kent lee's blog & ramble

The term "evangelical" was popularized by Martin Luther ("evangelisch" in German), which meant a follower of the gospel. The term was originally a very good and useful term, as it referred to someone who believed in a religion based on faith and following the teachings of Christ, rather than man-made religious rules. It was meaningful enough but also broad enough to encompass a general theological orientation and religious lifestyle. It could include and accommodate somewhat different views or interpretations of Christian belief, including those who focused more on the grace, spirituality and lifestyle of Christ. As such, it was not the exclusive property of one religious group or theological orientation. The meaning has been generally positive in modern church history. However, in recent decades the term has been hijacked by fundamentalists who insist on a narrow interpretation of the term, insisting on a set of specific theological beliefs, while ignoring the C...

In John’s Gospel we have an emphasis on Jesus that is unique compared to the other gospels. John not only emphasizes his deity, but his mysteriousness. The reader is left with an impression of Jesus as a mystical teacher, in the sense that his words and actions are not only those of a profound religious teacher, but of one who is other-worldly. So often in this gospel we read of Jesus making statements that the crowds, the religious teachers, and even his own disciples sometimes could not fathom. For starters, there are the “I am” statements (e.g., I am the bread of life; I am the living water; I am the good shepherd; I am the way, the truth, and the life), which were clearly claims to divinity, for these statements in the Jewish context referred to God’s title “I am,” given when Moses inquired of his name at the burning bush. Jesus makes much use of mystical metaphors like these and others, like all the ‘day’ and ‘night’ references in this book, which portrays him as mystical or my...

John’s Gospel opens with a fascinating prose prologue in chapter 1 that essentially summarizes the themes of the entire book. It introduces Jesus in a manner that emphasizes his deity, then John the Baptist who prepared the way for Jesus’ ministry, and finally, the spiritual essence of Jesus’ public ministry and outreach, and his ultimate rejection. John begins with the language of creation, showing that Jesus was always with the Father, was involved in creation, and was thus eternal. John describes him as the Word ( logos in Greek), which conveys multiple meanings. For Jewish people, it meant the Scriptures, meaning that Jesus himself is the ultimate revelation of God to us, because he himself is God, more so that the written word of God (the Old Testament, at this time). It also reminds Jewish readers of how God spoke the world into existence in Genesis 1, as well as divine wisdom personified in the wisdom literature such as Proverbs (the personification of wisdom in Proverbs ...

Imagine that you are a Gentile, such as a Roman or Greek, and put yourself into a first-century pagan mindset. What would you think if you heard of a man who went around healing people? You would probably think that he was a god. What if you heard of a man driving out evil spirits and granting divine forgiveness of people’s sins? You would think he was some kind of god. If you heard of a man raising someone from the dead, you would surely think of him as a god. What if you heard of a man miraculously feeding a crowd, and controlling the weather by commanding a storm to stop? You would think he was a god. Now put that all together - one man doing all those things. He is not just a god -- not just a weather god, a nature deity, or a divine prophet. It soon becomes apparent that he is a divine being with power over all those things. He has power over nature, over matter, over health and disease, over life, over death. He is not just a god, but something more than that. By the time h...

What does it mean to you that Jesus was a man? We hear a lot about him being God (and later blog posts in this series will address that), but we don’t hear as much about his human side. Luke emphasizes this aspect of Jesus, and it’s important for understanding how we relate to him.     He grew up in the small farm village of Nazareth, which means that he lived doing hard work and manual labor for the first thirty years of his life before he became an itinerant rabbi (a travelling teacher and preacher). He may have been a carpenter, though that’s not clear. The word translated ‘carpenter’ in the original Greek New Testament (tektōn) could refer to a carpenter, builder, stonemason, craftsman, or other occupation. He nonetheless would have worked like others around him - not an easy life. And growing up in a farm village, he would have been acquainted with farm work, too. He was in a low socioeconomic class, like the majority of people in Palestine in his day, and would...

