Every day, from the age of 17, until he died of pancreatic cancer yesterday, Steve Jobs looked in the mirror and asked himself: "if today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"

In a speech at Standford University in 2005, Jobs said that, "whenever the answer has been 'no' for two days in a row, I know I need to change something." He goes on to say:

Death is very likely to single best invention of life. It's life change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you. But some day, not too long from now, you will become the old and be cleared away ... Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. 

This made me pause, because the view I have often heard articulated in the Christian tradition - especially in evangelistic sermons and on courses such as Alpha - is that death's looming certainty makes life futile. Jobs appears to be saying precisely the opposite: the certainty of death means that each day we have must not be wasted. It is all the more valuable because it will not last.

Which poses the question: does the Christian hope of living forever devalue life in the here and now? If this day is just one of billions upon billions, stretching out into eternity, what real significance does it have? 

Abigail Lloyd, in a talk I read about some time ago, approaches the matter from a different angle. She argues that the brevity of life puts us under immense pressure to cram in and achieve as much as we can before we die. There is "a sense of not being able to do all that I should be able to do", resulting in "the draining of enjoyment from life."

The Christian promise of living eternally, she says, "redeems our frantic concern with life's abrupt curtailment". Being finite, as we are, is not the same as being mortal, and "it is precisely, because, from a Christian perspective, mortality no longer has the final say that we can relax and enjoy being created finite."

In other words, the fear of not doing everything we think we should do within our short lifespan - finishing War and Peace; completing the London marathon; getting Grade 8 on the piano - need not have a hold over us. Life in the new heavens and the new earth will not be static, but a "process of learning and exploring, achieving and growing [which] continues ever onwards".

"We shall", said the early church father Irenaeus, "remain always holding fresh converse with God". 

All of this, says Lloyd, "challenges the notion that eternity is going to be boring with nothing much to do."

The life of an Iranian Christian pastor, Yousef Nadarkhani, hangs in the balance, because he refuses to bow to a court's demands to 'recant his faith in Jesus Christ'. Christian Solidarity Worldwide reports:

'Pastor Nadarkhani was arrested in October 2009 while attempting to register his church. He was tried and found guilty of apostasy (abandoning Islam) in September 2010. He has been sentenced to death.

The Supreme Court recently asked for a re-examination of his case to establish whether or not he had been a practising Muslim adult before he converted to Christianity. However, the court ruled he wasn’t a practising Muslim, but is still guilty of apostasy because he has Muslim ancestry.

The death sentence isn’t specifically prescribed for apostasy under Iranian law so the Rasht court used a loophole in the constitution and based their verdict on fatwas (religious rulings) by the “father” of Iran’s revolution in 1979, currently Iran’s most influential religious leader.'

Pastor Nadarkhani told the court: 'Repent means to return. What should I return to? To the blasphemy that I had before my faith in Christ?' Ordered by the court to 'return to the religion of your ancestors - Islam', he replied: 'I can not.'

The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, issued a strongly-worded statement, saying that Pastor Nadarkhani has 'no case to answer' and urging the Iranian authorities to 'overturn his sentence'.

Pastor Nadarkhani is not the only Christian in Iran to suffer in this way. A CSW briefing published earlier this month said:

'Since June 2010 there have been nearly 300 confirmed cases of Christians who have suffered arrests, interrogations and detentions in at least 35 cities across Iran; however the full figure is almost certainly far higher. The majority of those arrested have been released following a short incarceration, but many have been called back for further questioning and at least 41 have spent between one month and a year in prison. Detainees face solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, illness as a result of privations, denial of medical treatment, unsanitary conditions in prison and forms of psychological and physical torture during interrogation.'

Rob Bell is leaving Mars Hill, the church he and his wife founded 12 years ago in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The statement on the church's website reads a bit like a corporate press release announcing the resignation of an executive: Bell is leaving to "pursue a number of strategic opportunities", it says, hoping to find "increasing opportunity to extend the heartbeat of that message [of God's love] to our world in new and creative ways".

Bell's sermon on Sunday didn't shed much light on his reasons for leaving, though he did say he would be moving to LA, from where he would continue to write and tour. He said that he had only made the decision over the last few months, prompted by the challenge of close friends.

