I implemented it in PHP, in about 20 line of code. I made an app on the Facebook developers’ page, entered my details and icon, and issued my app with an infinitely powerful access token over my account by following the good instructions at Facebook Developers (notes: you don’t need to do this with any code; you’ll only need the one access token, so just paste the links into your browser; as easy as pie; note also this SO detail that drained me five minutes).

Next, you need to write and test the code that will submit your article to Facebook. It’s as easy as pasting the example code into a file, and fiddling around with it until you get the appearance you want. It’s very hacky; very hacky, in fact. You’ll spot below the things that took me a while to work out.

curl -F 'access_token=use yours not mine!' \
 -F 'link=http://www.nicholaswilson.me.uk/2011/05/convergence' \
 -F 'source=http://www.google.com' \
 -F 'caption= <center></center>' \
 -F 'name=Article Title' \
 -F 'description= How long I wonder can a text block get? long I '\
'wonder can a text block get? long I wonder can a text block get? '\
'long I wonder can a text block get? long I wonder can a text '\
'block get? long I wonder can a text block get?<center>✼✼✼</center>' \
 -F 'properties={"Read more":{"text": "Whole post ➡", '\
'"href": "http://www.google.com/reader/shared/nicholaswilson.me.uk"'\
' },"From":{"text": "Nicholas’ blog of thoughts and code", "href":'\
' "http://www.google.com/reader/shared/nicholaswilson.me.uk" }}'\
 -v \
 --cacert <path to fb_ca_cert.crt> \
 https://graph.facebook.com/me/feed

Clearly, I blog. The Tumblr micro-blog Foreshortened has the rest of my content, including the stuff other people would share using link-sharing services, bookmarking services, tweeting platforms, social networking sites, and more (or less, as I cut out a tiny bit of junk when I see the full impact of what I am splurging brought together in one place).

I also use various domain-specific sites: I catalogue and review my books on my LibraryThing. I occaisonally post code at my GitHub, though I rarely have the patience to work anything up into a form usable by others, and there is nothing up at the time of writing. I rarely take photos, but do have a dormant Flickr account (not worth following). My music tastes are shared at my last.fm. Finally, in a remarkable act of openness, my calendar is actually public, should you want to find out what I’m doing at any moment.

We had a bit of a contrast tonight Jon’s excellent sermon and Mark’s excellent sermon. Both did exegesis, but in Jon’s case he did half as much (which was a matter of choice of course, just a different use of time). Jon read words from his passages, and even the odd clause, but the understanding he had of the flow of Paul’s argument and thought which informed his outline was not something he had time to demonstrate and quite make us see the correspondence. Mark, on the other hand, made it very clear that what he was saying matched up with not just with phrases and clauses, but the sentences and paragraph of Paul’s thought. I think that’s probably more important to me that it really is, with my persistent attraction to biblical rather than systematic theology, but I can’t help wondering if there isn’t something to gently suggest from this.

The text we are doing exegesis on is not simply a collection of clauses each saying something we make into a point and a section, but it is the passage that links the thoughts up, not something we do after drawing the three individual points out of the three sentences we are set to preach on—something that I have wriggled a bit with even during Eden sermons. There sometimes comes a point halfway through the sermon where I suddenly have to tune out for a couple of minutes when it strikes me that of the points made each lines up with a phrase in the passage, but that whatever process the preacher has done in his study to read the passage as a whole, he is not going to lead us through right then and there, so I have to try and spot the pattern and balance of argument ourselves before tuning in and taking in more.

So, I don’t know how well I will do next week on Colossians 1:15–23, but I know that my choice will always be to try as hard as I can to open up as transparently as possible the process and trajectory of the passage in its ebb and flow. The problem is that is naturally both time-consuming and hard, and I know that in bible studies I never have the skill to capture in what I say the shape and whole bent of the passage as it tugs me.

I am very influenced by Barry Seagren’s preaching style with its simple, gentle, thorough sermons led by exegesis at each level. My huge worry is that I know so strongly how many agendas I have, in particular my burden to capture and explore the whole of the bible’s teaching on the heart and emotions during the last six months. I feel there is so much more to Philippians than we normally tend to hear in Galatians-style sermons which can so easily get bogged down in words and clauses instead of the whole direction and passion of Paul’s concern for the heart. Colossians 3 to me is really the sister passage to Philippians (esp. Phil. 4), and I fear deeply, quiveringly, to so much as make a comment when I see how passionate I am for my hermeneutics to lead me into eisegesis.

