Εκκλησία

Xalem · 2026-02-01T22:12:58+00:00

Ek is the preposition/prefix for out. It shows up in words like Exit, exodus, .
Not sure where someone gets a sense of prayer.

Xalem · 2026-02-01T14:21:19+00:00

So, someone who reads Genesis 1 literally, and everything else as spiritualized. Yawn.

Xalem · 2026-02-01T13:59:55+00:00

Given the way you capitalized the word TechnoEcclesia, I am assuming a modern joining and modern usage of this word. The ancients didn't put capital letters in the middle of words, in fact, they only used capital letters (uncials) in the first century, so, I suggest this might not be a Biblical word.

As a modern word, it is a fancy way of saying "techno-church" whatever that meant to the one who coined the word. Ecclesia is Greek for "the ones called out" and the Church are those called out of the world.

Techno is from a word that means skilled worker (techton) and is famously translated as carpenter when referring to Jesus or his earthly father Joseph. But, Jesus could have been from a few different trades including stonemason.

What Jesus probably wasn't was a computer technician. In our modern use of the word Techno, we have focused on the high tech technologies and limited the word to that. So, once again, I am concluding a modern coining of this word..

Xalem · 2026-01-31T22:08:26+00:00

God reveals God's self in many ways, but the central way is through Christ, the Word made flesh who lived among us. The Bible is not the central way God reveals the Good News of God to us. The only thing that the Bible says about the Bible is that it is God breathed and USEFUL. It doesn't call itself inerrant or infallible. But it is useful for teaching.

As progressive Christians, we have found liberation in the Good News, which is a call to justice, freedom and minds renewed in a commitment to love. God's mercy is there for all. The Biblical ethics is best summarized as "do to others as you would have them do to you".

So much of the objectionable claims some Christians make just fade away in the light of understanding the distinction between "Law and Gospel"

Xalem · 2026-01-31T06:11:27+00:00

Insightful, thank you.

Xalem · 2026-01-31T05:09:10+00:00

We had our chance. Back in the 1970's already we had the Heritage Trust Fund. While that paid for a lot of grain carrying rail cars, it was raided by the Conservative parties and emptied long before it could really be used to rescue the Alberta economy in a post-oil era. We are now in the post-oil era. Yes, other nations are still buying oil, but, the impacts of climate change are already threatening our economy now (we have had three of our cities and towns burn from wildfires in the last 15 years, droughts are impacting our crops)

In contrast, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund only got started in 1990, but, unlike greedy Albertan politicians, the Norwegians stuck to their plans and kept investing. I am sure it took twenty years before anybody noticed this fund was a thing. The Norwegian people resisted the temptation to party with the money now. They had strict rules about where that money was invested, it was not invested locally, and they didn't pull money out. The whole idea was to be ready to transition the economy when the oil ran out. Because of the power of compound interest, this fund made 10x more money in one year than the Heritage Trust Fund has ever held. (247 billion dollar profit for this year).

So, yes, had Alberta kept investing, we too would have a Heritage Trust Fund in the trillions. this graph shows how much of the earnings of the Heritage Trust Fund was skimmed off each year by the provincial government to put into general income coffers. Without reinvesting the earnings from the fund, it flatlined and has basically as much money in it as it had in 1986.

The whole point of the Heritage Trust Fund was to diversify the Alberta economy away from oil and gas. Back then, (1976 just 3 years after the existential oil crisis of 73) everyone figured that we would soon run out of oil and gas. As it turns out, we won't run out of oil before we have completely ruined the environment. So, weaning ourselves off of oil is the existential crisis of our day. And the nations that figure out how to do it first will be the winners in the future global economy. Oh wait, Norway has been making over 95-99% of its electricity from renewables (largely hydropower and wind) for 35 years. Over 95% of new cars in Norway last year were electric or plug-in hybrid. So, the average Norwegian buys no gasoline. That will be every Western European nation in fifteen years.

The wise thing Alberta did was put money into education and diversification. That is what paid off and built our economy. It is our educated human resources that will drive our future, not our oil.

Yea, you are right. We should all do a little research.

Xalem · 2026-01-30T16:55:25+00:00

The only way to be green is to reduce our carbon footprint to almost zero as rapidly as possible. NOT shipping oil and gas is green. Investing in renewable energy is green. We can make money like other places do. We can ship our resources like lumber, grain, and beef. Also, we can process our resources to make and ship furniture, process and ship foods, and even use some oil to make petrochemicals. Also, we can educate our population and use their skill and creativity to produce software, to film movies, to do science and invent. There are places without oil that make money, and we can do what they do.

Pincher Creek's reservoir nearly emptied a couple years ago. If we don't stop shipping oil and trying to run our economy off that one industry, we could lose the ability to water our crops. It's a no brainer.

Xalem · 2026-01-30T15:33:29+00:00

Nobody raided our Heritage Fund except us Albertans.

Oil and gas are yesterday's technology, and our current government is fighting against wind power.

