Marginal Christianity

We’ve already noted that thinking that God is in control misconstrues how the Bible portrays God’s rule and how God relates to his world in the first pose of this series. I got that insight from Tim Gombis who is doing a multipart series on this theme too. In one of his posts he explores additional ways this way of thinking inhibits a proper understanding and practice of our faith. We will follow him and look at those problematic implications in this post, three in particular: -it provokes unbiblical ways of responding to suffering. -it hinders us from taking to heart the ways scripture directs us to respond to pain. -it does not accurately picture how biblical writers address God’s anxious people who face suffering. Gombis addresses in particular the way this view of God’s control affects our imagination which, as C. S. Lewis argues, complements reason, which “ is the natural organ of truth” while “imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors o...

Well, pretty much everything, we’ve discovered. Imperial domination of our lives reduces us to a simulacra, a parody of the life God intends for his creatures. It robs us of our energy, strength, creativity, and power rendering us somnambulent unparticipants in our living. Joy restores all that to us and for us. It is a gift of God that often unexpectedly lays hold of us and reorients our lives back to their true north. This paragraph at the beginning of 1 Peter says it well: 3  Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4  and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5  who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6  In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, 7...

I am a Scrooge at Christmas, I admit it. It frustrates my wife. Exasperated, she asked me the other night why I dislike Christmas so much. I’ve been thinking about how I would answer that since then. As far as I can tell, I think a certain experience, family experience, and theological development play key roles. That certain experience happened when I was about 10 years old. My family went to the Christmas Eve service at our church. We arrived late enough to find empty space only on the first pew. I was seated on the aisle. As the choir began to process down the aisle to the choir loft past me, I suddenly burst into tears. Sobbing uncontrollably, my parents tried to settle me down without drawing embarrassing attention to my outburst. I could not explain why I was crying. But after I settled down a bit, I realized that the onset of the service sparked a question in my mind that I couldn’t get rid of and it saddened me deeply. “Why did they have to kill him (Jesus)?” was the q...

In perhaps one of the greatest chapters in the book Lewis offers a grand and gorgeous and sensuous description of a place ever penned. The unfallen grandeur of the planet, its virginal character, its unimaginable beauty is so masterfully done by Lewis that it defies my ability to summarize or do justice to. You really need to just read it for yourself. One can only imagine this setting if one imagined oneself sitting in Eden trying to write down what one saw, felt, and experienced. This “warm, maternal, delicately gorgeous world” (3092) defies, as I said, my poor ability to summarize Lewis’ description of it. I confine myself to a few brief comments and leave it for you to read and luxuriate in the original. Excess is perhaps the best single word to capture this unfallen reality. Lewis communicates this is many ways in this chapter, only three of which I draw your attention to: 1.             Lewis notes that the reality of Perelandra exceeds...

In this chapter we read of the preparation for and the journey of Ransom to Perelandra and back. For our purposes of Christian reflection two matters stand out. The first is that Ransom is to travel to Perelandra in a coffin-shaped container and that he is to travel naked. To my mind, and I suspect Lewis’ too, this can scarcely be other than his way of speaking about our lives with God in Christ as having the shape of the cross (or cruciform). As Christ died hanging naked on a cross so Ransom “dies” (hence the coffin-shaped container) to his old life and is borne naked into his new one. Candidates for baptism in the early church would strip of their old clothes, signifying their old way of life, descend into the baptismal font naked, and arise from it to receive a white robe signifying their new life. Surely there are echoes of that here as well. Does remembrance of your baptism play any role in your walk with God today? Do you live with the awareness that, in all truth,...

After character Lewis confesses that he had his own encounter with an eldil and has been “drawn in” to Ransom’s adventure, he confesses “Yet here we were both getting more and more involved in what I could only describe as interplanetary politics” (2656). And Ransom later says to character Lewis, “You are feeling the absurdity of it. Dr. Elwin Ransom setting out single-handed to combat powers and principalities. You may even be wondering if I’ve got megalomania” (2877). It seems fair, then, to claim that “interplanetary politics” and “powers and principalities” refer to the same thing St. Paul tells us that the church struggles against “principalities and powers” and not flesh and blood (Eph.6:12). ” Principalities and powers” are created good (Col.1:16) to establish and sustain the conditions that make and keep human life human and humane. They somehow fell and rebelled against God and each sought supremacy over the others and humanity. The result is the chaotic and intractable p...

C. S. Lewis stars as himself in this opening chapter to Perelandra . This is more than simply a literary device to hook readers into the story. How CSL describes his approach to his relationship to Elwin Ransom and the rather odd (to say the least) circumstances of his life bear an uncanny likeness to his own coming to faith in God as he wrote it up in his book Surprised by Joy . I think we do well, then, to read this chapter as the confession of faith of one who described his real life turning to God in these words: “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now ...

12  1-2  So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (The Message) Fifth Sunday in Lent Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. God will change us “from the inside out” as we seek him and his will for us above all else (Mt.6:33). But God will not change us without us! It the relational Paul has been pushing us toward all Lent in this text. I...

Acts 4:5-12  5 The next day the leaders, elders, and legal experts gathered in Jerusalem, 6 along with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, Alexander, and others from the high priest’s family. 7 They had Peter and John brought before them and asked, “By what power or in what name did you do this?” 8 Then Peter, inspired by the Holy Spirit, answered, “Leaders of the people and elders, 9 are we being examined today because something good was done for a sick person, a good deed that healed him? 10 If so, then you and all the people of Israel need to know that this man stands healthy before you because of the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene—whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead. 11 This Jesus is the stone you builders rejected; he has become the cornerstone! 12 Salvation can be found in no one else. Throughout the whole world, no other name has been given among humans through which we must be saved.” This episode or sequel to Jesus’ resurrection brings us face to...