Mainly interesting to my Oxford crowd

[liv]

Poking around some of my old bookmarks (yes, I'm displacing), I discovered that Gerv has finally succumbed, despite all his former protests, and is now keeping a blog.

It's called Hacking for Christ and the title pretty much sums up the content, as far as I've read: mostly highly technical discussion about Mozilla and other computery things that I don't even know how to classify, and quite a lot of that deeply offensive right-wing Christianity that Gerv does, but we still love him anyway cos he's Gerv and he's so very sincere and well-meaning. I'd syndicate it here but the feed is in a format that is too cool for LJ.

Edited 6.9.04: Now public, with permission from Gerv.

Comments

[nameandnature]

Hmm... it's not clear whether the words themselves are intend to be prescribed here, or if it's not a rule, more of a guideline. The church has traditionally adopted the words themselves as liturgy, but also used it as a starting place for other prayers.

Some of the early Gentile Christians are keen on things like praying in tongues. This seems to mean praying in a language they don't understand, and which is seen as a spiritual gift, althogh I've never been very clear whether what the modern Charismatic movement calls speaking in tongues is the same thing as what was going on in the 1st century. In any case, tongues strikes me as the ultimate in extemporeaneous prayer. Paul has to tell them to moderate themselves when doing so in meetings, although he doesn't seem to completely disapprove of the practice. I'm not sure what Jesus would have thought about this: it does sound a bit like the Gentile babbling he refers to in the Matthew passage (if you're an evangelical, of course, there can be no disagreement between Jesus and Paul so there's no problem).

I found an interesting page on the history of the prayer and the variant versions found in Matthew and Luke's gospels.