Last week, I wrote about the controversy surrounding Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins. In contrast to many evangelical leaders, Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Seminary, defended Bell in USA Today. He then defended himself in a blogpost, “The Orthodoxy of Rob Bell.” I appreciate his desire for “generous orthodoxy” and “salvific generosity.” In other words, if Christians don’t hope that lots of people–even those outside the traditional fold–are in heaven (and if Christians don’t remember Jesus’ words that we’re going to be surprised by who is in the kingdom), then what is our understanding of God’s grace and love all about?
I read a fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine, “Secrets of a Mind-Gamer” by Jonathan Foer. He describes the human ability to memorize huge amounts of data, even though we don’t need to use our memories this way anymore: “Today we have books, photographs, computers and an entire superstructure of external devices to help us store our memories outside our brains, but it wasn’t so long ago that culture depended on individual memories. A trained memory was not just a handy tool but also a fundamental facet of any worldly mind.” Scholars in the ancient world, for instance, might only see a book once and therefore they would commit as much as possible to memory. Reading this piece made me think of Richard Bauckham’s book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, a critically-acclaimed argument that the Gospels were indeed eyewitness reports of Jesus’ life. We might not be able to remember the sermon we heard on Sunday, but people in the ancient world were trained to remember what they heard for decades to come. All the more reason to trust the Gospels.
Finally, Peter and I watched Waiting for Superman a few nights ago. Although I thought the storytelling could have been stronger, it nonetheless presented a compelling portrait of the plight of America’s public schools. I was struck by the injustice of kids and parents who long to be in a good school and yet are forced into failing schools instead. If only there were an easy solution.
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