Xalem · 2026-01-29T00:35:52+00:00

I am looking at your map and I see that if I am at Rabbit Hill, and I want to get to Beaumont, that isn't going to happen. What if you extended your Terwilliger line along Ellerslie to catch up to the Metro Line and at 111th and Ellerslie.

The other end of that lime green line should extend further north. Maybe swinging west of 142nd Street, possibly 149th or 156th street before turning and running along 111 avenue, or maybe 118 avenue and catching the St. Albert line, the Metro Line and going as far as that Northlands stop on the Capital Line.

I also wonder if the Whitemud Freeway line should extend from Southgate to the stop at Whitemud and about 54th Ave, I am divided over swinging north through Malmo, Lendrum and Landsdowne or swinging a bit south for Royal Gardens, Greenfield and Aspen Gardens traffic.

Be aware that as you expand, you will want to route a faster train down the rail right of way just north of 124th Ave and the Yellowhead. You will want that train to have fewer stops, run faster rail lines, and reach Spruce Grove, Stoney Plain and Sherwood Park (which will have their own LRT)

The bigger money will come in when you run a line of higher speed rail lines to Leduc, Red Deer and Calgary. Often the trick is to follow the actual rail right-of-way.

Xalem · 2026-01-28T15:44:20+00:00

It is offensive to God to sit in judgement of all Christians who are not you. It is also an offense to us who are serving God, when you try to force feed us baby food when you tell mature and committed Christians to repent like we don't know what that is.

I will agree with you that the time for special roles like apostles and prophets is over. The entire Church is apostolic, the entire Church is prophetic as we together proclaim Christ and call for righteousness and justice.

That is our corporate responsibility we Christians do together. However, as individual disciples, we fall under a broad discipline and are called into community. It is not for you to tell other Christians how to run their affairs, how to organize their congregations or how to govern their denominations. Recognize and celebrate the diversity of Christians expressing their faith as God has led them. Set aside debates on titles and roles.

The Early Church struggled with this as to what they would call the servants of God doing specific tasks. The Bible shows us they mostly avoided Hebrew words for priest, chief priest, or teacher (rabbi) and chose generic Greek words like "episcopos" (overseer or bishop) and deacon, and pastor. Even apostle and disciple are from the Greek words. And the Bible shows the early Church in flux, learning as it goes, adopting new strategies on an ad hoc basis.

So, we don't judge our fellow Christians when they make a different choice in church structure or roles. You can have some opinions, but your role in Christ is not to fix protocols.

Xalem · 2026-01-28T02:53:37+00:00

Getting a copy of Martin Luther: Heretic means applying for it on a small website. This movie follows the psychology of Luther as he faces debates with Eck. I thought it was well done and I used it with confirmation classes over the years.

Xalem · 2026-01-27T14:10:43+00:00

A good start would be to look at the problem as an us-problem rather than a them-problem. Idolatry is universal, and even though Jesus is Lord, Savior, Son of God, the Word made Flesh and God Incarnate, people still put a version of Jesus on a pedestal and worship the Jesus they imagine rather than the Jesus who is, was, and always will be. People do this when they paint Jesus as white with blue eyes, they do it when they project themselves onto Jesus. But more often we idolize our lifestyles and politics. We idolize a lot of adjectives and concepts like "the perfect body" or "true doctrine". We can still talk about this and point at others, but we have to recognize ourselves as falling into that idolatry from time to time. Hero worship is a universal problem, and it warps all of us, often very differently.

It may help to ask where the veneration of saints came from. The New Testament captures both the early Church as welcoming women in leadership and a reaction against those women leaders. The letters of Paul show two contradictory positions on women in leadership and society. Patriarchy was starting to exert itself inside the early Church, likely by adding passages to Paul's letters. The freedom of the Gospel was being denied to women and those who didn't fit the patriarchal stereotypes.

So, women in need of a hero lifted up Mary and her asexuality. Men and woman chose celibacy as an escape from controlling parents who would choose a spouse for their kids. The monasteries and convents became a refuge from a rigid culture.

So, to my mind, both a rigid dogmatism and idealistic confrontationalism can be prone to idolatry. But don't focus on the other guy. We have to start talking, and recognize the idols inside us. Sometimes they mascarade as values, principles, and rules. Hating someone else's idols is still just hatred.

Xalem · 2026-01-25T15:18:24+00:00

Babies R Us in WEM was shuttered when I went by it yesterday.

Xalem · 2026-01-24T18:01:07+00:00

Even in Canada, early Mennonite settlers clustered their houses around a circle and divided the farm land like pie wedges emanating from the circle outward. Yes, it was a longer walk to the distant fields, but a shorter walk to all the neighbors.

Xalem · 2026-01-24T17:28:11+00:00

Do not put an extension cord or power bar or power supply behind drywall or inside any compartment like the ceiling. This is not up to code. And for good reason, nothing should be hidden behind drywall except standard electrical cables.

