Apostacy and the Intellect

From Jesus Creed

Scott Mc Knight reviews a book and speaks of the loss of faith. The article was really helpful to me and is worth reading. An abstract follows :

... a common feature of deconversion for many is the overarching role played by a search for intellectual coherence. Reason alone brings few if any into the faith - but reason alone drives many away despite significant social and personal cost. Those who walk away find not faith and fellowship but freedom and intellectual coherence. I cannot overemphasize this point. The intellectual questions and struggles are painfully real. In many of the cases - especially for those with clearly developed commitment to the faith before being swamped by doubt - the issue is not sin, rebellion and self. Occasionally a desire for moral, particularly sexual, freedom plays a significant role - but this is not a major driving factor in most cases. Changes in behavior often result from, rather than precipitate, a loss of faith. 

The shame is that the church - rather than dealing with the problem at its core, rather than providing a forum for Christians to question and grow - has often responded in a reactionary and destructive fashion. It is easy (incredibly easy in fact) to find an advocate to lead one to reject the church and join the freedom of the secular world; it is hard, often well nigh impossible, to find an advocate to help one explore the hard questions of the faith.

Story from Tolstoy

A great story by Tolstoy about an angel who was sent to earth to learn.

Creator of Freedom to Create

I like the quote below because true freedom which can only come from true love is a possibility if what this theologian says is right.

A quote from Schillebeeckx:

If we are created, and that means if we are created in the image of God, then people must be other than conservers, restorers and discovers of what is already given…God creates man as the principle of his own human action, who thus himself has to develop the world and its future and to bring them into being within contingent situations. For God can never be the absolute origin of man’s humanity, in other words, we cannot be a creator, if he makes man only the one who implements a blueprint predetermined by the divine architect.

(thanks to Aaron)

The Church is not for the Nation

A nice article from Douglas Harink at F&T where he talks about Jim Wallis's book, "God's politics". I am a subscriber to email newsletter from Sojourners a journal from Jim Wallis's organisation and this book is heavily promoted in the newletter. A quote from the article :

"As those statements reveal, one of the most remarkable characteristics of Wallis’s vision, obvious on nearly every page, is the thoroughly instrumentalized understanding of religion. God, church, faith, and prophetic religion are all parts of the greater whole which is America, completely absorbed into the discourse of American politics, taken up for use in the cause of the American nation – of a just, compassionate and democratic American nation to be sure, but it is the nation that religious discourse is made to serve as its proper end."

And another one :

"The good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that it is God’s radical and decisive invasion of our humanly constructed worlds, and God’s deliverance from and destruction of the powers that hold us in bondage. The American nation, or the Canadian nation, or any other nation for that matter, is a humanly constructed world; it is a power that enslaves human beings and makes us serve its ends. Every nation is in the first place an idolatrous regime to which God comes in the Gospel to set his people free. Before the church and its discourse can be of any use to American people, it must learn that it does not exist in the first place as America, or to be of use to America, but it exists as the church, constituted in its worship and service of the one true God."

All relationship Mediated

I can help posting quotes from Bonhoeffer this time from here

What does it really mean to live keeping Jesus as a mediator in all our relationships? I can't even imagine.

“So people called by Jesus learn that they had lived an illusion in their relationship to the world. The illusion is immediacy. It has blocked faith and obedience. Now they know there can be no unmediated relationships, even in the most intimate ties of their lives, in the blood ties to father and mother, to children, brothers and sisters, in marital love, in historical responsibilities. Ever since Jesus called, there are no longer natural, historical, or experiential unmediated relationships for his disciples. Christ the mediator stands between the son and the father, between husband and wife, between individual and nation, whether they can recognize him or not. There is no way from us to other other than the path through Christ, his word, and our following him. Immediacy is a delusion.”

“But it is precisely the same mediator who makes us into individuals, who becomes he basis for an entirely new community. He stands in the center between the other person and me. He separates, but he also unites. He cuts off every direct path to someone else, but he guides everyone following him to the new and sole true way to the other person via the mediator. … Those who left their fathers for Jesus’ sake will surely find new fathers in the community, they will find brothers and sisters; there are even fields and houses prepared for them. Everyone enters discipleship alone, but no one remains alone in discipleship. Those who dare to become single individuals trusting in the word are given the gift of church-community. They find themselves again in a visible community of faith, which replaces a hundredfold what they lost.” (Discipleship, 97-98)

Grace precedes sin

Another short quote from Ray S. Anderson's continuation guest post at Faith and Theology

My puzzle is that without labelling something as sin (as Ray says "Jesus did not label people sinners") and therefore someone who does it as a sinner  how does one know how to engage with it. It could be that one cannot do this kind of labelling even to ones own sins without grace.

Sin is not a condition that precedes grace. For until one is welcomed into the Kingdom of God through grace, the tragic only is a condition to be overcome, sometimes by religion, rather than by a relationship in which the tragic is brought under the promise of redemption. Until we each have discovered our own sin, always through grace, to be called a sinner by others is not only graceless, it is tragic. It breaks the common bond that makes us human. Saul of Tarsus would never have accepted the accusation that he was a sinner until he experienced the grace of God through his encounter with the risen Christ. Until the tragic nature of sin is revealed though grace, it lies untouched and unredeemed, hidden like a deadly virus that thrives on self-affirmation only to emerge in self-condemnation.

The tragic in life

A post by Ray Anderson on Faith and theology gives this quote from Stanley Hauerwas.
“Marriage and family require time and energy that could be used to make the world better. To take the time to love one person rather than many, to have these children rather than helping the many in need, requires patience and a sense of the tragic”

Ray talks about the tragic as a thing that just can't be avoided. It has not been caused by the Fall of man after Eden, but simply by the fact that man is an embodied creature who makes choices and the result of many choices is a larger tragedy that one is not aware of at the time of the choice.