Awaiting...

Hey Neal,

hope you and your loved ones had a great Easter and are doing well.

Hoping to kick things back up again.

Your brother from another mother, Chris ;-)

Hey Chris,

I haven't abandoned you! We just put our house on the market last week, and it sold in two days, so we've been looking at apartments like crazy (we close on May 8, which gives us less than a month to move).

To add to the chaos, my wife gave me some good news of her own in the "niño" department... ;-)  Our living space is shrinking and our family size is growing.  What a week!

I still haven't listened to the MP3 you sent, but am planning to shortly.

Hang in there with me, I promise things will settle down,

Neal

No problema,

Go take care o' business. I'll be here. Congrats on hittin' a home run. I loved when my guys were little little crumb crunchers. I still luv'em, but there's something truly special about that time when you can actually hold'em and carry'em around.

Chris ;-)

Hey Chris,

I'm still in Dallas trying to make it out the door to Austin. Somehow, I wiped out all of the emails in my inbox--including your last one with the mp3. Can you resend it? I was looking forward to listening to it on my drive...

Neal

Hey Chris,

Things have calmed down a little bit, so I'm looking forward to resuming the discussion. Where did we leave off? I no longer have the email with the mp3 you sent awhile back, so if you have the chance to send it again, I promise I'll listen to it this time.

Last Saturday night Jimmy Buffet was in concert here in Frisco, and my pastor and his wife went -- so guess who got to preach this Sunday? Yep. Me, the backup guy.

It was a lot about "truth" -- the Hebrew concept of truth vs. the Greek concept of truth. Greek = truth as factual knowledge / Hebrew = truth as wisdom & understanding of human nature. Example: Greek philosopher might say, "The sun rises every day in the East.  This is the truth." A Hebrew philosopher would be more likely to say, "An obedient child will live a long life. This is the truth."

We are very Greek in our outlook these days, so the passages written in that language and especially to that audience resonate with us and make sense, but passages with the word "truth" that come more from the Hebrew understanding are harder for us to swallow (like Jesus' "I am the way, the truth, and the life). However...I think there may be a resurgence of the Hebrew concept of truth in the EC community, or at least a renewed receptivity to it.

And they say that emergent, post-modern types are "against truth"...

Maybe we're just against being Greek. ;-)

Anyhow, thought you might have enjoyed it. Hope your sermon & worship experience this past Sunday was stimulating,

Neal

Hey Neal,

Good to hear you're back in the saddle.

Things have calmed down a little bit, so I'm looking forward to resuming the discussion. Where did we leave off? I no longer have the email with the mp3 you sent awhile back, so if you have the chance to send it again, I promise I'll listen to it this time.

No problem. I'm attaching it again. Like I mentioned before, this is from a sermon given entitled "Evangleism in a post-modern world." I was originally going to send the 3rd part, but I guess it makes more sense to send the 1st part first, right? That way if you're at all interested I can send you the rest of it, or direct you to where you can get it online. Although you're so up on all things EC I imagine there's not much new that I could point you to. Just a little background on the speaker, His name is Stuart McAllister and he is part of Ravi Zacharias' UK team. I'm sure you know about Ravi. You, having more of a post-modern mindset, Ravi may not be your cup o' tea. But I think he's awesome. I don't think McAllister's representations of the post-modern condition are as nuanced as yours, but I do think he brings up some important things. In one of the later segments, he makes a comment very similar to yours about how as soon as we use the word "truth", it immediately sits within a particular worldview. It was a lot about "truth" -- the Hebrew concept of truth vs. the Greek concept of truth.

Is one understanding of truth superior to the other? Does it have to be an either or? These are my questions for the EC. I think a combination of the two can be very powerful. Going back to a previous email, if the EC is gravitating to the Hebrew notion to the exclusion of the Greek, then we may have an overreaction. It seems as if in any conversation, you're talking Greek "truth", and I'm speaking Hebrew "truth" then understanding is lost. We're just talking past each other. We may as well be speaking Greek and Hebrew. This is truth, No, this is truth. Yakitty-yak. I think we need to be clear and hopefully sensitive when reaching out to the culture at large. Does what we are saying resonate at all within this persons experience. I do agree that, at times some Christians view Evangelism as a kind of "job" and almost forsake the relationship in the process. People pick up on that real quick. They know when they are being "sold" and when someone really cares for them. I think a big strength of the EC as you've described it to me is having a person see, by extension, what Christ means to you. It can go a lot further than words can. But I think there are still a great many people who genuinely seek answers of "true" truth. Greek truth if you will. If you're not familiar with Ravi, he's one of the few evangelists who is invited to speak at major universities like Harvard or Ohio State, on the subject of God and Christ and how they are still relevant in todays culture. He packs 'em in like a rock star. Who goes? Some who are already believers, but most come earnestly seeking answers to the difficult questions of life. Questions no one else wants to touch or just dance around. They just want to engage with someone, anyone who will tell them the "truth." I see and sense the eternal truths of the Hebrew mindset, but my little peabrain always feels a constant tug to go back to "true" truth as it seems to me to be what best corresponds to reality.

Anyhow, thought you might have enjoyed it. Hope your sermon & worship experience this past Sunday was stimulating,

I'm sure I would have loved it. This past Sunday our Pastor used those dreaded words, "post-modern" again. I had one guy pull me aside and ask me if I was behind all this "post-modern" stuff :-) I think he thought that because I led an adult sunday school series of discussions on "5 PM questions about the bible" (maybe you've heard it) and he was there but seemed a bit nervous about the whole thing. I thought it strange because I was actually arguing for "true" truth, but somehow he didn't get it. :-) Actually most of the people in the class were not on board with the "true" truth concept so it was a lively exchange, which are the kind I like best.

Neal, I'm going to share a little theory I have ( I have a lot of theories ;-). As you know there are people in the world that operate primarily with the left side of the brain and people who operate mainly on the right side. The left being analytical, mathematical, linear logic, etc. The right being artistic, creative, abstract thinking, musical, etc. Both my wife and I are artists so we are mostly on the right. We have one son who is very left and another who is very right (go figure). The one who is very right brained has been the most difficult child to raise of the two. He has Attention Deficit and if you know anything about ADD or ADHD you know that these people tend to be very creative. My wife and I often say: we should all live in Ian's world." Anyway, I believe that people who use predominantly either the right or left side of their brain, literally see the world in a different way than their counterparts. This would account for the EC's inclination towards the Hebrew notion of truth, which is somewhat more abstract. It would also account for the preponderance of creative people and artist types within it, as well as being a big part of many of the services. These very creative people are literally seeing the world differently than their counterparts and are having trouble getting into the skin of the other side and vice versa. There's a funny thing tho' about the left brain, right brain continuum. If you think of the continuum as a straight line with people falling on it to varying degrees something interesting happens on either end. For example, if one goes to the extreme left side, the mathematical side, the line starts to curve up and around back to the right side because people who think at the very highest levels of math, now leave the realm of linear/logical and begin to think of physics, quantum mechanics, etc. in the abstract, sort of completing a circle with the creative ones. Anyway, my half-baked notion tells me that we have to try to understand one another. More than that, we need each other to reel back in the ones that go too far off on their own. I guess maybe I hope that the people in the EC will somehow sense this and come back and work with us poor Greeks (or should I say "geeks?").

Awaiting your response. Peace and God bless, Chris ;-)