Marginal Christianity

It is my contention that across the board in whatever form we find God’s people, that is a people fleeing Egypt, wandering nomads, a united and divided monarchy, a people in exile in Babylon, and a people exiled in their own land under foreign rule, they are to be a Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement (SCRM). Jesus of Nazareth entered the story of his people under the last-mentioned condition. They are to be God’s SCRM because this world is not as it was meant to be. Instead of a world lathered and luxuriating in God’s presence and the abundance of life on this planet in its full flourishing, humanity turned its back on God in the cruelest of ingratitude. Breaking relationship with God unraveled the good order of his creation. We could no longer live with ourselves, each other, or the creation. God, however, never acquiesced in this fallen state of his creatures or creation. Immediately, he began a reclamation and restoration project. God called Abraham and Sarah fro

(A rough draft of a chapter from my forthcoming book on Bonhoeffer) I have argued that Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement captures the DNA of God’s people in scripture and that the Submerging Church captures the form and ethos the church needs today. This image, I argue, provides a compelling icon for the church’s identity and vocation today and setting for scripture to function authoritatively as God’s Word. I want to offer here a further description of such a community, particularly in light of the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.   This is not a model and certainly not a formula for doing church today. It is rather a set of characteristics we might expect to find in all sorts of different forms and configurations where the church embraces and attempts to live out this “general campaign of sabotage” (as C. S. Lewis wonderfully put it) against the disorder of the world. 1.     A prayer movement (DB’s arcane discipline) a.     “To clasp the hands in prayer is the

1.     The church as we have known it is dying/dead because it has lost its identity which has obscured or hindered it from appropriating its DNA. a.     The judgment Dietrich Bonhoeffer passed on his assimilated and accommodated German church during Nazism applies just as well to our similarly assimilated and accommodated American church: "Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world." [1] b.     I contend that that DNA is to be what I call a “subversive counter-revolutionary movement.” [2] c.     Once we tap into that DNA we can experiment with forms and structures that faithfully witness to Christ. Form follows life. “The medium is the message” (Marshall McLuhan). [1] DBWE 8: Kindle location 10996 [2] Lee Wyatt, “God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement,” marginalchris