Imagine living as a Jewish person in the province of Judea around the time of Jesus. Not only do you live under Roman oppression and taxation, but the Romans have carved out the province from the rest of Palestine so that it has few economic centers or resources, making the area fairly poor. On top of that, the corrupt provincial governor “King” Herod (and sons) has also oppressed the land as a cruel dictator, and has imposed his own additional taxes to support his life of luxury and his grand building projects. While the Romans venerated their Emperor Augustus as a god-like hero, empire-builder, and peace-maker, the Jewish people would view him less favorably. Luke 2 sets up an implicit contrast between Augustus, in all his power to make life difficult (say, with an inconvenient census), and the Son of God, who is born to a peasant woman and lives among the common people. Furthermore, his birth is announced to shepherds, who were one of the lowest social classes in that time. This ...

Particularly in Luke, we see a Jesus born and raised in the backwaters of insignificant Jewish towns - born in Bethlehem, and growing up in the small farm village of Nazareth. You would think that if God mainly cared for or wanted to influence the powerful and mighty of the world, then Jesus should have been born in Rome, or Athens, or Alexandria, or at least Jerusalem. Instead he is born to a peasant girl named Mary in the middle of nowhere, at a time when the province of Judea suffered under poverty and oppression. Incredibly, her peasant son changed the world. But he never did it by allying himself with the rich and powerful or even seeking them out in order to implement his program. Usually if you want to start an influential movement, even as a grassroots movement, you would still recruit some wealthy donors and celebrities or leaders to promote your movement. Jesus did it totally opposite. He did not even focus on winning over the religious establishment; in fact, he often chall...

Who is Jesus to you? Reflect on that for a minute. Your mind will probably first turn to some standard explanations that you learned in church. But do you really understand what that means very deeply? Is it an understanding that really challenges your spiritual life? Jesus was a very complex character. He is a complex person, and far more complex as God and man in one. We can better know and appreciate him when we pull away from the two-dimensional Sunday school representations of Jesus, and see him as a real person who lived and acted in history with other people. And as a person he is more fascinating and mysterious because this man is also a member of the divine Trinity who walked among us. These concepts have real implications for how we live. This blog is the first in a series that will look at some insights from different parts of the New Testament, by touching on different perspectives of Jesus, especially viewed within the bigger context. The New Testament writers show u...

Warum läßt Gott es zu? Warum erfahren wir Leiden, and warum so viel Unrecht und Leiden in dieser Welt? Das können wir wirklich nicht wissen oder beantworten. Keine Religion, keine Theologie, keine Apologetik, keine philosophische Theorie oder Rahmen ergibt irgendwelche Antwort, die wirklich geht. Keine wirklich passt. Also ich versuche hier nicht, diese Problematik eigentlich zu addressieren. Ich kann nur ein paar kleine Gedanken dazu geben.  Imago Dei Wir sind nach dem Gottesbild erschaffen, im ,,imago Dei" gemacht. Wir denken oft daran, daß das heißt, wir haben Seelen, Bewustsein, moralischen Sinn, eine Fähigkeit für ein Verhältnis mit Gott, und so weiter, und das stimmt natürlich. Aber es gibt noch mehr im uralten Sinne, d.h., in der uralten nahosten Kultur, worin die Erschöpfungsgeschichte in 1. Mose zusammengesetzt wurde. Es heißr auch, daß wir als Vertreter Gottes hier gestellt sind. Als vetreter und Angehöriger Gottes, sollen wir seine Erschöpfung ...

Why was the OT book of Jonah written, and how is it to be understood? An honest reading of the book screams 'hyperbole', as there were so many obviously hyperbolic and metaphorical elements. If we take the Bible seriously, we should respect the genre and intention of the various sections of the OT in their cultural context. The book was clearly never intended as historical, and one need only look to a few good scholarly Jewish references on the book if the literary nature of the book is not apparent. In fact, understanding it as a sort of parable or such makes for a more theologically profound and more powerful interpretation than a simplistic, Sunday-schoolish literal interpretation. Apologetic attempts to defend its "historicity" lead to rather awkward explanations, as well as reliance on an account of a 19th century British sailor who was supposedly swallowed by a whale and lived - which turns out to be a made-up story and an urban legend in evangelical circles. I...

