Marginal Christianity

Royal Priests I’m not a prophet nor the son of a prophet. But I know who you are and what you are to do with your life. Let me say that again: I know who you are and what you are to do with your life. And if you’ll give me 10 minutes I tell you. That’s all, 10 minutes. I’m not selling anything or asking you to support anything. I want only 10 minutes of your time. If you don’t want to hear what I have to say, fine. Go on your merry way. But if you’ve spent any time wondering who you really are and whether you’re doing something that aligns with who you truly are, take a listen. It might be the most important thing you ever hear. Not because I’m saying it – heavens no! But because of what is said. It’s nothing I thought up on my own, I’m not that smart. Nor did I receive it directly from God. I’m not that holy. I got this from a variety of folks who in the last 30 years or so have taught us to read the Bible better than we ever did before. I borrowed freely from them and that’s w...

A Bonhoefferian Take on Evangelism Evangelism, under the sway of the 16 th century’s emphasis on the individual person’s (sinner) relation to God (judge and forgiver), saw people as needing to know they were miserable sinners in God’s sight and that they ought to avail themselves of his gracious forgiveness. Evangelism calibrated to this theology sought, then, to find others’ weaknesses and sins and bring them the good news of the gospel (as they understand it).   As long as the sense of guilt before God was strong in our culture, this approach seemed effective. I say seemed, because whenever we met someone for who life was going well, were decent people, successful, good marriage, children doing well, etc. we discovered our gospel has little to say to them. And as the sense of guilt before God ceased to be potent culture reality the gospel was speaking a language fewer and fewer people could or wanted to understand. The world had changed. The 20 th was no longer the...

In my book The Incredible Shrinking Gospel I proposed that we re-imagine the church as God’s “subversive counter-revolutionary movement”, the gospel as God’s announcement of his decisive victory over the powers of division, death, the devil in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth. Evangelism, then, is God’s call to humanity to enlist in this subversive counter-revolutionary movement whereby Jesus is setting humanity and creation on the path to God’s primal design for them. Thus evangelism has a number of similarities to “military” recruitment. Jesus doesn’t so much “offer” the gospel to religious seekers as call people to “follow” him and serve in his Kingdom (= God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement). Baptism serves as an “induction” ritual into this service and their training (“Boot Camp”) in acquiring the skills and weapons of the “violence of love” (Oscar Romero) is their apprenticeship to Jesus as he makes his ways through Galilee and on to Jerusalem. As with eve...

Hannah Matis November 29, 2016 Ed Watson’s recent post here at Covenant asked, What is preventing a new Oxford Movement in the Episcopal Church today? Watson was responding to a 2012 post by Fr. Robert Hendrickson. Zachary Guiliano then followed up , mentioning a potential missing element: an emphasis on Scripture and personal holiness. However, in the wake of the November election, it seems a question worth revisiting for a fourth time. I am very conscious that I speak as a committed layperson within the Episcopal Church, and therefore not in a position to practice directly what I preach. I believe, however, that what I discuss below should be a necessary part of the conversation. As a historian, reading both Watson’s and Hendrickson’s posts, I was struck by the extent that their framing, and therefore their definition, of the Oxford Movement was purely theological and liturgical. A revival of the Oxford Movement, by this definition, would consist in asserting the...

1.     Jesus is NOT your “personal Lord and Savior.” He is Lord and Savior but he is not yours. You are his. His mission to reclaim and restore God’s wayward creatures and damaged creation is much bigger than any individual. Better to say that what Jesus is up to is not about us, but we have graciously been included in what he is doing. 2.     You will NOT spend eternity in heaven with God. Heaven is a way station for whatever happens to us after death. Resurrection to a new body and life together with God on the new earth is our eternal destiny (“life after life after death” as N.T. Wright cleverly puts it”). 3.     You will NOT spend eternity as a quasi-angelic choir member strumming harps and singing praise to God. Not that God isn’t worthy of praise but he seems more interested in us doing something else: reigning (Rev.22:5). Or in other words, we will spend eternity doing what humans were created to do – represent ...

