a breather

It's been a nice couple of months. This blog took root some time last year when I thought I was having a "crisis of faith" and thus I set out on a "journey of rediscovery." What I actually accomplished was lousy and only amounted to me digging a hole that would never have the floor I hoped for in site.

Truth be told, the best thing to happen to my spiritual / faith life has been to stop taking it so seriously. So this blog will go on hiatus and I'll continue to have fun over at the Tumblr (of the same name which is set to pull from this blogger site) and simply enjoy life. Santa Claus doesn't care if I believe in him and he won't give me more or less presents either way.

Folks would rather me be cheerful here and so would I!

So, enjoy more coffee, turn up the rock, continue to think, but loosen up Jonny.....

A Call To Reality and a Benediction, "Go in Pieces"

by Pádraig Ó Tuama, from the Insurrection Pub Tour:

In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

In the name of goodness and love and broken community.

In the name of meaning and feeling and I hope you don’t screw me…

In the name of sadness, regret, and holy obsession, the holy name of anger, the spirit of aggression…

In the name of beauty and beaten and broken down daily.

In the name of seeing our creeds and believing in maybe, we gather here, a table of strangers, and speak of our hopeland and talk of our danger…

In the name of Mary and Jesus and the mostly silent Joseph.

In the name of speaking to ourselves, saying this is more than I can cope with…

In the name of goodness and kindness and intentionality. In the name of harbor and shelter and family.

The task has ended. Go in pieces.

Our faith has been rear-ended, certainty amended,

and something might be mended that we didn’t know was torn.

And we are fire, bright, burning fire,

turning from the places from which we fell,

emptying ourselves into the hell in which we’ll find

our loving and beloved brother,

mother, sister, father, friend.

And so friends, the task has ended.

Go in pieces

to see and feel your world.

Pluralism

      

 "...many of us find the exclusivistic claims of the Christian tradition impossible to accept. This is so for both commonsense reasons and Christian theological reasons. Does it make sense that the creator of the whole universe would be known in only one religious tradition, which (fortunately) just happens to be our own?"

         "Moreover, such a claim is difficult to reconcile with the centrality of grace in the Christian tradition. If one must be a Christian to be in right relationship with God, then there is a requirement. By definition, then, even though we may use the language of grace, we are no longer talking about grace."---Marcus Borg, Learning to Read the Bible Again for the First Time

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This gets at weighty questions I've had for some time but couldn't make sense of with the common theology. To this point, I'd always considered myself "blessed" to have been brought up within the Christian church in America, but the question lingered over the "misfortune" of folks who grow up in places like Iran or North Korea. Or even folks here who had horrible experiences early on that lead them far from the Christian faith. 

The typical answers range from "God works in mysterious ways" to a very misunderstood notion of "predestination"---neither makes any sense at this time. Of course, I'd also hear something to the effect of "well, there are Christians over there and people have come to know Christ regardless of their situation because God can do anything" .....or maybe I'd hear myself whispering reminders of all the ways God has been with me throughout the years despite my tough times and brought me this far. 


Yes, God as I believe Him to be, can do anything. But He will not do anything. Big big big big difference. 




So how do I possibly deal with these issues? Especially in light of the age that we're in now?
If pluralism exists, it is dishonest. Most of us (the sane ones) don't go around vomiting John 14:6 on people about Jesus. I'd get fired from my job, punched in the mouth by some, and mostly ignored as a lunatic by the rest. And rightfully so.
(We'll save persecution for another post.)


We "respectfully" accept freedom of religion but barely "tolerate" other religions. 9/11 certainly didn't help anything either. 


This is very hard to think through and deal with.
Some will answer by quoting Luke 12:51--"Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division."

 I would suggest that this same verse has been used by white supremacists and the hate-filled group associated this that awful picture above. Obviously that segment of our society is disgusting and that is a horrific use of scripture to validate their desire for means of power.

So what makes us so confident in our interpretation and usage?

