Marginal Christianity

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/01/nice-make-nasty-tyranny-sentimentalism.html ■ Culture ■ Dwight Longenecker by  Dwight Longenecker Ruth was one of those people about whom C.S.Lewis quipped “She was always living for others—and you could tell the “others” by their hunted look. “Just as nice as could be”, Ruth was often as nasty as could be. Ruth was a little tyrant because she believed her mission in life was to be nice and helpful. She chose her victims, I mean her “charity cases”, based on her subjective feelings. Old Mr. Livealone must be a lonely person who needed cheering up so it was Ruth’s mission to “bring him out of himself.” The single mother with a gaggle of kids and questionable other bed occupants must be miserable and in need of moral and social reform, so Ruth was the person to bring hope and change. The people at the local soup kitchen were clearly in need of not only a good hot meal, but a good hot bath, a job, and some stern advice from...

http://intotheexpectation.blogspot.com/2012/10/indulging-passions-natural-and-un.html Unnatural passions are destructive of holy thoughts, spiritual knowledge, and pure prayer. What does that assertion bring to mind? Or, for that matter, when Paul warns, “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions” (Romans 6:12) what comes to mind? I suspect that in both cases the first thought for most of us has to do in one way or another with sex. But, the New Testament and the early church have a more expansive idea of what constitutes sinful passion. In the early church, ‘passions’ was a technical term that refers to the spiritual agitations that well up from within us that lead us from the love, joy, and peace of God and from sharing that love, joy, and peace with one another. And many in the early church believed that things we have come to take for granted were in fact unnatural passions. For example: The love and accumulation of possessions ...