Marginal Christianity

“ When the fear of death leaves us, the destructive craving for life leaves us too. We can then restrict our desires and our demands to our natural requirements. The dreams of power and happiness and luxury and far-off places, which are used to create artificial wants, no longer entice us. They have become ludicrous. So we shall use only what we really need, and shall no longer be prepared to go along with the lunacy of extravagance and waste. We do not even need solemn appeals for saving and moderation; for life itself is glorious, and here joy in existence can be had for nothing. ” In Heb.2:14-15 we read: “ Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” Richard Beck identifies death as the chief and most powerful reality motivating and shaping huma...

13.       I started this series with no order or end in mind except for this last one. I left out much that could rightly have been included (hence, the “some” in the title). And the discussions are intended to be suggestive and provocative, not exhaustive. I’ve included matters that seem to me important for the church to wrestle with in this time and place. But this final post I always meant to close with because it may be the most important of all I have or could have included here: “the fear of the Lord.” We don’t hear much about this topic today. We’re all about getting the “fear” out of our relationship with God. And in one sense that’s a good thing (see my post on “forgiveness” above). Yet in another equally important sense, loss of “fear of the Lord” may be the most debilitating loss we could sustain. While God does not want us to live in fear of him because we are uncertain of his love or forgiveness or acceptance of us, God does want the awe, wonder, a...

1.     The love of God has triumphed over sin through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Karl Barth puts it memorably: “The Easter message tells us that our enemies, sin, the curse and death, are beaten. Ultimately they can no longer start mischief. They still behave as though the game were not decided, the battle not fought; we must still reckon with them, but fundamentally we must cease to fear them anymore. If you have heard the Easter message, you can no longer run around with a tragic face and lead the humourless existence of a man who has no hope. One thing still holds, and only this one things is really serious, that Jesus is the Victor. A seriousness that would look back past this, like Lot’s wife, is not Christian seriousness. It may be burning behind - and truly it is burning - but we have to look, not at it, but at the other fact, that we are invited and summoned to take seriously the victory of God’s glory in this man Jesus and to be joyful in Him. T...

Richard Beck Posted on 4.05.2016 This week with an interlocutor I was describing the relationship between my books The Authenticity of Faith and The Slavery of Death . Specifically, I see those two books as my attempt to address, for myself, what I've always struggled with as a central question my own faith journey: How can my belief in God be held non-defensively, non-neurotically and non-violently? Pulling from my books, last spring I summarized my answer to that question in a post, but I want to share that summary again for both my conversation partner and because what follows is, in a condensed form, my best answer to what I consider to be one of the most pressing questions facing people of faith and faith communities: How can our beliefs in God can be held non-defensively, non-neurotically and non-violently? Read more at http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2016/04/believing-in-god-non-defensively.html

The Book of the Twelve for Lent 2016 FUD – Zephaniah (1)           Lent 2016 grows old. Holy Week is almost here. The repeated warnings and calls from the Lord for the people to wake up and pay attention to him or calamity, the Day of the Lord, is coming upon them as gone largely unheeded. Yet the Lord continues to cry out to them, hoping against hope, it seems, for a sign of recognition and response. Zephaniah chimes in today keeping God’s voice ringing out clearly to stir the people to repentance.           Perhaps it is good at this point to draw back and ask ourselves why those people of God kept on resisting and resisting his call. Of Jerusalem I thought,      ‘Surely you will fear me     and accept correction!’ Then her place of refuge would not be destroyed,      nor all my punishments come upon her. But they were still eager ...

Jason Soroski jasonsoroski.wordpress.com 2015 14 Dec COMMENTS 27                  This week A Charlie Brown Christmas  aired on national prime time television for the 50th time. In a world where the latest greatest technology is outdated in a matter of months, and social media trends come and go in a matter of days, 50 years of anything becomes quite meaningful. I am a fan of all things nostalgic and all things Christmas, and so when the two are combined I am hooked, and the Charlie Brown Christmas special falls squarely into that category. I was in the first grade back when they still performed Christmas pageants in schools (less than 50 years, but still a very long time ago), and our class performed a version of the Charlie Brown Christmas. Since I was kind of a bookworm and already had a blue blanket, I was chosen to play the part of Linus...

     http://johnpavlovitz.com/2015/01/15/the-greatest-false-idol-of-modern-christianity/ Idolatry is a horrible, dangerous thing. Sadly, far too many Christians are so very guilty of it. You can see it in the way they complain on social media, in the way they comment on the news of the day; in the defeatist, alarmist language that they use as to describe the world. You see it in the way they furrow their brows, and throw-up their hands, and slam their pulpits. It shows-up in the lazy stereotypes and the religious rhetoric that flows so easily in church lobby coffee chats and extremist blog rants. It’s as if everything has now become an imminent threat: Muslims, Atheists, Gays, The President, inner city criminals, Hollywood, illegal immigrants, The Government, school hallways. The world outside the church building is broadly painted as a vile, immoral war zone, with “God’s people” hopelessly  outnumbered and outgunned. Parroting...

1 John 4:7-21 7  Dear friends, let’s love each other, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God. 8  The person who doesn’t love does not know God, because God is love. 9  This is how the love of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him. 10  This is love: it is not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins. 11  Dear friends, if God loved us this way, we also ought to love each other. 12  No one has ever seen God. If we love each other, God remains in us and his love is made perfect in us. 13  This is how we know we remain in him and he remains in us, because he has given us a measure of his Spirit. 14  We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the savior of the world. 15  If any of us confess that Jesus is God’s Son, God remains in us and we remain in God. 1...