From Knowledge to Wisdom

Guest interview with Frank Viola

This post is one of a series in a 'Blog Circuit' involving more than 50 other blogs (see the list below). These are my questions to Frank Viola about his book "From Eternity to Here: Rediscovering the Ageless Purpose of God" and Frank's personal answers.

Re Chapter 5 ekklesia the bride of Christ

AB: I appreciate the vivid parallels between Adam and Eve and Christ, and Christ and his bride and the vision of the beautiful, beloved Bride.

The church was born at the resurrection. the Bride of Christ existed as a spiritual body from that moment. We are part of her.

But how does this fit with the image of the Body of Christ with Him at the head? I try to live by this model in my relationships with fellow believers and in my understanding of how we are church together under the headship of Jesus.

I begin to feel schizophrenic if I also try to position myself as part of the already existing Bride of Christ who has a different relationship with Jesus than the Body of Christ.

So my question is, how do these two things hang together? If they were just metaphors, or models, that give us some insight on reality from a certain perspective, then it could work for me. But if we are saying these are two existing spiritual realities - the Body of Christ exists and we are part of him, and the Bride of Christ exists and we are part of her. Then I have quite some difficulty understanding where I am in the here and now and which way is up.

FV: I’m not sure it’s prudent for us to try to comprehend something as great as the ekklesia of God by the employment of the frontal lobe. Such spiritual realities refuse to fit neatly into Aristotelian categories. We know that the ekklesia is a multisplended organism, just as the Lord Himself is a multisplended Person. He is Lion and Lamb; King and Priest; God and Man; Alpha and Omega all at the same moment. He is a mystery and a paradox. In the same way, the church, which is His corporate expression, is His Body, His Bride, His House and His Family all at the same time. What the mind can’t bring us toward our spirits take hold of and soar beyond.

Celebrating Excellence in Blogging

Millennia Music & Media Systems have done a cool thing by assigning the Millennia Award for Excellence in PPM to the following blogs:

 

zoecarnate Sites Unseen
nextreformation Next Reformation
tallskinnykiwi TALLSKINNYKIWI .COM
jesuscreed Jesus Creed
lowercasepeople lowercase people
theooze The Ooze

I found the award statement by Millennia a wonderful reminder of why I started this blog:

"Blogging – Personal Participatory Media – is a growing bridge between local and global communities of faith – a gathering of Christ-followers interactively “working out their salvation” via organic cross- pollination born of commitment to God’s heart and kingdom. The Millennia Foundation views PPM as the “new printing press” – an intentional catalyst towards groundbreaking ecclesiastical consilience.

"The self-organizing nature of PPM is rendering historical sectarian boundaries blurry and indistinct – presenting an emerging global venue in which ideas and imagination, not structural or positional power, moderate dialogue. PPM encourages a new emancipation of knowledge, reawakening dreams buried in the slumber of institutional hierarchy and control. Wisdom (see Proverbs) is the new gatekeeper and community is reborn as a network of conversations.  

"Excellence in PPM invites passionate dialogue over points of faith while remaining charitable and beneficial to all participants. The Millennia Award is given to PPM communities which best reflect the centrality of Christ’s Jn17 prayer - seeking to bridge superficial cultural and religious divides; exploring commonality as much as difference; maintaining fresh, creative, missional formats accessible and relevant to a wide audience; remaining sensitive to our shared humanity and common need for grace as we learn and grow together."

I like the term "Personal Participatory Media", makes the whole subject sound really important, a serious scientific matter - much more serious than "blogging".

And I'm listed on zoecarnate under 'Relational "Home" Church Life' - does that mean this blog is just one click away from excellence?  ;-)

My Web 2.0 footprint

Been enlarging my Web 2.0 Footprint recently.

LibraryThing

I have started cataloging my books in LibraryThing. It is a really nice tool to use with lots of features. Of course it has aids to getting your book information entered, for example, for books currently on the market you can simply enter the ISBN and have the system fetch basic information and an image of the cover from your favourite amazon location. The really fun features are in the social area. You can immediately see who else has the same book. Or who else's catalogue contains a similar collection of books, or who else has done a book review. Or you can sign up to interest groups. And there is a messaging feature, so you can make contact with other subscribers. I did a search on a very obscure Christian novel and found one person had it in their catalogue. I was intrigued by her profile positioning herself as a member of the "Christian Left" (in the USA). So she kindly sent me a description of what that meant. Comforting to know that such brave, defiant people exist! On the right is a random selection from my catalogue. (Provided LibraryThing is not down. It does seem to be taken down quite frequently to deal with database issues.) You can see all the books I have entered so far here.

CoComment

CoComment has been working well for me. I find being able to retrieve comments I have made and track discussions is a great addition to the blogging experience (oops, there must be a better way of wording that thought!). And I have found that odd sorts of things can be added into my comments collection like the one book review I ever posted on amazon and my contribution to the "We The People" collection of photographs of Europe on nrc.nl. (You need to click through from the CoComment entry to the original article on its site to see the picture.) My recent comments as registered in CoComment can be seen in the right side bar and my whole collection here.

