Hearing God's Voice

It has been difficult to blog lately with running back and forth to Memphis. I'm reading Hearing God's Voice by Thomas Olbricht. Tom is my dad's age, born a few days after the 1929 stock market crash. He grew up just a little northwest of me, across the AR/MO state line in the vicinity of Thayer, MO. It is a fascinating story of growing up in small country churches and attending Harding and being a student preacher and working summers up north and finding a girl up there and marrying her (this far just like my Dad) and staying up north (Dad goes back South) and attending other schools and continuing to teach and preach. He gets a PhD from Dubuque and a BD from Harvard. Teaches at Penn State. I am up to the late sixties when he moves to Abilene. A theme in the book is hermeneutics.

I knew his brother Owen.

Tom was one of the people originally involved with Mission magazine, a Church of Christ publication that was an important influence on me. More on this later.

In Memory of Ada Eddins 1915-2008

Thank you for coming to help us celebrate the life of Ada Winters Eddins. Who was Ada and what was she like? She started life as part of a large family, the middle child of 11 surviving children. They lived on a large farm in Arkansas and they had to be self-sufficient. This was especially the case since they lost their mother when Ada was only 11 years old. The children divided the chores. Ada rose early every morning to milk the cows and operate the milk processing machinery. She later left home to attend the University of Arkansas for almost 2 years. It was not as common for women in those days as now. Mother lived in the 4-H club facility and paid for her fees by providing canned goods that she prepared herself. Her pictures as a young woman show an endearing vulnerability and humility. Her virtues attracted Tilman Eddins and they were married in 1942. They shared their early years in different locations in the states as he was in the armed forces. The war ended and following his honorable discharge they made Memphis their home some time in 1946.

It was in Memphis that they remained and where they raised their 3 children. Throughout those 62 years, she faithfully served and ministered at the Berclair Church of Christ. Mother was unpretentious, always upbeat, a positive example to all. Mother may have lived in the mid-South’s largest city for all that time but her farm-girl connection to the earth never ceased. She was a lifelong gardener. Mother loved working out of doors with flowers and vegetables. Mother had a specific genius for certain domestic things. For example, her green beans are unmatched by any one anywhere.

She was always there for her family. Mother lived for loving her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren and helped as long as she was able. Only a few weeks ago she rocked her youngest great-grandchild to sleep. And recently, during her last hospital stay, upon hearing that one of her adult grandchildren was under the weather and a little bit sick, she said “He should come over to my house and I’ll take care of him.” That was so typical and characteristic of her. Mother was always taking care of us and providing support and stability. And she will continue to do so as she lives in our hearts and memories.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I read the above at my mother-in-law's funeral on Saturday.

For Evolution Day

Check out the whole post from the Christian Century from which this is drawn.


...John Haught, Catholic theologian and professor of theology at Georgetown University, suggests that we think in terms of a God who offers "a wide range of possibilities that the world can realize, a universe of innumerable possibilities." Realization of any one possibility happens amid the play between God and creatures.

While in some ways this is a new and unfamiliar way of thinking about God, it is consistent with one key part of the scriptural tradition: in the Bible, God is the one who makes things new. God is the source of novelty. Evolutionary science, according to Haught's way of thinking, shows us the dance between order and randomness by which novelty is produced.

Humans have their own special part in the creation of novelty, for we are a conscious part of the dance of order and randomness. Philip Clayton, a theologian at Claremont School of Theology, picks up on this dimension of evolutionary process and likens creaturely life to the unfolding of a jazz composition: God provides the motifs, but creatures (of various kinds, from the smallest to the largest) provide the original riffs.

Galileo Takes Away Peoples' Reasons for Living

The most poignant and meaningful part of the play, for me, was the beginning of the Scene 8 (after our intermission) where Little Monk conveys his feelings and how he is torn between the two views of reality, the more traditional and the new. I'm quoting from this site:

What would my people say if I told them that they happen to be on a small knob of stone twisting endlessly through the void round a second-rate star, just one among myriads?

What would be the value or necessity then of so much patience, such understanding of their own poverty ?

What would be the use of Holy Scripture, which has explained and justified it all - the sweat, the patience, the hunger, the submissiveness - and now turns out to be full of errors?

No: I can see their eyes wavering, I can see them letting their spoons drop, I can see how betrayed and deceived they will feel.

So nobody's eye is on us, they'll say. Have we got to look after ourselves, old, uneducated and worn-out as we are ?

The only part anybody has devised for us is this wretched, earthly one, to be played out on a tiny star wholly dependent on others, with nothing revolving round it.

Our poverty has no meaning: hunger is no trial of strength, it's merely not having eaten: effort is no virtue, it's just toil.

So given this, it is understandable the resistance that many would feel towards the new view that the earth is not the center of the universe. Yes, Martin Luther, living decades earlier was skeptical of the Copernican view. And in his defense, much of the relevant data was not yet available. And to a lessor extent that was still true in Galileo's time as well. In defense of his critics, some of his reasoning was wrong, according to this at the Evangelical Outpost blog and its references.

But my point is that new ways of thinking, new scientific views, often are perceived as being inimical to religious belief. In our time evolution, in my opinion is a prime example of the same. Perhaps some are skeptical of other doctrines for similar reasons. If this evolution is true or if inerrancy is not true, then life does not make sense, they think. But consider, the Copernican view was eventually accepted by all and is no longer seen as harmful to Christianity. Perhaps, eventually the same will be true for some of these other things as well.

Brecht Play - The Life of Galileo

Had free tickets last night to see a play at the U. of Tennessee' Clarence Brown Theater and we saw Berthold Brecht's The Life of Galileo. First play I've seen in many years. Quite enjoyable. Of course we get the cartoon version of the science and the events surrounding G's house arrest, due to the limitations imposed by time, venue and audience. They call G a physicist in the play but I was thinking the term wasn't applied quite that early. Will have to check on it. I play a physicist in real life. Now off to work to horse around with some optical fiber. Wonder what he would have thought about that?

New Tag Meme about the closest Book

I was tagged by Matt in the comment to the previous post. Here's what to do:

--Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
--Find Page 123.
--Find the first 5 sentences.
--Post the next 3 sentences.
--Tag 5 people.

Well, I had to get the tape measure out. There is a lamp stand behind me to my left and five feet back and Emerson: The Mind on Fire is laying there. But, there are several books on the coffee table behind me and to the right. Three books flanked by bookends set on top of 5 books stacked laying down. I'll take the bottom one and the first in the series as the closest. At 86 inches it is slightly closer than the Emerson book.

"We cannot, therefore, assume (as did Radcliffe-Brown) that these Andamanese stories of the pig hunt and of pigs are truly native to the islanders and as primitive as their culture. They are the fragments, rather, of a mainland mythology which has regressed - that is, run wild like the pigs themselves, and, like the associated pottery, has deteriorated, breaking up, as it were, into shards. But there is a creative work here evident, also, in that the imported material has been imaginatively adapted to the life and features of the islands."

An amazingly coherent, self-contained thought from Joseph Campbell's The Way of the Animal Powers Vol 1 Part 1: Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers

Ok, it is now time to tag Jason, Matthew, Mark, Scott, and James.