I want, so deeply, my understanding of sanctification as unifying theme of Paul’s theology to be there in the passages, that I make it come to life in my eyes. I feel it strongly, that there is so much more to say from Paul that we tend only to hear from John, because he gloops it into each sentence whereas Paul can somewhat sprinkle the pieces across his letters.

You can see the confusion I am trying to express. I want to talk about these things I wrestle with but can’t talk about, and fear and doubt my own ability to pull together the sort of theology I struggle to find in books and hear so little. This was rammed home to me last Monday, when I was talking with Daniel Sim and tried to articulate some of what I was working on in Paul, ad-hoc, and really didn’t convince him.

So, the sort of exegesis I desire to hear I can’t even model, and I’m not convinced that stepping back from the passage like that is even safe for me to do, but there’s so much richness I can’t find in Paul’s letters any other way.

This second point is really related to the first: it is the same comment, but looking at the level of applications. It is hard to know where to get applications from and how to angle them. There are varying schools of thought: we can just say what the author does. When he says ‘God is great’, and that’s it, we pass on, and when he says ‘God is great, so share fellowship’, we follow his instructions and exhort the congregation to more acts of fellowship. On the other end of the spectrum, you can get talks which bang in an application for every point. Jon tonight was clearly in that camp, with a stack of applications that weren’t clearly part of Paul’s intention, like an evangelistic point from Ephesians 1:6. Sure, the gospel is going out into the whole world, but Paul doesn’t seem to be mentioning that at that moment in order to exhort us to go out and share it. (Mark fell in between the two extremes.)

There are pros and cons of each style. The first is obviously the sort of doctrine-heavy, application light preaching which Dave was criticising, but the second, by breaking up the flow and ideas of the word can prevent them being applied to demonstrate and fit into whatever the author is actually trying to tell us.

The same feelings I have above translate into a very natural third option here: we make sermons application heavy by finding the application in the book as a whole, not just the passage we are given. I found it very worth noticing that neither Jon nor Mark mentioned anything outside their given passage at all (except Jon’s throwaway mention of false teachers from ch. 2), and it was a pity no-one really explored why that was in the discussion, because I feel that is potentially a huge weakness.

Again, it’s a matter of choices and use of time. There’s nothing wrong with either of the approaches above to cooking up applications, each used in due proportion, but what I regret is that sometimes the application of the book as a whole is not given its share of the preaching in a sermon series. Paul’s gearing up for chapter three, and the more practical tone of chapter 2 which introduces the tone and meaning he’s going to draw out of the truths in chapter 1. We don’t have to make up applications, or give none when there are none, when a sermon series has room for several sermons just looking at that big theme, that deep sustained patchwork picture of the heart Paul stitches together, and treating the passage as part of that. That is, we are given the task not just of preaching a passage, but of understanding the meaning and context of that passage so as to say to the listeners, ‘This is what the book is all about! See how Paul says these things, here, here, and here! Today’s passage paints these parts of the whole, and you’ll see the rest of it in the other sermons.’

I think this is why people get mixed up with all these silly ideas that Paul majors on justification. Of course it’s huge for him, but I feel that’s only seen as such a big emphasis for him because so much of his teaching on sanctification (and glorification) permeates the books and is so much less amenable to word study sermons and sentence-by-sentence exegesis. He is a theologian of the heart’s change towards our Lord, just like 1 John so palpably is, but we miss those applications unless we pursue books as a whole with more passion in our preaching. This has to make up at least some of the balance and mix of different sorts of sermons we are treated to.

Where do I go with all this? I am still scared of my tendencies to manipulate the word and use it to push my agenda when taught in this way. I also know I’ve still not enough maturity to make it work, given how much easier it is to grasp and teach in a basic way systematic rather than biblical theology (although equally hard to do very well). My prayer is that God would equip us as he may to have a passion for his word, and teach it in all its fullness as well as we may. Let there be men who can apply the word to every depth of the human heart, and offer us that hope for change and maturity in every part which Paul teaches us to set our desires on and implore God to grant us.

