applies to church and ministry. Cautious, nervous people in churches can slow down ministry, getting ever more cautious, insisting everyone else goes no faster than their worries and fears. Soon the church is stopped. People get off and travel down different roads or are stuck for no real reason in the same place for a long time.

Church is like traffic! I think I made a point on that somewhere in my book.

Here he is, in an interview from late last year.

And yes, I have caught a bit of Moltmannia. I’ve a big presentation due on the 15th on Jurgen Moltmann and emerging church pneumatology. Moltmann is the main speaker at the conference and might be in the audience at my presentation.

No word on if any emerging church folks will be there.

I’m actually excited. I think I’ve found a fun new rhythm with the presentation and am hoping to take full advantage of my non-establishment status.

How emerging of me!

But yeah, check out the interview. I don’t agree with everything Moltmann says or writes, but I’m loving how he pushes me to think in great new directions.

From Wheaton College.

Jonathan Blanchard wouldn’t approve… but I really like it.

I don’t remember getting a Christmas greeting from my ol’ alma mater before. I think it’s quite a lovely thing to do. And very well done.

Merry (almost) Christmas .

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea:
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar,
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known.

Peter Jackson is going to start making The Hobbit.

I’m looking through my moleskin notebook and found this little tidbit I wrote in it. Sometimes I write quotes I like. Sometimes I have thoughts connected to the particular book I’m reading. Sometimes a book shoots me off in another direction. Sometimes I’m staring at a tree or bird and have thought.

The following is one of the above.

There are two forms of religion:
1. Being Right and Securing power
2. Serving God and Reflecting him

This stands out to me because I’ve been wondering how people can share the same basic fundamental beliefs but hardly in any way share the same real faith. There are, I’ve noticed, a lot of Christians whose religion I don’t share. Only we affirm the same basic doctrine and we call ourselves Christians. But they’re almost entirely Christians for a different reason I am.

Certainly there’s a dynamic too. Not everyone is fully one or the other. But the extremes clash even worse than other religions clashing, because each claims orthodoxy and each asserts heresy to the other.

In James 1:27 we read “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

Which rings more of the second than the first. But I’m thinking that most of Christendom was the first and Evangelicalism itself (which I’m still determining if I’m part of anymore) is a mix of both, depending on the church, leader, or topic.

Jesus I think wants us all to be of the second. He wants our obedience, service, and reflection. The rest? That’s for us when it comes down to it. Even when we forcefully crush an opponent beneath the weight of perfectly chosen Scripture. It often has very little to do with God.

But it looks, sounds, feels like real Christian religion, doesn’t it? Only it tastes like dust and poisons growth, bringing only anger, division and separation.

The second form might seem more passive, be less exact, and be more fluid. But it brings people closer to God, revealing him to this world as he desires, not as we want him to be revealed.