Over on http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/ there’s this interesting announcement:

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Wednesday, 4 June 2008

OMG. Srsly? LOL!

The Better Bibles Blog points us to a new Bible translation: yep, you guessed it, an entire Bible in LOLCatSpeak. To give you a general idea, here’s the translation of 1 Timothy 1:17-20:

“Dear Invisibl Ceiling Cat, u pwn; plz hav honor n glory 4ever kthxbai. OK Timothy, now iz time 4 u 2 fite da good fite,19 wif fayth n good conscience n stuff, not liek Hymenaeus n Alexander cuz dey say bad stuffs about Ceiling Cat, so I makeded them go 2 hel HAHAHAHAHA lusers.”

You can also read a translation of all the arguments for God’s existence. And here’s the translation of the Lord’s Prayer:

Praise Ceiling Cat, yu be watchin us, yu can has cheezburger.
Wut yu want, yu gets, srsly.
In ceiling and on teh flor.
Giv us dis day our dalee cheezburger.
And furgiv us for makin yu a cookie, but eateding it.
And we furgiv wen cats steel our cookiez.
An do not let us leed into teh showa, but deliver us from teh wawter.
Ceiling Cat pwns all. He pwns teh ceiling and teh floor and walls 2.
Forevur and evuhr. Amen.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, the only theological problem with this project is that God is translated “Ceiling Cat,” while Satan becomes the “Basement Cat.” So there’s, like, two Big Cats in town? Srsly?

Thanks for the site, Tom.

Here is something that caught my eye:

(In the artidle that goes "Sunday, 25 May 2008, Transformation theology: Oliver Davies responds")

. . .

Firstly, there is a small but massively influential Christological deficit. We don’t know “where the body of Jesus is”. We accordingly read the ascension as marking the absence of Christ, whereas it properly marks his presence in a new and more powerful way. Spirit and Church come to take the place of the body (as Jenson and others suggest), which just confuses a traditional Trinitarian structure of mediation (common ousia) with an innovative structure of substitution. We’ve lost the body but, hey, we still have the Spirit and the Church, so that’s okay!

There are two big problems with this. We lost the doctrinal affirmation that Christ continues to exist bodily (the “local” existence of scripture and tradition) in a mode which is fully human and fully divine – and we lost this on the grounds of changes in cosmology which were only ever expressive of the doctrine and never defining of it. Did we really want to do that? We keep the consequences of the ascension (i.e. Spirit of Pentecost and Church, universal presence of Christ) but can’t relate to the ascension itself (since it is expressed in terms of an alien cosmology).

That doesn’t seem right to me, since it shifts the axis of incarnation away from real time and space (where the living, wounded and ascended body of Christ must in some real sense be, if Christ is still fully human and fully divine) to ourselves as observers, meaning-makers, beautiful theoreticians, etc. If we have lost the reality of the continuing incarnation (contra Mt 28:20) since we lost a particular view of heaven as the place to “put” the body, then, never mind, we still have ourselves! And the human mind is a wonderful thing. If we no longer look to discover incarnational revelation in our space and time, in the actuality of our embodied lives, then we can nevertheless think it there: by the power of the creative intellect. And we have the sacraments too of course. To point to the sacraments is to point to Christ (never mind if sacramental theology was predicated in its origins on the real existence of Christ in heaven, without which we get substitution again and not the mediation which is the bedrock of classical sacramental theory). The affirmation that Christ still lives and is still embodied needs the corresponding affirmation that he is still in real relation to our space and time on his own account and not by virtue of substitution, which would imply that he has simply “gone off the radar”.