Marginal Christianity

Perverse Patriotism is the unique and exclusive loyalty (what we call “faith”) to apocalyptic Jesus that serves him in a Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement    ( a.k.a. in polite society as “church”) A Perverse Patriot Old Testament Text Jeremiah 29:4-7 4 “ Thus says the  Lord  of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon:  5  Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.  6  Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.  7  But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the  Lord  on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” In this important text God articulates the dialectical resident aliens/alien residents viewpoint we met...

  Perverse Patriotism is the unique and exclusive loyalty (what we call “faith”) to apocalyptic Jesus that serves him in a Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement                                   (SCRM, a.k.a. in polite society as “church”)  If we are God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement (as I argued we are in the last post in this series) this entails for us perverse patriots as double-layered relationship with our homeland. -Resident Aliens (Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon from the well-known 1989 book of that title), and -Alien Residents (Gerald Sittser from his forthcoming Resilient Faith). The former stresses the “Alien” part of our relationship to our homeland. This correlates with the “subversive” character of God’s movement of which we are a part. “They live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They . . . endure everything as foreigners. Every ...