Furl

My bookmarks have been going into Furl, so a public view of them can be found here. Filtering by topic makes the list a bit more accessible.

Technorati

I finally seem to have got Technorati tags working. It needed a combination of TypePads new feature supporting Technorati tags on posts and some tuning of the parameters on my RSS feeds. I am not convinced that it is working fully consistently. This post will be a further test. I had hoped I would be able to go back and get my posting history into the long tail on Technorati, but that does not seem easy.

del.icio.us

So I think I will have to get my own stuff into the long tail by putting all my posts on del.icio.is. Which does seem a rather narcissistic process.

So what is this all this effort to achieve personal exposure? Well, having read or skimmed through "The Long Tail" (the book not the blog!) I am comfortable this is just a normal way to participate in the global community. So 'Hi - this is me, on the way. Greetings!'

Getting over Blogger's Block

I found myself saving a link to Sarah Hatter with the note to myself:

A blog to come back to - see also 'Things I am over'. When is there ever a time to go back to a blog you don't have time to read now? And you could be tempted to buy their book, "The Very Best Weblog Writing Ever" Vol 1, an anthology of blog writing. Which only goes to show that we will be reading books long after we are over blogging.

And I wont be intimidated. Despite the fact that I have been struggling with a couple of blog posts that are still in draft and refuse to slip into well formed posts and will never make it into "The Very Best ..." series. So this post is by way of encouragement to myself. Blogging is still possible.

Typepad and Technorati

Well, I just noticed that Typepad have announced the complete feature set enabling Technorati tagging. Up to now there have been bits and pieces and workarounds and I had a long sad diagnosis discussion with Typepad support.

So this is just a post to test that I can make the new features work. Then I want to see if I can get my existing posts into the long tail.

Bling for my Blog 2

Making minor adjustments to blog content and layout again. The recently added Opinmind widget has now been replaced in the left column by a link to IRREPRESSIBLE.INFO. This is an Amnesty International UK campaign against government repression of freedom of expression on the Internet.

Also signed the pledge which says:

I believe the Internet should be a force for political freedom, not repression. People have the right to seek and receive information and to express their peaceful beliefs online without fear or interference.

I call on governments to stop the unwarranted restriction of freedom of expression on the Internet – and on companies to stop helping them do it.

This will be used in support of the Amnesty position at a UN conference on the future of the Internet.

While following some links around this I cam across this account of the arrest of an innocent on the London tube by UK anti-terrorist police.

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Technorati tags irrepressible.info Amnesty International

Bling for my Blog

Recently added a couple of new features on this weblog.

Opinmind appears near the top of the left column. If I understood the FAQ, it is supposed to select opinions from all my posts. It must have some clever semantic analysis function to be able to distinguish an opinion from any other type of sentence. So far it has only shown a couple of sentences from my 7 May post. The Opinmind search function is intended to focus on opinions and tries to produce separate lists of positive and negative opinions about the search topic. But Englsh sentences can be formulated in so many convoluted ways that the Opinmind algorithms have some more learning to do before they get reliable results regularly.

The second new feature is coComment.

My Wordcloud

Well here's a snapshot of my wordcloud, no clever dynamic stuff, just a one-off generated by the people at SnapShirts

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Technorati tags wordcloud

Down a rabbit hole to ecclesiology

I really will have to break this addiction. But the Internet around One Year Bible Blog has been such fun, especially since we collected the list of OYBB Bloggers. I was just reading a piece on Laura's Writings about ECCLESIOLOGY AS MISSIOLOGY and the thought that "missiology precedes ecclesiology". Now, this terminology is not part of my daily vocalulary vocabulary, so I had to check "ecclesiology" on Wikipedia. Then I followed Laura's links and found a delightful piece from Australia about being and doing church. Luch, check this out re your 'haunting thought' on OYBB a few days ago:

I sometimes wonder if people in my own faith community are trusting more in me, our staff, and in our well run church than they are in the Lord Jesus.

So many wild ideas, and only one lifetime to appreciate them.

Aware that my poor wife does not understand why I am spending so much time on the computer these days the following paraphrase occurred to me:

"And God said it is not good for man to spend all day at his work on the computer and then again all evening on the computer in his attic. I will send him another gadget to take his attention." Oops 99:1

OK, that's it. Logging off for the evening NOW!

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Technorati tags one year bible ecclesiology

Blog Redesign Due

According to BBC News First impressions count for web. Internet users make up their mind about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye. This weblog is now about a year old. Overdue for a facelift!

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Technorati tags blog weblog blog design

Remembering Why Blogging

TallSkinnyKiwi with a challenging post on the Spirituality of Blogging has freshly inspired and reminded me why I set out on this blogging adventure. Thanks for all the links and see especially Sarah Hamilton's notes and the quote from Athanasius (4th century) on spiritual blogging.