Marginal Christianity

Here’s a quick test to check yourself. To see you really know what the Bible is really all about. Answer these three questions: -What is the key problem that determines the shape and direction of the Bible’s story? -Would Jesus have come if humanity had never sinned? -Are you going to spend eternity in heaven with God? Now, if you answered “sin,” “no,” and “yes,” you do not quite get what the Bible’s all about. How would I answer these questions, you ask? I’m glad you asked. I’d answer “something that happened before sin came in the picture, yes, and no. If you’d like more detail on my answer just request a copy of the first chapter of a book I’m working on titled What the Bible is All About and I’ll send it to you.

Joy in the Bible One scholar offers this summary of joy in the Old Testament: “In the Old Testament, joy is most frequently mentioned in the Psalms. The Psalmists often exhorted worshippers to shout for joy, dance for joy, and sing for joy before God — in God’s Presence. While there is a place for silence and solemnity before God, from the scriptures it appears that God wants his people to be joyful in his Presence and offer exuberant (and sincere) praise to him. King David delighted in God’s Presence, and he wrote that in God’s presence there is fullness of joy ( Psalm 16:11 ; 21:6 ; cf . Acts 2:28 ) God also wanted his people to be joyful before him when they were celebrating certain appointed festivals, such as the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost) and the Feast of Booths (Tabernacles) ( Deut. 16:11 & 14 ). Joy is a godly attribute.” At the same time profound darkness and depression is an all too regular part of human life as well. Just read Psa.88 ...

This is a follow-up of sorts to an earlier Torrance Tuesday post on Bible Reading. It is from his Reality and Evangelical Theology (Westminster Press. 1981), 16,17,18). “Fundamentalism stumbles at the consubstantial relation between the free continuous act of God’s self-communication and the living content of what He communicates, especially when this is applied to divine revelation in and through the Holy Scriptures. It rejects the fact that revelation must be continually given and received in a living relation with God ­ i.e., it substitutes a static for a dynamic view of revelation. …The practical and the epistemological effect of a fundamentalism of this kind is to give an infallible Bible and a set of rigid evangelical beliefs primacy over God’s self-revelation which is mediated to us through the Bible. This effect is only reinforced by the regular fundamentalist identification of biblical statements about the truth with the truth itself to which they refer. …The living r...

Ch.4: Reading the Bible Redemptively READING THE BIBLE REDEMPTIVELY: ENGAGING TWO HORIZONS Reading the Bible redemptively works from the premise that “movement is meaning.” Even as we read a text as it is on the page to determine its meaning within its lterary context, we must pay attention to its social, historical, and canonical contexts to get a the movement of its meaning that represents the underlying spirit” (103) of the biblical material as a whole. CONCLUSION We must read the Bible both looking backwards and looking forward. If we only read it looking backward from our vantage point in the present we will see only much that seems foreign, primitive, retrograde, and even repulsive to us. And it is! But we also look forward from the text toward its eventual fulfilment in Christ, we may see “ a redemptive side, which often contains partial or incremental movement toward the betterment of human beings.” (103). That these redemptive movements, ...

Spiritual Flaw #1: We’ve Never Known the Real Jesus The American Jesus looks something like this: Jesus as a 1 st century Middle Eastern peasant probably looked something like this: American Christianity forgets that Jesus is a Jew through and through. He cannot be understood apart from that Jewishness. To forget this and to try and read Jesus as an American is to misunderstand the New Testament almost completely. Americans also forget that Jesus is cross-eyed . He sees everything from the perspective of the cross which turns everything in our prudential calculating way of living for ourselves, by ourselves, and by our own strength on its head. His upside-down, out-of-the-box, round peg in a square hole, a question-wrapped-in-a-riddle-surrounded- by-an-enigma life calls all that into question. Any hope we have as Americans in understanding Jesus is to see as black . Unless we see him as one enslaved throughout his li...

                                                           by Alastair Roberts and Andrew Wilson                                                                                                      ...

THE FOUR SIRITUAL FLAWS: WHY CHRISTIANITY DIED IN AMERICA Spiritual Flaw #1: The Jesus We Never Knew                                                              The American Jesus looks something like this: Jesus as a 1 st century Middle Eastern peasant probably looked something like this: American Christianity forgets that Jesus is a Jew through and through. He cannot be understood apart from that Jewishness. To forget this and to try and read Jesus as an American is to misunderstand the New Testament almost completely. Americans also forget that Jesus is cross-eyed. He sees everything from the perspective of the cross which turns everything in our prude...