#changed 2.0

[wutbju]

The question Jim Berg asked himself in 1999 is the same question he claims to have continually asked himself in 2018:

Do I consider the material I am examining essential for my daughters' pursuit of God and godliness, or is it merely peripheral? Is this idea or that thought indispensable for their walk in the Spirit, or is it only incidental? And most important, will it stir within them a thirst for God, a hunger for His Word, and a desire to represent Him well as salt in the earth?

Read it closely. Is God something to be pursued? Is being LIKE God something to be pursued? Is God just a trophy at the end of a race? 

Does salt “represent” something outside itself? Is that what salt does? 

Do you salt your baked potato so it better represents the sheer ontology of potatoness? Do you throw salt on the sidewalk in January so that the sidewalk can represent cement better? 

Absolutely not. Salt preserves. Salt improves the sheer pleasure of something.  Ironically enough, nothing has changed in Changed 2.0. It’s the same wrong-headed heresy that it was the first go-round.

You don’t listen, Jim. You never have. You ask these spiritual-ish questions but you don’t want any answers. 

Sounds like Romans 1.

[wutbju]

Berg starts his CIHI 2.0 with the same justification as he started his first version. As if it were a corporation, Berg wrote a “Mission Statement” for his family when his youngest was still in Middle School. 

Read it:

The Mission of Our Family

To passionately know our God, and to love and please Him by living together in harmony, serving each other in humility, growing together in godliness, helping others with cheerfulness, and thereby, as a family, to provide a "living advertisement" of Christlikeness for others in this generation and for our children in the generations to come.

What is the purpose of the Berg family? To be a “show window” of “Christlikeness.” To sell a lifestyle of being god-like. 

Berg has commodified his own family when they were as young as twelve to sell a something that’s “like” god.  Makes everything fall into place.

[wutbju]

This is how Ken Collier begins Changed into His Image. The bolded phrase is the new 2.0 addition. 

But notice -- the superlatives begin right out of the gate:

Although I have long enjoyed studying about the great campaigns of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg remained a puzzle to me even though I had read several books about this strategic battle. Not until I sat in the bleachers surrounding a thirty-by-thirty-foot lighted map of the battle at the Gettysburg Visitor Center did the battle make sense to me. Although the map has since been retired with the building of a new welcome center, I always wanted to find the map's designer, shake his hand, and give him my heartfelt thanks for helping me see the big picture. 

Changed into His Image is like that large-scale, grand, lighted map to me.

Jim Berg’s book gives “a panoramic view of what God expects.”

And here I thought Jesus gave us the exact picture of what God expects.