Etc

A nice and interesting video about a couple of American tourists in Oslo, here. Gives sort of an outsider's look on the city.

- Well, yesterday I went to Bø to visit my good friend Nobu, who's a leader on CHRISC's youth camp (Action). About 700 teenagers gathered together to have fun, engage in sports-activities, go to meetings, get strengthened in their faith etc. Looked like they were really enjoying themselves. Also, I knew quite a lot of the leaders there, and they're good people. So Action is highly recommended, especially since it's a type of Christian work/ministry that also appeals to guys.

- Perhaps you're familiar with CS Lewis' "Trilemma". Either Jesus was "lunatic, liar or Lord." Or: He was "mad, bad or God". I used to be a little impressed by the stock criticism of this line of argument. Like: Well, perhaps the evangelists are wrong - perhaps the real Jesus really didn't want to be Lord, or God. Perhaps he was just another Messianic pretender, and then the stories about him have been embellished by his followers.  Well, the more I learn about the Gospels and the NT and Second Temple Judaism, the more I think that Lewis' trilemma actually is sound. Jesus really did say those things, they really were that shocking, he really must have been severely deluded - that is to say: quite crazy - to say the things he did, if it wasn't true. In Lewis' own words:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

Yes, and this line of reasoning then presupposes that the Gospels really are quite historically reliable, which I think they really are, and faithful in their renderings of Jesus' words and deeds (well, the Gospel of John is a whole other story; I'm emphatically not saying it's unreliable, unhistorical etc., rather that it's...different...in its depiction of Jesus.) So, well, Jesus continues to be an enticing and challenging enigma, both to Jews of the first century and to us. So it's up to each and every one of us to give a response. Well - it of course depends on the church giving a faithful witness to the message of the Gospels to the world, like John explicitly does (ch. 20-21).

That's it for now.