Marginal Christianity

 Exposition Luke’s elegantly written preface expresses his intent in writing this gospel. Luke is traditionally thought to be a Gentile doctor and cohort of Paul (though the gospel itself is anonymous and Luke is a common Greco-Roman name). Aware that “many” have already set down accounts about the events “that have been fulfilled” in their midst, that is, God’s promises to his people in Jesus, he decides to draw up his own to add to their number. Luke believes he has something to say about these things that will aid the story of Jesus having its full effect. One scholar notes that such an addition to a tradition of writings about a similar subject strives not “to strike out boldly in a radical departure from one’s predecessors, but rather to be incrementally innovative within a tradition, by embracing the best in previous performers and adding something of one’s own marked with an individual stamp” (cited in Garland, David E.; Clinton E. Arnold. Luke (Zondervan Exegetical Com...

21Sep2015 Posted By: Greg Boyd To begin, it is significant that when Jesus and the authors of the NT referred to their sacred writings as “God-breathed,” they were referring to the writings that had been handed down to them. So too, the text that the Church has always confessed to be “God-breathed” has been the canon she received. Never has the “God-breathed” nature of the text been affixed to oral or written versions of the biblical material that preceded the written text. For this and other reasons, I find that the “God-breathed” status and divine authority of Scripture attaches to its final canonical form . This alone is the text we are called to wrestle with, with the ultimate goal of discerning how any given passage bears witness to the faithful and merciful covenantal God who was definitively revealed in Christ. This means, among other things, that our estimation of a passage’s “God-breathed” nature and/or its divine authority should not hinge upon anything like ...

  David Fitch July 1, 2015           (Caveat: The argument I am about to make has nothing to do with promoting the agenda for or against the Christian support of Same Sex Marriage. It is solely about this argument that is often used to urge church support for it) When someone tells me “we need to be on the right side of history” I look quizzical and ask whose history? Which history are you talking about? Has anyone been reading literature these past forty years (the beginning of postmodernity)? There is no one interpretation of history. There are multiple histories. To claim one history is right over another is an imperialist move of first order magnitude. Have we just reverted back to Enlightenment fascism? There’s only one history and we own it? Usually by the time someone says something like this, the right side of history has already been determined. And, using this ...

http://www.themennonite.org/issues/17-5/articles/From_tragedy_to_apocalypse First, an apocalyptic perspective recognizes that the Spirit is often present precisely when we are most vulnerable. At one level, we know that vulnerability—particularly within the covenant of marriage or a trusting group of friends—is a path to intimacy and joy. Yet we often avoid vulnerability at all costs. Especially in times of cultural upheaval, the absolute certainty of conviction—on either side of the issue—provides a welcome sense of security.   Yet our tradition is littered with the wreckage of well-intended groups whose moral clarity led to endless fragmentation and division; or, at the other extreme, with groups who sought to resolve conflict by retreating to the safety of spiritualism and the invisible church and simply disappeared from history altogether. If a tragic perspective on the future offers the security of predetermined outcome, an apocalyptic perspective calls us to live into th...

http://growrag.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/you-cant-have-jesus-without-faith/   By Bobby Grow You can’t simply do historical analysis of the New Testament and expect to come to right conclusions about Jesus. And yet this is where so much of ‘Evangelical’ scholarship (and Christian scholarship in general) resides. You can’t use analogies that start with yourself and work your way to Jesus from there, and expect to find the genuine Jesus; you’ll just end up finding the Jesus who looks oh so much like yourself–the Jesus molded in your own image. So the irony of what I just asserted is that I am saying that you can’t ‘solely’ rely on historical Jesus studies and expect to find the true Jesus, and at the same time I am asserting that we must avoid somehow importing our own historical culturally situatedness back onto the face of Jesus. So what’s the answer to this dilemma? What gets us beyond this impasse of dualism between studying Jesus through historical empiricism and isolate...