Marginal Christianity

Paying attention to God is the heart of Christian existence. Duh! Sounds like every Christian platitude, right? I hope by this point you can see that’s not true. Or at least not simple and easy. To counsel someone to undertake paying attention to God is actually to invite them on a harrowing journey into a reality we never imagined. Attention is not simply noticing something but attending to it, engaging with it, and entering into a mutually reciprocal relation with it. When that “it” is God the reality we encounter is personal to the nth degree and full of grace and truth like nothing else we know. We will not remain unscathed in this journey but the wounds we sustain are divine surgery for our healing. An early age in the West faced a world filled with gods and spiritual powers and faced the challenge of discern the right god and powers to attend to.   Later as Western culture changed and entered the modern age the challenge was to sustain faith in the face of on...

This is my attempt to help us see the forest of Root's presentation since we've looked at all the trees. If you need more on any of this you may reread the relevant section of my review or read the book itself! In future posts I will offer some evaluative comments.  SECULAR 1, 2, 3                                                                                                                      ...

This is the last chapter. We've looked at the trees in the forest. The next post will try to give a picture of the forest with a synoptic summary and sketch of the whole of Root's argument. Conclusion: practical steps to consider as the household of ministry The Church “As the household of ministry, the church is the place where we experience the real presence of Jesus as minister . . . the church is a gathering place to receive the ministry of Jesus through the embrace of others.” (4959) “The church’s job is not to fight for space in Secular 2 but to be the outpost of ministry in the world. The only thing the church offers the world is ministry! And this only thing, as we’ve seen, is everything.” (4966) Core Dispositions of church: -gratitude -giftedness -rest Gratitude “The church is first a community of gratitude; receiving the ministry of divine action and experiencing the very being of God through the unveiling of God’s ministerial being, we ...

10. The Music of Formation Secular 3 tells us there is no living person as faith’s content. So we focus on the process of faith formation designed to secure greater commitment to our institutions. Faith formation seeks commitment with faith itself the goal. Separating faith from its content is ultimately untenable. The Music of Ministry “To have faith is to be in Christ; it is to have the faith of Christ because Christ lives in you. The way into Christ is not through a program, a principle, or even a doctrine. The only way “in” to this union, as Michael Gorman says, is through a death experience (the cross, negation).” (3738) Substantiation of our death experience as union in the person of Jesus is that divine action enters as ministry. “Ministry is more than just a generic (natural) relationality; rather, ministry is a form of action that draws spirit into Spirit.” (3753) “Ministry is the deepest form of relationality because in ministry your person is shared in so ...

8. What is Faith? Through the cross of Jesus Paul finds a new divine transcendence emerging from this negation. Faith is a transcendent experience born out of this negation. “Faith for Paul is something ever strange to our modern ears. Faith is actually to enter into Christ; it is to have our own being taken into the being of Jesus.” (2901) We are tied to Jesus’ faithfulness, his ministry. “’Faith’ then, for us, ‘is a complex human experience, and Paul preserves this complexity while giving it a unique twist. While affirming its character as trust and conviction, Paul connects faith to the experience of Jesus as God’s faithful Son. Faith is more than trust; it is also fidelity, or loyalty.’” (2920) Dreaming of Phinehas Phinheas is Saul’s model of righteousness. Only he and Abraham are called righteous in the Old Testament. “He was a young man with a robust, consequential, vital faith—with a personal religious commitment brimming with adjectives. He saw the Israelites...

7: Faith and Its Formation in a Secular Age Subtraction We think of our world in terms of subtraction. For example, we taken prayer out of school, lost our moral guidelines, church attendance has declined.   More liberal folks think if we could just get rid of religion we be more rational and peaceful. Our faith formation, then, becomes a plugging up of the holes caused by this subtraction. But these pragmatic actions don’t work because the problem is not subtraction. Charles Taylor says it this way: “Modernity is defined not just by our ‘losing’ an earlier world, but by the kind of human culture that we have constructed.” [1] It’s not the world we’ve known minus some vital components we can replace but a whole new world. “Rather than subtraction, we’ve added layers of authenticity and youthfulness, creating forms of cultural and social life where ‘the God gap,’ for many, simply isn’t there.” (2458) “The adding of the mass society and its need for consumer want bro...

5: The Rise of Hip The Conquest of Cool Neither the Organization Man of Mass Society and the Bohemian rebels who critiqued them had any use for transcendence. As Root puts it, “The romanticism of bohemians led them to despise the church but to seek the many flavors of spirituality through desire. Organization Man attended and supported the church but flattened it into a bureaucratic institution without spirituality. Both turned to naturalism (either of desire or of science and organization) that had little room for divine action.” (1666) Ad-men hated the Organization Man. He was boring and aesthetically uninteresting. An obstacle to their work. They sought for other ways to ply their trade but until the youth movement got underway there were few alternatives to the Organization Man. The latter’s coup against conformity, its “cool,” seemed to advertisers an ally in their effort to revitalize and energize American business. Cool Competition The Bohemian cool or hip...