Marginal Christianity

A Sandwich to Chew On Mark has a habit of telling stories “sandwich” style. He often starts one (one piece of sandwich bread), interrupts its telling to relate another story (the meat), and then return to finish the first story (another piece of sandwich bread). And just like we eat the bread and meat of a sandwich together, Mark intends us to interpret these two stories together. The bread of this sandwich story is about Jesus and his family. His natural family, having heard about his strange exploits with the supernatural (exorcisms) worry about his mental stability and their own family reputation in the community “Exorcists often invoked a higher spirit to get rid of a lower one, so Jesus’ opponents accuse him of gaining his power for exorcism from sorcery-relying on Satan himself. Insanity (3:21) was often associated with demon possession (3:22). Because false teachers were sometimes thought to be inspired by demons and the official penalty for misleading God’s people this w...

Nov 01st, 2015 0 Comments by Leonard Allen -  It mostly hasn’t hit us yet that we are living in a post-Christendom culture. The cultural status and power that Christianity in America held from about the 1850s to the 1960s is virtually gone. In Christendom, the church occupies a central and influential place in society; after Christendom, it gets pushed to the margins, out of the place of power. And that’s where we find ourselves now—more and more at the margins. So let’s be clear: Any sort of Christian establishment has definitively ended. As David Bentley Hart put it recently, “we now live in the time after Christendom, among the rapidly vanishing fragments of its material culture, bound to it by only a few lingering habits of thought.” Christianity’s loss of cultural power in America is waking us up to the reality that we are in a missionary situation in our own culture. And this is forcing us to rethink our mission, our theology, and our priorities. http://www.l...

August 26, 2015 by Frederick Schmidt 3 Comments \ For many of us it can be hard to believe that the Holy Spirit speaks in a way that is real or helpful. That struggle can be traced to a number of factors: We live in a culture that doesn’t expect God to “show up.”  When we do talk about the work of the Holy Spirit, we use rarified, impenetrable, stained-glass language.  And most of what we expect to hear in listening to the Spirit is couched in such pious jargon that we find it hard to believe that any of it applies directly to us. I’ve come to the conclusion that often what the Spirit of God has to say to us is far more practical, blunt, and candid.  Here are a few things I’ve heard or that others have reported hearing: One: Just do something. Responding to the will of God is not necessarily about doing the one, right, thing —  unless moral considerations are at stake – and even then, there may be more than one faithful choice to make. God trusts us wi...

                                                              Triune Servanthood The title of this chapter is another echo of C. S. Lewis:   this time his book of essays God in the Dock .   While Lewis’ essays offer a variety of defenses of God and the things of God that modern culture has questioned and placed “in the dock,” this chapter of the Shack features Mack getting to know Jesus as they watch the stars “on the dock.” The chapter begins with Mack observing Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu winsomely interacting as they prepare a meal. As they eat the three ask Mack about his family and friends, except Missy. When Mack allows that it seemed like they were hearing all ...

Posted on September 10, 2014 by David Guretzki A longstanding criticism of Karl Barth has been that his christocentrism so overpowers his theology that pneumatology often seems to take a theological back-seat. This was especially noted by Robert Jenson’s famous article cleverly entitled, “You wonder where the Spirit went” [ Pro Ecclesia II (1993): 296–304.] Jenson, and others, while highly sympathetic to Barth’s theology, nevertheless are concerned that Barth’s christological centre is so unmoving that sometimes all we hear is “Jesus Christ” when we would expect to be hearing “Holy Spirit.” This critique focused especially upon Barth’s pneumatology as evident in the  Church Dogmatics (CD).  [For a similar critique, see Eugene Rogers, “The Eclipse of the Spirit in Karl Barth,” In Conversing with Barth , 173–90. London: Ashgate, 2004.]   In reviewing Barth’s chapter in Evangelical Theology (ET)  entitled, “The Spi...

Unless we know we’re in a battle, we’ll never have the urgency necessary for faithfulness. Unless we know God’s big picture/story of where he taking this world and what he created it for, we’ll never live or bear witness to the gospel properly. Unless our community is relationally thick enough to share the disciplines and rigors of our battle, we cannot help but give in, give out, or give up in our struggle. Unless we re-educate ourselves to read good novels and poetry and free our imaginations to play with biblical patterns and images, we will keep on reading the Bible in the flat, linear, idealist ways that have brought us to our current impasse. Unless we rediscover the Spirit in more than the now traditional Pentecostal and charismatic ways but as the Nicene Creed puts it, “the Lord, the giver of life,” who sends us into the life he gives to bear witness to its triune Creator and Redeemer, we will never know who we truly are and what we are to be about in the world.

          The dove is a standard and venerable sign of the Holy Spirit – and a good one it is.   Yet the point of this symbol for the Spirit is not readily evident for most of us today.   So I propose one of more recent vintage that none of us will have difficulty understanding.   In 1972 John V. Taylor wrote a now classic book about the Spirit, The Go-Between God .   He visioned the Spirit as God who goes between people and works to bring them together.   He offers a + sign as apt image for this “go-between” God.           In the formula 1+1 the numerals designate individuals and the +-sign the Spirit.   We often think of the Spirit as the presence of God within us.   And that’s true.   But it’s not the whole truth.   The Spirit is also God active in the world standing between individuals and groups and working on both to bring them into unio...

           Biblically, the Holy Spirit is the life-giving, gift-bestowing presence of God who carries out this role by informing, forming, and conforming God’s people and his creation into the image of Jesus Christ.           Flourishing is the fingerprint of the Spirit – creational flourishing, human flourishing, social flourishing.   The presence and gifts of the Spirit enable and celebrate flourishing.           Human flourishing means creatures reaching their intended calling and vocation.   Created in God’s image, humans are to be God’s royal representatives through creation and reflectors of God’s will and way to and for creation.   God the Spirit works our calling out in us and our vocation out through us.   Yet this work of God the Spirit engages us in all the depth, height, length, and breadth of our being. ...

Without the Holy Spirit God is far away. Christ stays in the past, The Gospel is simply an organization, Authority is a matter of propaganda, The Liturgy no more than an evolution, Christian loving a slave morality. But in the Holy Spirit The cosmos is resurrected and grows with The birth pangs of the kingdom. The Risen Christ is there, The Gospel is the power of life, The Church shows forth the life of the Trinity, Authority is a liberating science, Mission is a Pentecost, The Liturgy is both renewal and anticipation, Human action is deified. -Patriarch Ignatius, address to the Assembly of the World Council of Churches, 1968.