When a company CEO leaves suddenly, it is the job of financial journalists (like I used to be) to delve beyond the PR babble and uncover the real reasons for his/her departure. Such digging around seems somewhat unsavoury in the case of a church pastor - and my hunch is that there is little scandal or discord behind Bell's decision to move. The book he released earlier this year caused much controversy in evangelical circles, but his church threw not one but two parties to celebrate its publication.

Journalists, as they are prone to do, say they have spotted a trend; Bell is just the latest in a line of church pastors to leave the monotony of running a church for the glamour and freedom of full-time speaking and writing. The only names I've seen so far are NT Wright (who retired early from the bishopric of Durham to take up an academic post at St Andrew's University), Jim Belcher (a friend of Bell's who also left the church he planted) and Francis Chan (who did the same).

Bell's situation might bear some comparison with Belcher's and Chan's. But it differs in lots of ways from that of Wright, who ran an entire Church of England diocese, sat on several church committees, and in the House of Lords. Bell, on the other hand, stood down from day to day managing/pastoring of Mars Hill several years ago, focusing instead on preaching, writing, and touring.

Rick Warren expressed some scepticism about Bell's decision, tweeting: “Speaking tours feed the ego All applause & no responsibility. It's an unreal world. A church gives accountability & validity."

I don't really care for Warren's concern (and neither, I would venture to guess, does Bell). Bell is accountable to other Christians; indeed, as already mentioned, the decision to move to LA was prompted by the discernment and wisdom of close friends. 

I'm more concerned about the ramifications his departing Mars Hill will have for his good old fashioned Bible teaching. Bell is simply one of the best expositors and communicators of scripture I have ever heard, one of only a handful of preachers who engages the head and the heart (to use that problematic dichotomy), with little more than an open Bible and a microphone.

His material outside the church is, understandably, lighter on exegesis. Some of it is original and brilliant. But some of his more recent talks/presentations, like the one I heard at Greenbelt last month, had something of the self-help motivational talk about them ("You don't have to be anyone else; you can be who you are"). Without the theological depth and rigour, it feels a bit hollowed out, like it's target audience is day time TV viewers.

And I still want to listen to Bell preach on Philippians, or the Sermon on the Mount, or Lamentations. I don't particularly care to listen to him on Oprah.

Atheist Christopher Hitchens stares death in the eye

'The only objection I have ... is it seems to me a bit crass to be trying to talk to people about conversion when you know they're ill. The whole idea of hovering over a sick person who's worried and perhaps in discomfort and saying, "Now's the time to reconsider," strikes me as opportunist at the very best and has a very bad history in the past ... 

... But as I say, the arguments about immortality, the supernatural, the last things - death, judgment, heaven and hell - are or are not valid quite independently of my mental or physical state. And so there's something fishy to me in the suggestion that, "OK, now that your system is breaking down, wouldn't it be a good moment for you to repudiate the convictions of a lifetime?"'

Tim Keller's 9/11 remembrance sermon:

'But it is on the Cross that we see the ultimate wonder. On the cross we sufferers finally see, to our shock that God now knows too what it is to lose a loved one in an unjust attack...Do you see what this means? Yes, we don’t know the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue, but we know what the reason isn’t, what it can’t be. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us! It can’t be that he doesn’t care. God so loved us and hates suffering that he was willing to come down and get involved in it. And therefore the Cross is an incredibly empowering hint. Ok, it’s only a hint, but if you grasp it, it can transform you. It can give you strength.

Tad Delay on why the debate about Adam and Eve has nothing to do with Adam and Eve:

'The text of scripture is very, very rarely the issue in theological debates. The real issue is that we’ve decided to believe something and are desperately grasping for any way we can use the text to backward-engineer justification for our beliefs. This isn’t controversial. It’s just how we are wired… by evolution.'

Scot McKnight responds to a letter about Christians drinking alcohol:

' ... there is a Bible tradition of abstinence from alcohol, from Samson to John Baptist, but there is nothing that indicates this was either common nor was it seen as the special mark of piety. Abstinence is a good and wise option for Christians; it is not the posture of the most advanced Christian or the sign of total dedication.'

A friend of mine emailed today and got straight to the point: 'What's your thoughts on "unity"? Sure, we unite on the common ground where we can find it, people say, but what/are there issues that we should divide on?'