So fühle ich mich heutzutage im Bezug auf meiner Theologie. In Bezug auf meinem vorherigen Blog-Stück, muss ich sagen, es ist schwer, diese abgespaltenen Richtungen zusammen zu bringen. Ich finde, in diesem Tiel meiner Glaubensreise, dass ich ganz underschiedliche Richtungen abstimmen muss: meine neue Emerging-Theologie-Richtung und/oder moderne evangelische Richtung, meinen aalten evangelikalen Glauben, und die charismatische Richtung meines Glaubens. Im Moment scheint es, wie Öl und Wasser zu mischen. Ich schreibe heute über einen gewissen Schwerpunkt: die Theologie des Todes und der Hölle.   Universalismus kann ich nicht akzeptieren - nicht ganz. Aber die Theologie der exklusiven Errettung von Menschen finde ich problematisch - wo die Mehrheit der Mesnchen zur Hölle gehen müssen. Hier in Kürze hat es mit dem Charakter Gottes zu tun, zum Beispiel, wie könnte er Seelen ewiglich und endlos bestrafen für einen beschränken Satz von Sünden? Wie ist das kon...

In the 11th century, organized Christianity split into East and West, mostly for political and cultural reasons that were a bit silly. In the 16th century, Protestantism split off, though Luther's intention was not to split organizationally from the Catholic Church - merely to reform it from within. Since then Protetestantism has split into countless denominations. Two big splits followed by many smaller fractures. From the latter 1800s to the 1920s another major split took place over time, mostly within Protestantism, across various denominations: the liberal / conservative split. One one side, the liberals or modernists, and on the other side, evangelicals and fundamentalists. I question whether this kind of split was wise or was totally necessary, and I think both sides were to blame. To some degree this was in response to modern science - geology in the 1820s showing us that the earth was very old, and later evolutionary biology, showing us that species arose from simpler ...

Rene Descartes proclaimed "cogito ergo sum" - meaning that in his epistemology, the starting point - to validating truth, the existence of the self, and the existence of the external world and external truth - is oneself, one's own thoughts. One's self-awareness serves as the basis for deducing other truths, and in his philosophy, even for deducing the existence of God. A few problems quickly become apparent to the modern social scientist here. First, his method of deducing God's existence is forced and unnatural; it is probably not the path than anyone else would naturally and intuitively take to apprehending the existence of God. Second, his subjective approach, starting with one's own thoughts as a foundation for other truths, is tenuous, given what we know in modern psychology about cognitive biases, false intuitions, and decision making that is subject to all kinds of subconscious influences. So do we reactively take a totally opposite approach, as an em...

If you said the word 'multiverse' 10 years ago, people would think you're talking about a new form of poetry. Now it's part of our vocabulary, thanks to string theory. Unless something new happens in string theory, apparently the number of theoretically possible universes that might come into existence is huge. I don't know if most of them would last very long - I'll leave that question to the physicists, as I'm no physicist, just a language educator and linguist and lay theologian. So according to the theory, the number of possible universes would be 10 500 (10^500, if the superscripts don't display properly). The name of that number would be 100 quinquasexagintacentillion (ten to the 165th power, times 100) (or 100 tresoctogintillion in the traditional European system). Unless new discoveries or adjustments are made to the theory, then the theory, according to physicists, may imply an eternal inflation. Universes keep popping in and out of existe...

I recently upgraded my Linux to Ubuntu 12, and I had major difficulties installing the IBM Lotus Symphony. It would not install, complaining about dependencies involving some libnotify program. I found and installed libnotify, but then Lotus would not start up. I found that there's a problem with the currently available Debian installer / program for Lotus, and following some advice I found from my Google search, I tried a previous version of the Lotus installer, and everything seems to work fine. I'm making the installer available here for people who need it, since I can't seem to find it on the IBM website.  Details: The current installer is designated for the Lucid version of Ubuntu - symphony_3.0.1-1lucid1_i386.deb - for Ubuntu / Debian versions since March 2010. Installing this in the most recent versions of Ubuntu / Mint Linux (versions 12-14) doesn't work for some people, leading to the following error message - or the program simply won't start up.  ..... ...

