Marginal Christianity

8. What is Faith? Through the cross of Jesus Paul finds a new divine transcendence emerging from this negation. Faith is a transcendent experience born out of this negation. “Faith for Paul is something ever strange to our modern ears. Faith is actually to enter into Christ; it is to have our own being taken into the being of Jesus.” (2901) We are tied to Jesus’ faithfulness, his ministry. “’Faith’ then, for us, ‘is a complex human experience, and Paul preserves this complexity while giving it a unique twist. While affirming its character as trust and conviction, Paul connects faith to the experience of Jesus as God’s faithful Son. Faith is more than trust; it is also fidelity, or loyalty.’” (2920) Dreaming of Phinehas Phinheas is Saul’s model of righteousness. Only he and Abraham are called righteous in the Old Testament. “He was a young man with a robust, consequential, vital faith—with a personal religious commitment brimming with adjectives. He saw the Israelites...

by Joel Green While teaching at a conference some years ago, I was startled when a participant announced that he could not imagine how any Republican could claim to take the Bible seriously. Not long afterward, I witnessed a repeat performance in another setting, except in this case we were told that Republicans alone read Scripture correctly. This reminds me of what I imagine to be a first-century “battle for the Bible”: Pharisees, Christ-followers, and Sadducees, all reading the same Scriptures but reading them quite differently, and reaching diverse conclusions about the nature of faithfulness to God. How can this be? Clearly, a lot has to do with our formation as readers of Scripture and not only with the words written on the page. This underscores the importance of reading Scripture as a “practice,” since the idea of “practice” assumes circularity: Formed by our reading of Scripture, we become better readers of Scripture. This is not because we become better skilled ...

“The task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it.” — Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor I am on a journey. I know I am not the only one. I am on a journey to know God, a journey to be seamlessly integrated into the life of God, into what Eugene Peterson calls “all the operations of the Trinity.” Our God, the Christian God, is not a stagnant monolith. As we Christians speak of God, we do not talk about a God who is immovable, impersonal, or impenetrable. We have not received a faith tradition which describes God as a long-forgotten, far-removed idea or an insignificant element tucked away in the material attributes of all things. Our God has existed from before the beginning as a dynamic, self-giving, active, moving, living, communion of persons: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We find our journey on the well-traveled path of our faithful a...

http://inamirrordimly.com/2013/03/18/here-comes-a-confusing-article-about-radical-discipleship/ North American Christians have a lot of anxiety about whether we’re living “radical enough” as disciples of Jesus. We all want to learn how to get it right, and so we’ve been buying lots of books and hearing lots of people speak about how to live as a radical Christian. Some have made costly personal commitments to live simply or even in poverty. It was only a matter of time before someone asked, “Is all of this radical stuff actually working?” Let’s talk about the Christianity Today article Here Come the Radicals by Matthew Lee Anderson that attempts to answer that question. The cover image features caricatures of Shane Claiborne, Francis Chan, and David Platt. Platt, sadly, got the largest head in the illustration and the bulk of the attention in the article. With a teaser that mentions all three, Claiborne and Chan get passing references with the bulk of the arti...