Relevant magazine recently ran articles on 6 things that unite and 6 things that divide Christians that are worth reading. When I saw the question, I recalled something I read about when Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones, big figures in the Emergent Church scene in America, had lunch with John Piper, the Calvinist godfather of the young, restless reformed movement. Piper's account of the meeting is somewhat depressing:

'There are profound epistemological differences—ways of processing reality—that make the conversation almost impossible, as if we were just kind of going by each other ... We seem to differ so much in our worldviews and our ways of knowing that I’m not sure how profitable the conversation was or if we could ever get anywhere ... This shows how different we are, because Galatians 1:8 says, “If we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.” And that’s not friendship. Paul insists on establishing the gospel, whether there is a good relationship or not. I came away from our meeting frustrated and wishing it were different but not knowing how to make it different.

In Jones's account, which features in his excellent book, and can be read here, he pinpoints what is perhaps their defining area of disagreement: the atonement:

'John Piper basically equates a penal substitutionary understanding of the atonement with the gospel. I am unwilling to do that. I don't disparage that theory of the atonement ... but ... I do not think that one theory interpreting that event to be sufficient ... When I expressed these thoughts at the lunch, Piper told me that I should never preach -- his point was that my ideas about historical context would merely confuse listeners. He said this with a smile on his face, but then he turned serious and said that people need "fixed points of doctrine" in order to believe in Christianity. I think I disagree with that statement, and I surely disagree with Piper on which points are most important.'

This seems to sum up the problem with unity: people disagree with which points are most important, making it difficult to unite around any one 'essential' point of belief or confession. Saying 'we agree on the gospel' doesn't really settle things; it only takes a two-hour lunch to discover you cannot even agree on that.

If you are absolutely sure that your definition of the core essentials is correct, you will probably walk away in frustration, deeming the people with whom you disagree willfully obstinate or blinded to the obvious truth. They can safely be labelled as 'liberal' or 'fundamentalist' (depending on the disagreement and your point of view) and kept at arm's length from now on.

Or, if you have some degree of epistemic humility, and can entertain the idea that your grip on reality might be partial, or distorted, or culturally conditioned, you might invite your lunch companions round for dinner some time to continue the conversation. And, if Nadia Bolz Weber is right, none other than the Holy Spirit might turn up too:

'The Holy Spirit is subversive, and one of the things the Spirit does is blur lines that we’re comfortable maintaining ... Every time you meet somebody who’s in a category of conservative or hateful or narrow-minded or fill-in-the-blank, there’s some sort of connection that’s made, and then you have to rethink the category. That’s the work of the Spirit.'

In a previous blog, I wrote about the obsession that some Christians have with people making decisions rather than becoming disciples. That thought was provoked by a video promoting a new book by Scot McKnight, who blogs at Jesus Creed. The book was downloaded to my Kindle yesterday (it seems to have released earlier on Kindle than in print, at least in the UK).

It hasn't disappointed so far. I don't like talking about middle ways (as in when people say 'maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle, or, it's all about having a balance), but McKnight does seem to be a writer who strikes a good 'middle way' (sorry) between the Reformed and Emergent camps: he is respected, it seems, by both, and is unafraid to point out the shortcomings in either.

In The King Jesus Gospel, McKnight says that the word 'gospel' 'has been hijacked by what we believe about "personal salvation", and the gospel itself has been reshaped to facilitate making "decisions"'.

But what is 'the gospel?'. The 'Calvinist crowd' in the USA, one of whose figureheads is John Piper, 'has defined the gospel as in the short formula "justification by faith"', says McKnight. Hence, many evangelical 'gospel presentations' say things like (this my summary, not McKnight's): 'you are cut off from God because of your sins. Christ took the punishment that was yours, and if you put your faith in him you will be justified and can be assured of a place in heaven when you die.' 

But McKnight argues that evangelicals mistakenly 'equate the word gospel with the word salvation ... when we evangelicals see the word gospel, our instinct is to think (personal) "salvation"'. 

Some might be wondering what the problem is here: 'the gospel' is all about salvation, and 'preaching the gospel' is all about telling people about what the problem is and how to be saved. The fatal error, McKnight thinks, is this:

' ... sometimes we are so singularly focused on the personal-Plan-of-Salvation and how-we-get-saved that we eliminate the Story of Israel and the Story of Jesus altogether.'

