ADVENTures Before Christmas, Week 1

Much of the information came from the web, where it has been reposted many times, so I’m not sure of the original author, but the site used is http://www.crivoice.org/cyadvent.html

Advent means ‘coming,’ so it is the time of preparing for the coming of Christ. While it is most closely associated with Christmas and the celebration of Christ’s birth, for many Christians it is a reminder to anticipate and prepare for His second coming.

Interestingly, the original purpose of Advent was merely a countdown to Christmas, and that’s all. However, just as no modern evangelical pastor can conceive of a sermon that isn’t three points starting with the same letter, people expect everything in a ritual to be full of meaning to bursting, so meanings began to be assigned to various parts of the celebration. As a result of this ad hoc approach to liturgy, there is actually a lot of variation in both symbols and meanings, as you will see.

Vibrant Dance 2: Breakout Session 2: John Walton

On this Remembrance Day (Veterans Day), thank you to all who have said no to self and served this nation. May the Lord lift you up and sustain you for all your days, receiving you into His arms at journey’s end.

{RJW Note:  The final session of the conference was composed of breakout sessions by the various speakers to interact with attendees about the day’s panel discussions. I again attended Dr. John Walton’s session as a TA. It was primarily a Q&A format, so where necessary for context, the gist of the question is presented with the answer immediately following. As before, Genesis 1 and 2 are abbreviated as G1 and G2 respectively. Again, full audio and video of the conference (including the breakouts with the other speakers are available at www.vibrantdance.org.}

In Revelation, when it declares there is no sea, it is a functionality argument—no more chaos, not no more water.

To have “consistent hermeneutics” is to be a competent reader of what the author writes and an ethical reader of his words (versus how in literary criticism the reader starts out with disbelief). Virtuous readers use their perlocution {how the information is received by the audience} to identify what the human author intended and this can be applied regardless of genre. He is concerned with the label ‘history’ as a genre, it may indicate the subject is real and true but that label doesn’t say how authors communicate their reality. For example, it is not an ethical hermeneutic to apply standards of photography to modern art. It is competent to read a document as intended by the author. We have to understand authors’ conventions, not impose our conventions, but theirs.