Marginal Christianity

If God is not in control, that is, does not determine in advance what is going to happen, that there is no “plan” or script unfolding in all the ups and downs of every life and event, how might we best envision his governance of the world (as far as we are able to do so)? I would suggest we think in terms of fixed goals and open routes. What does that mean? -God’s plans and purposes for his creation are sure and certain and, as God, is able and willing to achieve them. -He achieves them by being true to himself. -God desires real relationships with his creatures and real relationships are open-ended ever-changing. -God’s power to achieve his purposes in such a world constituted by real relationships is his love. He does not coerce, manipulate, or force. He woos, guides, directs, and acts in the best interests of his creatures toward their fulfilment and his good ends by the quality, intensity, and relentlessness of his love. Even in discipline, judgment, defeat, and exile ...

"The cross is not something historically fortuitous which might not have happened. God himself is nothing other than love. Consequently Golgotha is the inescapable revelation of his nature in a world of evil and suffering." ( The Trinity and the Kingdom ) Do you ever wonder what life will be like then and there and how different it will be from the here and now? I do. And what I’ve come to realize Moltmann captures in this quote. It’s this: “in a world of evil and suffering.” What will be different then and there is not how we will act and behave or what we will be expected to do. Everything required of us here and now will be required then and there. -loving still means serving others -their interests remain more important than our own -“dominion” over the creation (Gen.1:26-28) remains “tilling and keeping“ (or “protecting and serving”) it (Gen.2:15) -“glory” means “fastening our belts, bidding those other and less than us to sit down to eat,...

The Fourteen Triads: Practices The great barrier to taking the SoM seriously is, as we observed earlier, their seeming lack of contact with our daily reality. We noted the various attempts to account for this each of which ended up treating them as anything but what on the face of it they appear to be. That is, practical instruction for Jesus’ hearers about living faithfully through the crisis of that time, God’s coming to judge his people for their default on the very reason for which he brought them into being. I introduced Glenn Stassen’s way of resolving this seeming unreality or impracticality by treating Jesus’s teaching as triadic rather than dyadic, that is having three elements rather than just two. Instead of traditional teaching – Jesus’ prescription Stassen believes they consist of traditional teaching – vicious cycle – Jesus’ prescription. This means the parts that seem the most difficult and remote from reality to us are not what Jesus says we ought to be doi...

God is love. Love is . . . -committed to us. We’re stuck with God for good or ill, like it or not. -working for us. God wills and works for our good. God will make us like Christ no matter the cost (to us or to him). -always seeking to save us (and we always need to be saved). We’re loster than we can imagine, God is more resourceful than we’ll ever know. There’s little God won’t do, other than not be himself, to save us. This may seem to put a dent in his reputation, vex and perplex us, raise all kinds of doubts, even at times drive us away from him (really or ideas of him) so we might truly find him and be saved. -tough as nails (like the ones that bound his Son to the cross) on us and our world as needed. -accepting us, actually sitting next to us on any trash heap we end up on, like Job’s friends sans the lousy theology. -challenging us to be as good as we were made to be. -unfathomable as chess’s Grandest Master playing all of us at the same time and somehow allow...

written by Gregory P. Floyd Share Christmas Morning, 2017 T here is a kind of theology that is not written in words, but written in lives. It is a type of religious reflection, not the reflection on religion of lettered men and women, but the reflection of religion through the performance of active love. If both are indispensable to the Christian tradition, it is also clear that they are neither equivalent nor, perhaps, equally important. It is the latter task: the daily, difficult, and often unremarkable practice of being in the world as a Christian that is the material of Christian life. Rosemary Therese was that kind of Christian. The oldest daughter of a Polish father and an Irish mother, she grew up in an age when that arrangement was not yet unremarkable nor, amidst cultural and financial pressures, unremarked upon. By certain lights her life was a humble one. As the oldest child, she was not to go to college, but to care for her parent...