Marginal Christianity

Ch 4: The Covenant of Vocation            The Heaven and Hell scheme the reformers brought forward from the late Medieval church congeals into a “gospel” that Wright claims is: -Platonized: accepts the material (earth) – spiritual (heaven) dualism and favors the latter over the former. -Moralized: believes the “sin” and its punishment/forgiveness is the basic human problem. -Paganized: the solution is seen as an angry deity who has to be pacified by human sacrifice.         The biblical gospel, on the contrary, is about heaven and earth reunited in the new creation which will host God and humanity in living fellowship through the ages. The problem is not morality but idolatry. And the solution is a loving God who goes to the uttermost to reclaim and restore his lost creatures and creation.         While some versions of reformed theology teach tha...

Ch.2: Wrestling with the Cross, Then and Now           One of the chief claim NTW advances is that atonement must be congruent with eschatology. That is, the means (atonement) God uses must be congruent with the ends (eschatology) toward which he is working. How we conceive God’s goals determines how we will understand his works.           Medieval Catholicism bought into an eschatology of individual salvation from sin and life with God in heaven forever. This its theory of penal substitutionary atonement was congruent with this eschatology.           Luther and Calvin challenged the excesses that Medieval Catholicism developed but never challenged the Heaven-Hell schema that determined its eschatology nor the assumption that the cross had to do with pacifying God’s wrath. They could not, therefore, see the biblical eschatology of new creation...

  Luke Bretherton ABC Religion and Ethics 31 Mar 2015 It should not be the fickle attention of Western media that determines who appears as the subject of care. Uncoupled from contemplation of Christ crucified, we misperceive what suffering looks like. Credit: vincent desjardins / Wikimedia Commons From pictures of poor farmers in Depression era America to bloated children in Sudan, the contemporary aesthetics of poverty subtly reinscribe the ancient division between the children of the soil ( chthonoi ) and children of the gods ( theion ) familiar to us from the Greek and Babylonian myths. Those who live some form of what is often deemed the ideal "Western" lifestyle look down from Olympus with sympathy on the sons and daughters of the soil and their visceral imprisonment to nature and necessity. "We" who benefit from consumer lifestyles, technological advancement and decent sewers contemplate the photographs of stricken faces an...

  0 Sidenotes   One of the most pressing challenges of discipleship and mission that daily confronts me is articulating in word and practice why and how salvation in Christ is good news in a world where Christianity is increasingly perceived as irrelevant to the things that matter most. I am bombarded with this challenge in different places – like in the relational dynamics of my family, in the pressures and complexities of being a pastor to seasoned church-folk, and in the lost and hurting people I regularly encounter at the coffee shop. +   Addressing this challenge involves re-imaging how salvation gets real in the lives we actually live – in the grittiness and fleshiness of embodied life . If we are affirming that salvation is about becoming more, not less, human, I’m learning that the recovery of embodiment is a crucial move. But I’m also learning it doesn’t stop there . We must follow the implications of the incarnation and resurrection a...

http://www.dominicanablog.com/2014/03/25/the-annunciation-and-the-one-ring/ By: Br. Isaac Augustine Morales, O.P. | March 25, 2014 | Posted in: Books , Culture , Saints   In a seemingly insignificant detail in one of the appendices of his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings , J. R. R. Tolkien notes that the destruction of the One Ring and the defeat of Sauron took place on March 25. What might have led Tolkien to date the destruction of the ring with such precision ? Being a devout Catholic, Tolkien most likely was subtly weaving into his work an ancient Christian tradition regarding the Solemnity of the Annunciation, the feast the Church celebrates today.   According to this tradition , the date of the Annunciation coincided with a number of significant events in salvation history. March 25 was not only the day on which Christ was conceived in Our Lady’s womb; it was also the day of the creation of the world, the day Adam and Eve fell, the day Abraham (n...