Marginal Christianity

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2013/10/hellbound-talk-back-part-4-love-power.html Posted on 10.03.2013 Richard Beck  Last week it was my honor to participate in a talkback with filmmaker Kevin Miller after a viewing of Hellbound? . As I mentioned Monday, I am using posts this week to work back through some of the Q&A Kevin and I hosted, the queries we fielded and some of our answers regarding "universal reconciliation in Christ" or "evangelical universalism." Today's post is about love, power, eschatology and universal reconciliation in Christ. The best conversation I had was actually after the Q&A, a talk with Caleb who had read my series "On Warfare and Weakness" (see the sidebar for those posts). You'll recall that in that series I work with the notion (leaning heavily upon John Caputo) that God, being love, is a weak force in the world. Caleb's question had to do with how I reconcile that notion--Go...

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2013/02/being-enough-shame-and-cultures-of.html Posted on 2.25.2013 Last week in my post Good Enough I argued that our cultural success ethos is based upon a lie, a delusional anthropology, a false conception of who we are. Specifically, I argued that our success ethos presumes that we are gods rather than finite creatures. The success ethos--believing we are gods--presumes that we have inexhaustible resources of time, energy and talent that can be leveraged into greater and greater success, improvement, betterment, and excellence. But we aren't gods and we don't have inexhaustible resources. We are finite. We have limits. Only so much energy. Only so many hours in the day. But still the call for more, more, more. Better, better, better. And as I argued last week, the only way for a finite creature to give more, more, more or get better, better, better is to make greater and greater sacrifices. To spread the but...