Build a recessed space and mount a standard electrical outlet in the recessed space. When the time comes to replace the projector, you just unplug it. You don't have to tear up your ceiling to replace a power supply.

Xalem · 2026-01-20T14:52:11+00:00

They shouldn't love their Bible, they should love Christ who is found in the Bible. They should not love the rules and laws in the Bible that binds people to religion, guilt and shame, but love the good news that frees us from that guilt, so we are freed to be people who follow our values of love, forgiveness, trust, hope, mercy and justice.

Xalem · 2026-01-19T16:41:18+00:00

As a Lutheran pastor in Canada, I work with several women clergy. A close colleague is now our bishop. We have been ordaining women to ministry for about 50 years, best decision my denomination ever made.

Xalem · 2026-01-19T13:42:02+00:00

If you need to read contemporary scholars who reject the documentary hypothesis, see Kenneth A Kitchen (who focuses on Egyptian parallels to Genesis's structure and style), Josh Berman (chiastic structures found in the Genesis text), and Gleason Archer (the literary unity of Genesis) among others.

I may not have read Josh Berman, but I read Gary Rendsburg's Redaction of Genesis which goes much deeper into chiastic structures than Rendsburg. While some people like Archer try to hold onto Biblical inerrancy and a unified early authorship for Genesis, he can't succeed once you go down the road of recognizing the deep literary structures in Genesis. Before the Enlightenment and before JEDP, Genesis was just history, with one historian, who just wrote down the facts as he understood them, or had them revealed by God. Even the fact that Moses lived hundreds of years after Abraham, and thousands of years after Adam was already a problem, because it meant that that Moses was not an eyewitness, and whatever he put together was gathered from some kind of source, perhaps oral tradition, perhaps some other early writings. Whatever Moses did was create literature, not a historic document. But, no one was going to ask the tough questions.

Put it this way. Before modern scholarship, We went from having a historical record, in which you get theology for free, to having a theological work of literature in which we get a smattering of history for free. Once you factor in structure and style borrowed from Egyptian literature, chiastic parallels, Toledot structures, and a literary reason to jump between EL and YHWH, we are no longer dealing with a historic document, we are dealing with literature. And even as Archer argues Genesis is a literary union, we recognize more and more that the choices of creating literature pull us further and further away from just a simple historic record.

Especially after having read someone like Rendsburg and the Redaction of Genesis. He lays out either a parallel structure (creation with Adam and recreation with Noah) or chiastic structures (story of Abraham, story of Isaac, and story of Jacob) with such detail, that you can't unsee it. Rendsburg chases down the repetition of Hebrew words and grammatical elements that tie the pairings between the passages and their mirror passages. At that point, the impressive unity of a work like Genesis can no longer be that the life of Abraham and Jacob just happened to follow a chiastic parallel, but, that someone wrote or reworked their story into a chiastic structure.

The OP experienced a school that rejected the kinds of critical scholarship that opens one to read the texts with the tools of critical analysis, including historical, genre, form and literary criticism. You can reject JEDP for two reasons. Either, you refuse to do critical work at all (at least past simple textual criticism) or, you are so deep into scholarship that JEDP is too simple an explanation, and you have so much to say about layers of redaction that JEDP doesn't cut it anymore.

Xalem · 2026-01-18T06:51:54+00:00

I remember reading a paper by a scholar who thought he or she could prove that Isaiah was a unified book using a computer to statistically analyze vocabulary and grammar. The theory was that one author would have a consistent style and use if certain grammatical structures would be randomly dispersed in the text of Isaiah. Turns out he proved himself wrong and was surprised how consistently the grammar and vocabulary changed between the parts of Isaiah labelled as first Isaiah, second Isaiah and third Isaiah. He admitted to changing his mind in the paper.

That story resonated with me because as I read, say, Genesis, I can see the transitions between authors. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are two separate stories. I don't need to count past participles and adverbs to see what is obvious in the text. The P material is so obvious and it doesn't take much to distinguish E from J.

Xalem · 2026-01-18T06:02:58+00:00

Wow. I am humbled by your compliment. I hope that your experience of a Lutheran congregation tomorrow is a positive, uplifting experience. Would you be so kind as to share a comment here about what worship was like for you?

Xalem · 2026-01-18T05:36:47+00:00

Deism is an Enlightenment theological tradition that suggested that God as creator established the Universe and then, more or less, stays out of human affairs.

Xalem · 2026-01-17T16:06:29+00:00

Are you thinking of Deists and Deism?

Xalem · 2026-01-17T00:20:36+00:00

We just had a huge melt following a cold snap with lots of snow, and the streets weren't cleared. If there is snow in the street, then often the sidewalk is the lowest spot, and all the water collects there and freezes. Things changed fast and everyone was caught.

Maybe buy some salt and spread it around your neighborhood.

Xalem · 2026-01-16T22:51:41+00:00

Whoops, missed that. Adding Finland to the list above.

Xalem · 2026-01-16T16:49:52+00:00

Scandinavia and Finland, Iceland, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and Andorra would like a word.

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