Marginal Christianity

“ God with a Scowl ”           “God” is the most dangerous word in any language. Dangerous because we invest it with so much of our search for significance and security. Dangerous because it can become whatever we rely on as our “ultimate concern” (Paul Tillich). Dangerous because we will do anything for whatever we deem “God.” And “believers” have and continue to do horrendous things in the name of their “God.”           Now all of us are “believers.” There’s something or someone that’s the bottom line for us and helps us make sense of our world and respond to the issues we face in life. I am only concerned here with the Christian deity, though. That that “God” has a major PR problem at present is no secret to anyone.           Part of this PR problem comes from the miserable track record of his people representing in the world, including ...

The Book of the Twelve for Lent 2016 The God of the Book of the Twelve – Hosea (2) Ash Wednesday           Lent begins with Ash Wednesday’s great call to national repentance from the Book of the Twelve in Joel 2. We will get to Joel 2 in time but we will not start there in our reflections. We will start where everything Christian starts – with God. More particularly, with YHWH, the covenant, personal, familial God of Israel.           Everything, I mean everything, in life begins with and is colored by who we believe God to be. In 1995 Joan Osborne released her hit song “One of Us.” In it she asked two questions:           - If God had a name what would it be? -If God had a face what would it look like? Is God personal and can we know God, these are the questions whose answers determine in large measure the tenor and texture of o...

          Bradley Jersak’s A More Christlike God is a sort of summation or primer on the last 15 years or so of rethinking God, especially around atonement issues. For many years now I’ve loved my tradition’s (the PCUSA) emphasis that, as I put it, the distinctive claim Christians make is not about how godlike Jesus is, but rather how Jesus-like God is! As you can tell from his title, Jersak agrees. And reclaiming this understanding of God is the big take away from the discussion I mentioned above.           Not that we ever should have lost this heartbeat of Christian faith, but tragically, we did. We too easily accepted damnable surrogates from the culture around us and as we tried to put Christian faith to illicit uses (behavior and social control). Jersak mentions four common false surrogates: God the doting grandfather, God the deadbeat dad, God the punitive judge, and God the Santa Cl...