Marginal Christianity

A couple of days ago Michael Bird wrote what I take to be the most important post I’ve seen in a long time. It’s titled “Living the Victorious Christian Life?” ( http://www.patheos.com/blogs/euangelion/2017/05/living-victorious-christian-life/ ). It’s a no-holds-barred, no-quarter given expression of that “not much loved” tradition (Moltmann) of the theology of the cross. Scrubbed free of sentimentality and false expectations (“Does it mean having sin conquered, success in your ministries, a fruitful spiritual life, healthy relationships, onward and upward all the time?”), Bird takes the cross as the “means and model” of victory in the Christian life and then claims that “victory looks like defeat, it feels like despair, and it smells like death.” He follows with a litany a la 2 Corinthians 4:7-12 closing with a echo of Leonard Cohen that “Victory is a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.” In the midst of all this living for God that “doesn’t  look  like victory . . . doesn...

Communion     Sharing the life of the triune God means sharing in the rich communion of Father, Son, and Spirit throughout eternity. Communion builds on the Communication we considered in the first post in this series. Otherwise this Communication would remain external to us - coming from the outside. But in Christ this Communication between God and us is rooted in a profound Communion shared between us. The great New Covenant prophecy of Jer.31:31-34, fulfilled in Christ, shows this well: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord , when I will make a new                     covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not                               be like the covenant that I made with thei...

Nothing about being the Bible’s God’s person or God’s people is easy. And that’s just the way it is. It stems from the reality that God has a plan for this world. Every human being has defied that plan and sought to live life as they desire. In each and every case, then, there is no human being who comes into the world who wants to live God’s way. If God had given up and refused to have any more to do with us and abandoned us to our own fate then whatever religions or spiritualities we cooked up for ourselves (for it seems we humans have to worship something as Bob Dylan made clear in his song “Gotta Serve Somebody”) would be pleasing and understandable and doable by us.           But God has never so given up. Instead he launched a subversive counter-revolutionary movement to reclaim and restore his people and his creation to his creational design and plan. God always intended to create a world in which he and his creatures (human and...