“Heresy” is really the wrong word; it’s got the wrong flavour entirely. We can’t go out hunting for ‘heresy’ like we’re rooting out vile evil or something. It just feels wrong to me to go around denouncing random links on the Internet when we’ve not even met the guys. They have a very slender view of the end times based on a very meagre understanding of how we read and write; they wouldn’t be able to enjoy a novel or history book like we might if they approached it with the same understanding of words as they do the bible. But, so what? I’d disagree, and we’d all think it clear that their specific views on things like this are simply not in the bible, relating a few hundred cow deaths to the end of the world. And yet, so what? It’s not deeply insulting to Christ, or necessarily strongly damaging to the church in anything beyond its reputation, so it’s not some sort of a wicked heresy. It’s just an attitude and thinking which we don’t agree with. I’d hesitate to even judge the people involved enough to call it silly—the views are silly, and I guess the guys involved are somewhat, but they’re really just part of their surrounding redneck culture with all its trends.

Either we fall off end of the denouncing scale by picking on people and calling them stupid when what they’ve done isn’t bad or degrading, just perhaps incorrect. Or, we get all culturally snobbish and start laughing at people and blaming them because they fit in with pop culture, or low culture, and we’re more high and refined. So, we like refined things, and think a bit more clearly, but so what? We’re not better people than the bottom 90% of the population because we like Tudor music or have academically credible views on theology.

As far as heresy goes, we can only go as far as denouncing it when it’s wrong in a hurtful way, and certainly there a lot of goodness and richness in life that Christians miss out on when they read the bible like that, but the end times per se are not a primary issue to get up in arms about. As far as culture goes, the church’s aim isn’t to smash through all the inferior cultures of the world and convert them to Cantabrigiensism, or whatever we think is ‘better’, but to reform cultures. The bible should altering our cultural expression with on love, grace, meekness, humility, self-control, and so on, not replacing one culture with another, but redeeming it. Some of their ‘American’ attitudes will have to change, but we have in our own culture the same sins just as deeply entrenched, and we can’t set ourselves above these guys even though we might by dint of more careful thinking have a few more facts here and there worked out. The challenge to Christians culturally isn’t to be looking for heresy and going out on a crusade to make people correct, but to engage together on making our hearts right, which is much stronger than being correct.

Finally, if we look at the way these way out guys in America act, at the end of the day we have to make what might be a very uncomfortable association. Calling out heretics, whether we do it ourselves or get goaded into it, is an act of separating ourselves off from other people, and we love to do that to avoid being embarrassed. We look at the creationism in schools mess and thank God we aren’t stupid or otherwise like that, and distance ourselves from all these far out crazy people. We must not, and simply cannot, approach it this way though. At the end of the day, the uncomfortable association is that the I and the students and priests in Cambridge count ourselves alongside those people more than most of the ones we swill port with, however much we disagree. We are with these guys if they follow Jesus, even if they do it so differently to us. The people we look like on our staircases, if they are not with us on the real basics, are counting themselves out of the church. Tough stuff. The plus side is that if we can’t scorn or disown even the crazy nutters in our family, we should be pretty able to strive towards living generously and kindly alongside our friends. We mess up, just like the apocalyptic Americans, and Jesus’ grace has to be enough to justify them and us. We can only hope our friends will forgive us and see that the church is full of Christians committed to changing and growing into the new lives we are being given, and that as we stand alongside the people who embarrass us the most, we won’t reject them either.

This is the biting criticism for some of my friends. Brothers, you are simply not qualified to make the evaluations you are bent on making. I would not speak out so certainly on secondary issues which are complex, nor should you presume to have enough understanding to set yourselves over and above the word of God, and thirdly, you must concentrate your reading and learning on the essential discipleship you need and are lacking.

Firstly, I will illustrate this if I may with a poorly disguised anecdote. May my silly conversations be so used against me if I don’t turn from them. Imagine the scene in a Peterhouse room, discussing some fiddly point regarding the interpretation of language, the bible in particular, and the doctrines of how exactly God can be speaking to us through it. I draw the debate back to the point that God who desires our sanctification does lead us into truth. Slightly awkwardly (and kudos for doing so), I am asked what sanctification is. This is just extraordinary, and rather than picking on one person, I’d like to round on the entire Peterhouse culture of academic arrogance. Does reading one book qualify us to be dogmatically set in our ways? May we all discuss things more cautiously at the very least until we have convinced ourselves that we have pursued with due diligence everything we need to be confident that we have understood God’s word correctly. I’m not going to pull any punches: this guy was making it entirely clear he hadn’t read a single introduction to theology, or more than a couple of the sort of basics-of-the-Christian-life books that IVP publishes, many of which must use the word, not to mention that it crops up in five of the New Testament books.

