Marginal Christianity

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/04/being-certain-of-god-not-our-beliefs-is-the-mark-of-the-spiritual-life/ April 30, 2014  By  Peter Enns   0 Comments The following was posted as “Gracious Uncertainty,” the  daily reading  (April 29) at  My Utmost for His Highest  (I made my own paragraph divisions). My Rector at  St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church , Dave Robinson, sent this to me. When you preach 12 minute homilies  you’ve got extra time for passing on nice things like this. The text for these reflections is 1 John 3:2,  …it has not yet been revealed what we shall be… Our natural inclination is to be so precise—trying always to  forecast  accurately what will happen next—that we look upon uncertainty as a  bad thing . We think that we must reach some predetermined goal, but that is not the nature of the spiritual life . The nature of the spiritual life is that we are certain in our uncertainty. Consequ...

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/14/certainty-is-idolatry/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PatheosJesusCreed+%28Blog+-+Jesus+Creed%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher Oct 14, 2013 @ 0:02 By Scot McKnight Leave a Comment Here’s the argument: we are born with an ache and yearning to find love in the unconditional love of God, and we find this yearning in our desire for “more” and the idea of Sehnsucht ; this yearning is to enter into the love of God — the trinitarian community love of Father, Son and Spirit; this love is seen most clearly in the cross of Christ — Calvary; in that revelation we see pure divine love for us. Yet, our sinfulness distorted our yearning and turned into forms of idolatry. We are addicted to idols. This is the central theme of Greg Boyd,  Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty . The key orientation, certainty, is found in a number of ways — craving the next experience, sexua...