Many think that the 'Plan of Salvation' form of preaching is what the church has preached throughout history. 'We needed perhaps to be reminded of the past,' McKnight says. 

And it's to the past - all the way back to 1 Corinthians 15, not just to the Reformation, or Augustine, or The Purpose Driven Life - that he next turns.

Andrew Wilson, writes on the biggest theological debate of the next 20 years. This quote stood out:

'Loving and mutually encouraging relationships can make up for enormous differences in theology. I can’t speak for the convenors of The Gospel Coalition, but my guess is one reason that they can happily disagree with each other on baptism, but make gender roles a deal-breaker – even though, you would think, how somebody becomes part of God’s people is more important than who gets to speak in a church meeting – is that DA Carson (credobaptist) really likes Tim Keller (paedobaptist), and Justin Taylor really likes Kevin DeYoung. When you love people, you see them as fellow believers before you see them as theological opponents, and that really helps.'

Richard Beck, at Experimental Theology, continues a belated series of reviews of Love Wins - this one on how 'our eschatology shapes our ethics': 

Your view of heaven and hell influences how you treat people. In my tradition, this has meant privileging bible study over feeding the hungry. Marginalizing justice in order to save souls. And in one sense, I can't blame the people I've known who have felt this way. They are just enacting their eschatology. Avoiding hell is themost important thing. Even if you are starving. There is more important than Here. But if we pray "Your Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven" we have a very different view. Here is as important as There. 

Tad Delay explores a similar theme in a review of a book that he says trumps both Rob Bell and Francis Chan:

If there is a hell, it’s really, really, really damn important! Bell has this sort of “let’s talk about hells on earth now and not speculate about later” motif running throughout the book. I completely agree with him! But I can only say that because I’m open about finding the idea of a fiery place for eternal, conscious torment to be not only laughable, but also incredibly harmful. Disregarding the importance of hell only becomes a legitimate option when you negate the concern altogether: it’s illegitimate to simply downplay it. If you believe there is a hell, it is a much bigger eternal deal than hells on earth- war, poverty, disease, sex trafficking, etc.,- none of this measure up to how unbelievably awful hell is. If you detract from telling people how to avoid hell by focusing on these “lesser issues,” I would argue you either A) don’t actually believe in hell as much as you think you do- which is a good thing, or B) you are a shockingly unethical person with terrible priorities.

And finally, via Jon Kuhrt's blog, an atheist writes about the impact that listening to Rob Bell speak has had on him

I’ve had no ‘miraculous conversion’ but I am now open to all of the mysteries and unanswerable questions that accompany the stories and parables of the Old and New Testaments.  I initially ascribed this opening up process to the power and persuasion of Rob Bell and the sense of elation that accompanied hearing ‘his’ story.  What is increasingly apparent to me though of course is that Rob Bell is talking about Jesus – thus the story that speaks to me is the story of Christ. 

I promise I am reading some other things, especially books I bought at Greenbelt, that aren't about Rob Bell or hell. It's probably time to think about some other things.

There's been a fair amount of debate recently, particularly in the US, about the historicity of Adam and Eve. It's one of those questions that comes up on Alpha courses quite a lot: what about evolution? Don't science and the Bible conflict? To which the Christians scramble around for an answer, usually ending up with something along the lines of: 'science explains the 'how' questions, the Bible addresses the 'why' questions.' If someone present had really done their homework, they might even throw in the line: the word 'Adam' can be translated as 'mankind', so it doesn't necessarily mean there was a literal person. 

But I have to say I'm slightly bored by both the question and the pat answers it provokes. I suspect there are far more interesting, and potentially transforming, connections to be made between scripture and science. One to look out for is the book that Rob Bell is working on about the relationship between quantum physics and the Eucharist. Another is the work of a scholar by the name of Gerd Theissen, whom I read about in a book I saw lying around at work. 

Thiessen says that the Old Testament prophetic tradition turns traditional evolutionary theory on its head:

'Whereas the evolutionary principle advocated the survival of the strong, the teaching of the classical prophets completely undermined all such systems of domination by emphasising that God was on the side of the weak, the oppressed and the downtrodden.' 