I'm aware that there are a lot of others thinkers, (Newbigin has some stuff I can't wait to read), who've weighed in on this and I'm excited to see what more I can scratch at.

Interesting movement here:  http://www.embracingourdifferences.org/donate.html

building bricks to build with

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"When people tell us to be quiet and accept the conventional wisdom of the past, many of us groan like the Hebrews when they were forced to produce bricks without straws."--Brian McLaren, A New Kind Of Christianity

       Recently, my buddy Rob let me borrow his copy of the latest book by Brian McLaren, "A New Kind Of Christianity." For the past year or so before I decided to dig deeper into all of this, I had been doing a lot of back and forth about who I should or shouldn't read. I had big meaty questions that seemed to rock whatever speck of faith I had to the core. I would read reviews of the books by some of the "new atheists" that absolutely terrified me. Why? Because they were attempting to put answers to those big questions and they had answers that I was afraid of hearing because they might make too much sense. 

 While I'm still not ready to dive into Hitchins or Dawkins, it has been interesting to learn more about some people who are dealing with questions openly and honestly but in more of a positive light. But everywhere I looked it seemed that the evangelical group that I put all my trust in were pointing fingers at this other group and warning the world against these "false prophets." 

The "Emergent Church"...Brian McLaren seems to be the grand old uncle of the group infecting the minds of young folks like me. So when Rob gave me the book I felt a bit sinister. Like I was hiding something dirty...which is absolutely ridiculous. The other camp calls him a heretic but either I'm not reading things correctly or I'm evolving into a heretic myself. The things he's talking about are making a lot of sense. But I'm trying to come at all of the new information in a steadied and studious fashion. One mistake I always made in my old version of faith was getting overly excited and jumping right on boards with things that I look back at now with embarrassment.

"Post Modern"--- the emergents are the ones talking the most about this phase in cultural history. And they're also the ones making the most sense of it because it seems they've taken the time to actually understand where a lot of folks like myself are coming from. We've shoved ourselves through an evangelical church system that has left me with nothing to stand on...except the rock I cling to as a base which is the existence of a God that created me, and a man that claimed to be his son and taught things that I continue to have a hard time actually absorbing because the kind of people he was calling us to be is a lot more intense than the American Evangelical religious system desires/requires. There's always been talk of a "transforming" experience that happens when you "accept Christ" but either I'm in the thick of that transformation or it's never happened. 

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Maybe it's all been me trying to make those bricks without straw. I know how I got here, but I'm unsure why I'm still here. And that's a big piece of the puzzle that needs to be placed. 

So it's out of the bag. I'm learning about / interested in the emerging / emergent church and a lot of it is exciting. As much as it's not a good option for me to have faith out of fear, it's not a good option to stay away from a group based on what other people say it is or isn't. Besides, who am I to have more faith in anyway? Faith in myself that I will lose my faith? Faith in other people that they will lead me astray or teach me correctly? 

 Nope. I know what I cling to and that's all i need right now to stand on.

a few more questions...

I'm sure this will be the first of many ongoing posts with the
appropriate title of "a few more questions," but here we are. 

So I've realized that the Christianity that I've come to know is strictly from a blend of protestant perspectives, of which I really know nothing. I know the big names of the Reformation, but I couldn't lay out what big ideas any of them had (save for Calvin and predestination, which makes no sense) and it's good for me to look into that as I work my way backwards towards Jesus and my understanding of the bible.

The other 2 big questions I need to work through are the bible, translations, and how we came to what is known as the canon. Along with that thread are the base literal vs interpretive understandings, the "inerrancy" of the scriptures, and divine inspiration aspects and how those affect any given view of the text. 

I think these may be good starting points. I must acknowledge that I come to the bible not with new eyes and a clean slate. I bring a bias and lens both personal (cultural) and theological (what I've been taught thus far). I'm attempting to shed as much of the bias as I can but I think that a great starting point is to understand a little bit more about the movements that have brought me here. 

 Moving on.........