After lots of faffing I've decided to ditch the WordPress site that lived at www.theonology.com.  I can't upgrade the WordPress account due to 1and1 having such an old MySQL database.  So what I thought I'd do instead was use this fine url to keep my posterous account going.  If you've not come across posterous it's truly wonderful and a much easier way to blog than anything else I've come across.  You can post blogs via email and even attach pdf's, images and mp3 files and they all get neatly formatted without any faffing around.

So the url stays the same.  The RSS feed is still the same to, so if you used to read the WordPress site now you'll just get the posterous version instead.

I also decided to keep one blog for theology and technology as that's the title of the blog and what I like posting about.  So it might be a bit of a mismash of technology and theology and if they both float your boat, this is the blog for you.

Now that it's easier to post to this blog and I only have one, I should be able to post a little more too.

A few weeks ago I spoke at Trinity Baptist Church on the subject of the Shekinah Glory of God.  The Shekinah Glory being “the radiance, glory or presence of God dwelling in the midst of his people." according to the New Bible Dictionary.  Basically the talk became a walk through of five passages in the Bible that talk about God dwelling with his people. 

I called the talk Two gardens, two mountains and a city.  The two gardens being eden and gethsemane.  In Eden God walks in the garden in the cool of the day.  God dwells with his people but when mankind sin they're banished from God's presence.  However in Gethsemane Jesus says: "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death". This time God is in effect banished from the garden, from the presence of God so that we could come back in.

The two mountains were Sinai where God appeared before Moses and the Israelites in terrifying glory and the mount of the transfiguration in the Gospels where Jesus appears with similar power.  The contrast there, is that while God demonstrated his transcendance to the Israelites (God is holy), in the person of Jesus, God demonstrates his immanence.  A touchable God now dwells with his people.  The city points to the New Jerusalem in Revelation when God finally dwells with his people permanently.

If you want to listen to the talk, you can download it here:

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If you're a visual learner, here's a word cloud:

And if you want to read the talk and look at the handout, here they are too.

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A few weeks ago the Resurgence published a blog article entitled: Time Magazine Names New Calvinism 3rd Most Powerful Idea.  It cites an article in Time magazine about the rise of what is now being termed 'New Calvinism'.  The Time magazine article is quite interesting and definitely worth a read.  What annoyed me was the pithy summary of what New Calvanism stood for at the end of the article.  I quote:

Four Ways 'New Calvinism' is So Powerful

1. Old Calvinism was fundamental or liberal and separated from or syncretized with culture. New Calvinism is missional and seeks to create and redeem culture.
2. Old Calvinism fled from the cities. New Calvinism is flooding into cities.
3. Old Calvinism was cessationistic and fearful of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. New Calvinism is continuationist and joyful in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
4. Old Calvinism was fearful and suspicious of other Christians and burned bridges. New Calvinism loves all Christians and builds bridges between them.

The issue I have is that this is just bitesize revisionist history.  The message that comes out is that Calvanism 1.0 was a bit rubbish and now we have shiny new Calvanism 2.0 which is far better than the old one.  Now I don't deny that there weren't problems with some of the reformers or their ideas, but at least be a little be more grateful for the theological shoulders that you're now climbing all over.

The other issue I have is to assume that all calvinists who want to engage with culture are Pentecostal.  Now I appreciate that there are many movements that are reformed and pentecostal and believe they're doing a great work.  But there are just as many culturally engaged calvinists who aren't Pentecostal.  I think times have changed and rabid cessationism is a thing of the past, but there are plenty of calvinistic movers and shakers that are practical cessationists.  By practical I mean that they believe that God can work through miracles today but feel that those miracles are somewhat less common the Pentecostals think they are.  Tim Keller and Mark Dever are a few that spring to mind.  To say that historic Calvinism was ' fearful of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit' is simple ignorant of most of the reformers' works as well. 

And this leads me to a few more concluding comments.  I find it quite hard to accept that traditional calvinists were supposed to have fled the cities when Calvin spend most of his life reforming Geneva and also find it hard to see how calvinists seperated from culture when their main aim was to see its reform.

All in all, I love the resurgence but comments like this are simply not very well thought out.

I've recently discovered Epicurious.  It's an iPhone/iPad app that's also a website.  For foodies it has over 25,000 high class recipes.  And it works well on the web, but it works even better on the iPhone.  The iPhone/iPad app is free and all 25,000 recipes are then available to browse.  The app lets you pick your main ingredients so that you can narrow down recipes to cook with things you already have in your kitchen and it also allows you to add recipes to a virtual shopping list.  The reason why it's so great on the iPhone is because you can pull it out of your pocket in the kitchen and re-read the instructions and you can even use the virtual shopping list in the supermarket to tick off each item you put in your trolley in one go.  The recipes are all rated and reviewed by fellow Eipicuriites which means you can see how each recipe works (or doesn't) in real life situations.  For a free app it comes with some advertising, but it's not too invasive.

As this blog is often about technology and theology, where's the theological link?  Well in Genesis 1 it says God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.  And as that refers to food as well as the rest of creation I'm sure God is very pleased with Epicurious.

Yesterday was the start of this years Apple WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference).  As per usual Steve Jobs started the conference with the Keynote address in which he unveiled the all new iPhone 4.  Apple are claiming that this is the biggest change to the iPhone since its launch and if you realise that they're changing the hardware (all new frame, much better battery, A4 chip) as well as the software (iOS 4) you can see why they're saying that.

Other new features (Job's mentioned 8) include a gyroscope, a game changing retinal screen (4x pixel density), HD video as well as a better low light camera and Facetime video chat.  I can see the benefits with some of these features but some are a little confusing.  For example, the Gyroscope massively improves gaming, but what's the demographic of iPhone (and iPod Touch) gamers? Teenagers?  How many teenagers will be able to afford an iPhone 4?  The other 'invention' is Facetime video chat.  I love the fact that Apple are talking about this as if we've never video chatted before (Skype anyone?).  It's true to say that mobile phones have come with front and rear facing cameras for years but most mobile operators insisted that you payed for each video call.  A stupid move meaning that the front facing camera on most phones was useless.  At least Apple have addressed this issue by making Facetime work over WiFi.  But haven't Apple missed a trick with Facetime.  If only the iPad and iPod Touch and older iPhones had front facing cameras.  Just think of the number of Facetime users then?  iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 voice calling is, in my humble opinion, about as useless as front facing cameras where you pay your provider for each voice call.  It's a bit of a lemon.

The most exciting thing for me personally (and I hope O2 have a good upgrade path) is the HD video and iMovie for iPhone app.  Apple make really easy to use software and now that they have HD video support, I think this is the killer feature for the iPhone 4.  The low light sensor also looks like a great idea.  So all in all, while gyroscopes and front facing cameras may have taken up a great deal of the Keynote presentation, it's the HD video that takes the iPhone 4 into the next league and protects its future as the no1 smart phone for years to come.

As I'm struggling to regularly write blog posts at the moment I thought I'd turn this blog, at least temporarily into more of a techy blog and leave theonology.com as the more theological blog.  As most of the work I've been doing recently has been to do with iPhone development, that's what I'm going to start blogging here about - at least for a few months.  I hope that doesn't bore you silly, but as I'm getting quite passionate about it I thought I might as well get blogging and I didn't want to create yet another blog to maintain.

Here's to more iPhone related posts!

Thanks to WPTouch at the click of just two links in the Wordpress admin panel I now have an iPhone enabled view of the Theonology blog.  If you have an iPhone why not try viewing this site in mobile Safari?  I still can't quite believe how easy it was to get this working.  It shows how far open source blogging has come that this sort of thing is so easy to get working.