Furthermore, he says, 'Jesus' teaching 'completely reversed the principle of natural selection with its emphasis on the solidarity of the in-group ... and aggression towards the 'outsider'.

Whatever the details of the science, you'd have to be a hard-nosed reductionist to insist that 'survival of the fittest' is a desirable ethical goal, and something of a pessimist to insist it is the only way of life to which we can aspire. Natural selection might be the mechanism via which species evolve, and the brutal reality in which we are caught up. But what good news if the natural course of things is not the way things have to be, nor the way they always will be.

As my grandfather, a consultant cardiologist, once said to me: 'People say you should let nature take its course. But what they fail to realise is that nature is very cruel.'

In this fascinating interview, Nadia Bolz-Weber, who spoke at this year's Greenbelt (though I didn't hear her), says some insightful things about how the "subversive" Holy Spirit blurs the categories we like to put people into:

'The Holy Spirit is subversive, and one of the things the Spirit does is blur lines that we’re comfortable maintaining. My experience has been that we like to have these lines of liberal and conservative -- theologically and socially. I think that people, especially the younger generation, have experienced those lines becoming real blurry and are fine with that. I know that’s true for myself.

I’m at the point in my life where I don’t want to be a part of fundamentalism of the left or the right, mostly because it lacks two things that I can’t do without in my life anymore -- which is joy and humility.

I don’t see a lot of joy and humility in these extreme stances that people take on either side. So I feel like the Spirit moves in the blurring of those distinctions that we all like to have. Every time you meet somebody who’s in a category of conservative or hateful or narrow-minded or fill-in-the-blank, there’s some sort of connection that’s made, and then you have to rethink the category. That’s the work of the Spirit.

What Bolz-Weber says chimes in with my own experience (though I've never articulated it so well). On more than one occasion, I've spoken to, or read something by, someone I've deemed 'unsound' - theologically, politically etc - and come away enriched by the encounter. 

Some call this a slippery slope, or getting taken in by a 'wolf in sheep's clothing'. But it could be the Holy Spirit.

In a video promoting his new book, Scot McKnight (no, Rob Bell hasn't aged and put on weight, though it looks like the Nooma production crew could be behind this video) quotes research which says that '90 per cent of children who grow up in evangelical homes make a decision to receive Christ into their heart'. Perhaps not surprising, given all the opportunities afforded those who grow up in evangelical churches to 'pray the prayer'. 

However, McKnight goes on: 'Of that 90 per cent, only 22 per cent are following Jesus when they're 35. And I think most of us are shocked by that number. Think about it: we're losing two-thirds of those who make a decision for Christ. There's something wrong.'

McKnight lays part of the blame on a gospel that 'becomes obssessed with making decisions rather than disciples'.

In light of this, what are we to make of those proclaiming, on Twitter and elsewhere, the number of young people who 'made decisions to follow Jesus' at Christian festivals this summer? I can think of numerous friends who once prayed a prayer, even attended church enthusiastically for a while, but no longer identify themselves as Christians in any way. 

I don't think any the less of them for that; but it does make me a bit wary when people count salvation in numbers. 

Tony Jones, asked in this interview when he was 'born again', may speak for many (and probably for me) when he says (albeit in an American context):

'I was in fifth grade, I went to summer camp and on the very last day, when all the kids were totally, completely exhausted, and already on the brink of tears because we were going home the next morning and camp was over, they gave the 'Jesus talk' about how much he bled for us and I went forward weeping and asked Jesus into my life and felt a woosh in my body because that's what my counsellor told me would happen.' ...

Pushed by his inquisitor to confirm when he was 'born again', Jones says:

'When did I really take on the lordship of Jesus Christ? Today, this morning ... Really, truly, I can't look back on one day and say 'that was the day I took on the lordship of Jesus Christ in my life.' It is an ongoing battle ... daily I wonder if this whole thing's a total crock. Daily I think, 'is there really a God? Is my whole life based on a hoax? Daily I make a decision to go one day more.'

Some will be disturbed by Jones's open expression of doubt and hseeming lack of 'assurance' in his salvation. But I suspect his words express the private, daily experiences of many. And I suspect his daily decision "to go one day more" builds a faith with much more staying power than a faith built on a one-off, emotionally-charged 'decision' on a summer camp when life seemed so much more simple.