Mon, 11/05/2015 - 15:45 Hell Like a lot of people who promote the doctrine of hell as a place of eternal suffering, J.D. Greear insists, in a recent post on the Gospel Coalition site , that he would happily erase the belief from Christian teaching if he could, but he can’t because it’s in the Bible, so we have to live with it. Moreover, in his view, we can’t fully understand God and his world unless we come to terms with the doctrine. To that end he sets out “seven truths” that he thinks should frame our discussion of the topic. The problem is that the fact of hell is merely taken for granted—we are asked to take C.S. Lewis’ word for it. You would have thought that a set of seven framing truths would have a demonstrable biblical or theological relationship to the doctrine that supposedly sits in the middle of them. But they don’t. They are arbitrary and incoherent; they don’t appear to frame anything in particular; and where scripture does come into the picture, it is spe...

N. T. Wright has played a major role in the rethinking of the gospel (among other things) by and for the church in the last 25 years. In Simply Good News he pulls together various threads of that rethinking of the gospel, the good news, in a popular presentation.   The first two chapters considered in this post lay the groundwork for the rest of his presentation.   In the first section of this blog I’ll summarize Wright’s content and follow that with a brief reflection. Content (chs.1-2) What do you mean when you say the gospel is “good news”? Surprisingly, perhaps, not all Christians mean the same thing by this phrase.   -Some mean a new set of religious ideas about God, humanity, and the world.           –Others mean a new way of living, a new morality that will improve one’s life.                      –Yet other...

This cursory list of “Who we are” and “Who we have become” makes an essential point for evangelism in the 21 st century.   Who We Are Who We Have Become Beloved children Sinners Royal Priests Rebellious Creatures Human Sub-Human Made for Community Isolated Billiard Balls Slaves of God Slaves to Self Part of Creation Estranged from Creation Caretakers of Creation (Ab)users of Creation Traditional evangelism has for the most part addressed the latter category and offered of gospel of the forgiveness of God and our acceptance in Christ through his sacrifice on the cross.   It focuses on our reclamation from what we have become. However, the gospel, while addressing our need for such reclamation, goes further and calls us to receive the gift of who we are in creation, forfeited by us, ane...

http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/?p=4395 Posted on  April 16, 2014  by  David Fitch   —   1 Comment ↓ Growing up in Canada, (an intentionally bi-lingual country), I would read the  cereal boxes  every morning in both  French and English . I would learn what  French  words meant in a French built around the vocabulary of breakfast cereal. It was an entry point into a whole entire world of French if I would just follow its discipleship (which regrettably I never really did). I still remember more French from the cereal boxes than I do from the endless all comprehensive French classes I had from third grade on because there the French was decontextualized. There’s a lesson here in the how’s and why’s of contextualizing the gospel. It illustrates that contextualizing the gospel is about finding an entrance point and being confident that any given entrance point into the true gospel will lead to the whole of the gospel if one foll...

Most of us would rather go down a slide of razor blades into a pool of alcohol than share our faith with someone!   Well, maybe not.   But nearly all of us are at least hesitant if not heartily resistant to doing it.   Right? While most of us don’t like the packaging (not to mention the theology) of simple formulaic approaches like the Four Spiritual Laws or the Romans Road or questions like “If you died tonight do you know where you’d go?   (And the answer’s not “into a grave,” you smart alecs out there!) However, we don’t any alternatives.   There’s an old joke about what you’d get if you crossed a Presbyterian (which is what I am) with a Jehovah’s Witness:   someone who’ll knock on your door but has nothing to say! But seriously, what would/should we say about Christian faith to an interested listener? Seems to me there are two aspects:   What is the Gospel? and What does it means for people today? What is the Gospel?   Accord...