Marginal Christianity

Our culture is often likened to whitewater rapids - ever-changing, unpredictable, dangerous. It would be hard to gainsay the analogy. Experienced rafters know the key rules for successfully negotiating the whitewater rapids. I suggest these rules give us some critical guidelines for navigating our cultural/social rapids. I've tried to translate them into biblical/theological guidelines for just such a purpose. The Nature and Purpose of Theology Theology is the work of the church that evaluates and directs its journey into and through the unpredictable and treacherous rapids. According to Karl Barth this means that theology -is contextual and conflictual : an instrument of the “ ecclesia militans” (Church Militant) , theology guides the Church of a specific time to address and/or contest the needs and hopes of that time. ( Church Dogmatics 1.2, 841) -is communal and missional : “...theology . . . can be put to work in all its elements only in the context of the ...

Fr. Stephen Freeman 8 Comments I have continued to meditate this past week on the quote from Stanley Hauerwas that I shared previously: The project of modernity was to produce people who believe they should have no story except the story they choose when they had no story. Such a story is called a story of freedom – institutionalized economically as capitalism and politically as democracy. That story, and the institutions that embody it, is the enemy we must attack through Christian preaching. There is an assumption within our contemporary world that the life we bring into this world doesn’t mean a thing, at least, not at the start. Meaning is something the individual must create for himself/herself. It is, we think, a version of freedom. We are told that if we come into this world with our meaning already established as a given, then we can never be free. Autonomy, being “self-ruled,” is the heart of our contemporary delusion. We have seen this taken to extremes in t...

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/04/easter-with-flannery-oconnor by George Weigel 4 . 16 . 14 T his coming August 3 will mark the golden anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s “Passover,” to adopt the biblical image John Paul II used to describe the Christian journey through death to eternal life. In the fifty years since lupus erythematosus claimed her at age thirty-nine, O’Connor’s literary genius has been widely celebrated. Then, with the 1979 publication of  The Habit of Being , her collected letters, another facet of O’Connor’s genius came into focus: Mary Flannery O’Connor was an exceptionally gifted apologist, an explicator of Catholic faith who combined remarkable insight into the mysteries of the Creed with deep and unsentimental piety, unblinking realism about the Church in its human aspect, puckish humor—and a mordant appreciation of the soul-withering acids of modern secularism. Read more at http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/...