I can’t make it any clearer: no more than we can set ourselves apart from one group as ‘misguided’ or ‘heretics’ can we attach ourselves firmly to a doctrine until we understand it, which we simply cannot evaluate until we have the basics. Most of all, read the New Testament.

As a side note regarding debating, I’ll make a side-remark on actually listening, which I mentioned in the last post as a motivation for these polemics. I am so often confronted with people who say almost deliberately stupid things to me (a couple of friends in particular). For example, the other night, I heard something pretty much on the level of, ‘Oh, but that’s ridiculous; you can’t be asking us all to wear pink trousers like are’. If you are going to have an argument, please, please, please spend a second or two before blurting out a nonsense to consider what the person you are talking to is actually saying. It’s patently obvious that my statement was being ludicrously misinterpreted because the interpretation totally failed to line up in a basic way with the way I actually do things. Stop and think, because stupid theological positions are made worse when backed up by a total, almost malicious, and certainly insulting refusal to properly consider what your opponent is saying. I am sometimes wrong in my assessments, but we have to open and not dissimulative of our feelings and motivations, and watch lovingly to try and understand what is really going on in someone’s mind. (I don’t hear this complaint against me very often; if I’m deaf comment or drop me an anonymous note in my pidge. I am keen to correct any misunderstanding I have of people’s hearts so I can engage with the real people I am trying to love.)

This leads us to the second point really, one of authority. Not only should we not presume to hold ill-informed positions, but we should utterly afraid of incautiously criticising scripture. In the most direct case, I have some friends who call themselves Christians who simply outright disagree with some of the bible authors. He says something, they don’t like it, and say he’s wrong. This is a supreme arrogance, and we have to call it out when we see it. I think it’s theologically indefensible, but we don’t even need to go there right now. My discussion here is about the moral stature and understanding we would need to claim to be able to get to that point. I was talking once to another friend about sanctification (it’s my favourite topic, after all), and the friend simply did not like what the many passages were saying. He’s hazy on the basics, I’ve never heard even clearly articulate the gospel, and he says pretty directly to me, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m uncomfortable with this so I don’t buy it’. To hold a position against someone else in a debate (and really mean it) demands a certain assessment of our position; to actually ponce around with scripture is extraordinary.

The obvious application again is that even the most liberal of us should demand a very clear understanding of what’s going on beyond our impressions or inclinations if we are to disagree with the bible. Study it, and conduct yourself with all due effort and all available tools, to a degree appropriate to the strength of the position you are trying to hold. At the least, you’re going to have to actually read and few books on theology before presuming to wriggle out of the bible’s teaching on anything (and I mean ‘real books’, which talk seriously about the scriptures, rather than summaries, digests, or other books about books). I know I fall into some difficulties here, because I have only extracts from the church fathers and the mediaeval theologians which Peterhouse chaps seem to like so much. So, please correct me if I claim more expertise than I have. I know what I know, the ABC of the bible’s teaching, but I try not to hold strong positions on whether, for example, I agree with Aquinas.

I have only down-to-earth, factual argument to make (rather than moral), to those who would rather learn from the church than God’s word. To those who say the bible is too hard to understand, that the difficulties in bringing together tricky passages are too great, or that its doctrine is too deep or expressed too deeply for comprehension: If you claim that the squillion disagreements theologians have had, the conflicting church councils, the vastness of the different directions authors take in each century; if you claim that these are necessarily easier to understand, you are off your rocker. If you think that whatever the last church council said was right, you’re naïve to think that novelty makes something right. Perhaps the next council will fix something up with a different emphasis. You’re going from one untrustworthy source to another. Or, perhaps you look back at the great theologians of the past and use some other criterion to show that one council, pope, or writer was the best, or some mishmash of your own. If you think that the language they use is qualitatively more understandable than that of the bible, or that synthesising their writings is easier than that doing the same for the bible authors, you’re having a laugh. Defending something as ‘the bible’s teaching’ is orders of magnitude easier than defending it as ‘the church’s teaching’, and defend it you must, because unless you have some reason to think that someone in particular was (or is) the be-all and end-all of theology, you’ll have to be doing the tricky work of assembling and defending your theology yourself. Sometimes I’m touchy-feely about it, other times I feel I just have to join in Paul’s mocking in 1 Cor. 1, “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?” At the end of the day, when we have to choose between one theologian and another, based on the writings of yet another theologian, and another, we have to admit that we can’t delegate our brain to some confused, brainless, amorphous body, but need to evaluate things for ourselves, and when we trace the thread back, we always come to scripture. It is hard, but not too hard, because God promises his Spirit. Together, as a church, it is the scriptures we study, not each other’s ideas. Sharing our insights and reflections on the scriptures together, we do not scorn their ability to communicate, but turn to them together with trust, unmediated, each one personally meeting Christ our wisdom, together.

