Marginal Christianity

A hundred years ago conservative Christians put out “Five Fundamentals of Faith” in response to the “liberalism” invading America from Germany. These fundamentals constituted an effort to justify the historical reality of Christianity against the attacks of historical critical biblical study.   We live a time of change, uncertainty, and transformation. A hundred years (more or less) seems a good time to re-visit the Fundamentals.   So much has changed culturally, historically, and theologically that there seems little more than historical interest in re-visiting them. Yet, since we are in a period of change and transformation in our time as the church was a century ago, a look at what “fundamentals” might be and mean in our time seems in order. The “Fundamentals” a century ago claimed and reasserted the historical reality of five pillars of the Christian Faith:   the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, the Virgin Birth of Christ, the historical reality of hi...

Unless we know we’re in a battle, we’ll never have the urgency necessary for faithfulness. Unless we know God’s big picture/story of where he taking this world and what he created it for, we’ll never live or bear witness to the gospel properly. Unless our community is relationally thick enough to share the disciplines and rigors of our battle, we cannot help but give in, give out, or give up in our struggle. Unless we re-educate ourselves to read good novels and poetry and free our imaginations to play with biblical patterns and images, we will keep on reading the Bible in the flat, linear, idealist ways that have brought us to our current impasse. Unless we rediscover the Spirit in more than the now traditional Pentecostal and charismatic ways but as the Nicene Creed puts it, “the Lord, the giver of life,” who sends us into the life he gives to bear witness to its triune Creator and Redeemer, we will never know who we truly are and what we are to be about in the world.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2012/05/did-paul-have-a-high-view-of-scripture/ May 29, 2012 By peteenns 2 Comments Yes, of course he did. He was a Jew trained in the traditions of his people. In fact, he had such a high view of scripture, for a while there he was trying to put to death those annoying Christ-followers who undermined it. That high view of scripture was not abandoned when Paul became a follower of Jesus himself. It was just transformed and utterly refocused. Paul had a high view of scripture. It’s just doesn’t look like what conservative Evangelicals insist on when they talk about a high view of scripture. For Paul, his scripture–the story of Israel–come to its conclusion in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the creation of a new people of God made up of Jew and Gentile on equal footing. But that conclusion could only be seen in hindsight. It wasn’t obvious. That’s why Paul had to argue his case, and, as I mentioned in my previous post ...