Job is one of my favorite Old Testament books because of how it addresses deep life issues. It addresses why we as Christians face trauma, suffering, injustice, and evil in this world -- why God allows to happen to us, or allows others to face severe persecution for their faith. Yet it is paradoxical in how it addresses these issues, seemingly without providing us a direct answer that we would expect to the question of why. Yet simple answers to such questions are not to be found in scripture. We read of Job struggling deeply with spiritual despair and loneliness in the face of suffering, plus criticism from his dubious friends. He never learned the why's of his particular circumstances from God, nor apparently of the spiritual warfare in which he was enmeshed between Satan and God. The book provides no straight, simple answers to these questions. The answer that comes from God seems in fact strange. Essentially, God speaks and reminds Job and his false friends of who he is, as a...

“Immanuel” - “God with us” announced the angels two millenia ago. And thus, a great cosmic mystery unfolded in human history. The most holy and omnipotent God, whose nature and existence we cannot comprehend with our finite minds, who exists beyond the universe that he made, broke directly into human history to reach out to us. The eternal Christ emptied himself of his divine powers and prerogatives, took on human form, to show us the way to salvation. And not just to show us the way, but so that he himself would become the way, as he humbled himself to death on a cross for us. This month, as we reflect on the Christmas gift of the Son to us, let us remember it not just as a story of long ago, but let us also remember his profound love. Let us open ourselves to experiencing it more each day. Jesus, our Immanuel, came to be with us, and is always with us and in us. This is amazing for so many reasons, first of all, because God himself is infinitely ...

People in relationships often ask themselves, at some level of consciousness or another, how they feel the relationship is going. Particularly they ask themselves, “how am I benefiting from the relationship” or “what am I getting out of the relationship?” And in a healthy romantic relationship, a person would ask him/herself, “I wonder if s/he is benefiting from or enjoying the relationship, and me?” These are the kinds of questions that healthy people would ask themselves in healthy relationships, as long as their expectations aren’t unreasonable or overly selfish. We also have to evaluate our relationship with God, but we can’t evaluate this relationship in quite the same way. To simply ask, “how am I benefiting from this relationship with God” in the same way would be egocentric. A better way to approach this question would be to ask yourself, “for what specific things am I thankful to God?” and to reflect on all his mercies, grace, and blessings to you – ma...

In Jesus’ day, a disciple was a follower, a student and an apprentice of a rabbi (a spiritual teacher). If one wanted to become a rabbi, one trained as a disciple-apprentice to a rabbi, learned from him, followed him, and then started to do as the rabbi did. Jesus, by the way, was a self-taught rabbi; as God’s son he did not need to learn from a human rabbi. Jesus commands us to be his disciples. We follow him, we learn how to live the spiritual life that he wants for us, we learn his teaching, and we spread his teaching to others and encourage them to become disciples of our Lord. Being a disciple, then, entails a cost, because we must give up everything to become his disciples [Luke 14.33]. There’s no room for the sort of easy-believism that has become popular today. One could be a faithful disciple, or a disciple who is ineffective or inactive (just as one could be a good or bad student, but a student nonetheless; in fact, ‘disciple’ and ‘discipline’ come from the Latin word f...

Here's the transcript of my talk at the 세바시 on Freedom from English. This is an approximate transcript that I prepared for my talk, so that they could provide Korean subtitles for listeners. My delivery was kind of unnatural and sometimes not so fluid, because I had to give my speech from a memorized script. Freedom from English I remember several years ago, I was at a bus stop near 왕십리 [Wangshimni], when some high school boys came up to me, wanting to practice English. But as they opened their mouths, all they could say was, “Hi... I like kimchi... I love you” - and then walked away quickly, giggling, and embarrassed. Sadly, they studied English in school for many years, yet they could not say anything meaningful – just a few simple, awkward phrases, not knowing that it is not appropriate to say “I love you” to stranger. I often hear of how Koreans spend so much time, so much effort and so much money on studying English, but with such poor results. In fact, English has beco...