Marginal Christianity

I will be suspending Torrance Tuesday in favor of Colin Gunton Tuesday for a while. We’ll work through his important book The One, the Three, and the Many .                                                                                                                                    PART ONE THE DISPLACEMENT OF GOD Introduction Willia...

The American Church was birthed on dualisms which allowed it to morph into a noxious hybrid. This strange creature drained the gospel out of the church’s message and whittled its ministry down to production of good Americans. That gig is over now. The church has been fired as chaplain and Jesus has been demoted to background cheerleader. These dualisms trade on some version of the division between the “spiritual” and the physical, material, or worldly. The church has valorized the former and downplayed or even denigrate the latter. Western culture opted to prioritize the physical, material, and worldly, often in reaction to an effete and powerless church tied to the “spiritual” stuff. We are familiar with them: sacred or secular, church or world, evangelism or justice, Jesus - human or divine, heaven or earth. This dualism ironically made possible the conditions for the church in this country to become that hybrid, the Christendom church, the chaplain of the Good Ship America...

http://lawrencegarcia.org/god-loves-the-animals-a-lent-reflection/ No comments yet Categories: Blogs , Lent 2014 It was never the Triune God’s intention to snatch his elect away from the world of space-time prior to an escalation of violence upon the wicked that would then culminate in total cosmic desolation. This, as is increasingly being recognized, is a tragic misreading of several passages (not least, 1 Thessalonians 4:17) filtered through a dualistic [1] worldview which drives an unnecessary wedge between the material world of space-time and spiritual or metaphysical realities such as “heaven.” Softer forms of this can be detected where Christians speak of “going to heaven when they die” (without the caveat that they will eventually return at the resurrection).   There are, of course, many ways to go about challenging this persistent cosmological dualism so prevalent in the church. Near the top of the list would be better interpretation of the passages in questio...