MetaCatholic

While updating Wordpress, I’ve also added the Scripturizer plug in. I’ll be interested to see how well this works, so feedback is appreciated. It’s set to the NRSV.

I’m amazed and proud that the following search terms not only found this blog, but (as of today) turned up as “I’m feeling lucky searches in Google.

• 50% gray “soft light” hex code (Given the number of photo-editing sites out there I regard this as little short of amazing)
• droitwich floods (after six months, still hanging in there)

Nowhere near as impressive, but still pretty good going (or so Jim will think) I turn up on the first page of search results for “wickedpedia”. And I like it! Bizarre.

But let me not blow my own trumpet. Here are some of the odder search terms, and I have no idea how they ended up here.

• ginger hair humour (is this a Bird joke?)
• babylon solutions sex toys (right city, I suppose)
• how much tipping priest at christening? (That did amuse me)
• bishop nazi-rally (very rude about the Bishop of Rochester - Nazir-Ali)
• bastard tniv (how rude)
• bending art (no idea)
• how to have sex on a bike (painful)
• british logos (I’m sure he is!)

Jim has a characteristically diffident post on what he learned from Karl Barth.

It is the undeniable, irrefutable, unalterable, eternal truth that the Gospel is in and of itself thoroughly sufficient and that the Gospel + Anything = heresy.

Leaving aside the consummate irony of a disciple of Bultmann (perhaps the greatest 20th century example of adding to the gospel) saying this, I note that he then lists some examples of what he means by “anything”. I won’t disagree with his disapproval of “entertainment” masquerading as worship (though we might well differ about our definitions), but I will take issue with his listing “maximalism” and “emergent” among his “anything”.

In a curious way these condemnations go together. Bultmann’s despising of history which Jim echoes in his hatred of maximalism is no doubt tied to Jim’s rejection of any emergent attempt to engage the specific moment of history which is today’s culture.

However, the gospel does not exist in a vacuum, nor happen in the head. Jim forgets that for Barth in his proclaiming of the gospel, the Bible went in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Without history and culture there is no gospel, because there are no specific historic and contingent settings for it to be spoken to.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world — he’s going to have a church to do that.

(An irreverent thought that popped into my mind while reading today’s gospel!)