The third point is the toughest of all. Where are you applying your efforts? I remember a conversation with a friend who said he was a firm believer in consubstantiation. What! This from a guy who wasn’t sure whether Paul was really teaching in Philippians that sanctification was for all believers? He takes a stand on a comparatively tiny historical blip, a minority doctrine in vogue among subsets of a few denominations, over and against the Catholics, the Anglicans, and most other protestants. We need to grasp hold of the time we have, and spend it reading and studying what is good for us. Fixing up little philosophical niggles by aligning ourselves with something we have seen mentioned in a couple of history books without ever properly examining ourselves is not an acceptable use of time.

Life is not an essay, to skim through a few books, form an opinion, defend it for an hour in a supervision, and move on. We aren’t filling in the gaps. We have to take hold of the central questions of what it is that God does for us, how his reign permeates ever sphere of our lives, how our hearts, minds, wills are going to shaped. What do we expect from life, and what are our real goals? Christ urges us to aim higher: to come before the living God with our sins forgiven, and glory in service which is pleasing to him. He can and will develop every flaw in us to an asset and testimony to his power. Will you set your heart on that, and leave behind foolish controversy? Before walking away from this with the pre-formed conclusion that I am wrong, stop, and soften your heart. Read Philippians, or Colossians, and be struck by the magnificence of God’s grace, and re-affirm that as the centre of our lives, and be determined to see that change brought about in us as we pursue the way of salvation, the newness of life. If we question even these comments, what right do we have to call ourselves followers of Christ? We are all called to lives of repentance and commitment to seeing glory at the end of our transformation, sealed and guaranteed by the cross and the Spirit, so be united with Christ, rather than pursuing fruitless debate, questioning God’s word or faithfulness, and wasting your efforts on that which does not fill your deep and every need with nourishment.

I recently re-evaluted the various options in the market for what is now know as tumbleblogs: small logs of links and snappy content, but without the excessive minimality of Twitter, falling in between that and the full scale of a traditional blog. There are a few main options on the market. Firstly, Google Reader is the simplest, and I suspect has the most users (though Google’s not giving out exact figures). It’s now the most popular web-based feed reader, which is still an indispensable tool even in the age of Twitter and Facebook, so it’s no surprise that several of my friends are using its sharing feature. Items you like in your feeds you can share (like RT), there is a bookmarklet for sharing links to any page, and the much-less-used feature of adding unlinked Twitter-like comments to your stream.

I started using GReader shared feeds a little while back, and I’ve been sharing an item every few days for the last year. There are several drawbacks that led me to wanting to switch:

So, I’m hardly a trend-setter to make the switch so far behind the times, but I realised I would make my use of technology a bit easier if I moved.

The two competitors are Posterous and Tumblr. There are plenty of comparative reviews (such as), and Posterous has its advantages. In the end, it is not quite as flexible, nor as popular in terms of making sharing easier for my friends, nor does its feed and social integration quite manage to do what I want to concoct. Tumblr wins. If you want to make a micro-blog with quotations, links to YouTube videos you like or articles you read, with some commentary, or make short updates to your online status, use Tumblr.

There are various good options for getting content into Tumblr, but not for GReader. I wrote a quick-and-dirty tool to do it. It works for me, but does need some manual tuning. It runs on your own computer rather than a web-service (sorry to Windows and Mac users, who are dependent on other people’s kindness because their operating systems don’t come with enough standard tools to do odd jobs like this—snide, but true). It is PHP though, in case someone does want to do the last mile of work and easily host it as a service.

Get the script.