Marginal Christianity

Paying attention to God is the heart of Christian existence. Duh! Sounds like every Christian platitude, right? I hope by this point you can see that’s not true. Or at least not simple and easy. To counsel someone to undertake paying attention to God is actually to invite them on a harrowing journey into a reality we never imagined. Attention is not simply noticing something but attending to it, engaging with it, and entering into a mutually reciprocal relation with it. When that “it” is God the reality we encounter is personal to the nth degree and full of grace and truth like nothing else we know. We will not remain unscathed in this journey but the wounds we sustain are divine surgery for our healing. An early age in the West faced a world filled with gods and spiritual powers and faced the challenge of discern the right god and powers to attend to.   Later as Western culture changed and entered the modern age the challenge was to sustain faith in the face of on...

I wrote in the last post in this series “from a Christian perspective, any serious search for one’s authentic self has the potential to make contact with the self’s gracious createdness by God.” To that I would add today that our authentic selves are vouchsafed in Christ and we have been graciously included in all he has done for us. Creation is redeemed in Christ and it is there we find our authentic selves, our true identity. Paying attention to God entails saturating ourselves in this knowledge until it becomes our self-knowledge, until its reality shapes and reshapes us into its image, until we are able to “find the divine in the human, life in suffering, strength in weakness” (Andrew Root). That is, until we are sufficiently conformed to the image of Christ (which is God’s will for us, Rom.8:29) to find in him the God. We can do this in a number of ways I’ll look at in a future post in this series. The God we pay attention to is the One who comes to us as a minist...

Charles Taylor ( A Secular Age) , and building on his work, Andrew Root ( Faith Formation in a Secular Age) , detail the rise and significance of the “Age of Authenticity” in their respective works. We live fully immersed in that age so unless we are of sufficient age we cannot remember or imagine the age of conformity, civility, and obedience that preceded it. The Age of Authenticity began in earnest with the Youth and Countercultural movements of the 1960’s (though it had earlier precedents). The central tenet of this age is that the conformity, civility, and expectation of obedience of the previous era was repressive and oppressive in hindering us from realizing our true selves. With the dawning of the Age of Aquarius the youth culture revolted against the inauthenticity of the previous epoch and set out to “find themselves.” And we’ve been doing it ever since. There are plusses and minuses to this as with every shift of culture. The primary minus is that it centers...

          Our relationship to God occurs in at least three grammatical moods. First, is the indicative mood. Faith in this mood is declarative, stating what is true, usually with a fairly high degree of certainty. Fundamentalists of all stripes (right, left, center) can be found here. Intellectual assent is the key virtue in this mood.           Secondly, we have the imperative mood. Here demand is the main thing. The rules are there and they must be kept. Purity cultures (again, of all stripes) thrive on this imperative mood. Taboo subjects like sex are high profile here. Performance is the key.           Thirdly, we have the subjunctive mood. Here we find the “perhaps, maybes, hopes, doubts, perplexities” of faith. This is the mood we all live in much of the time if we’re honest. The rough edges and loose ends of life are where this mood th...