Patrik Olterman Rodhe's Blog, page 14

Redeeming Sex – Book review

I just finished reading “Redeeming Sex” by Debra Hirsch. I was so excited when I picked this one up and I was hopeful that someone had finally published a book that dared to deconstruct and reconstruct sex from a biblical perspective. And it started out great showing the important and beautiful link between sexuality and spirituality.

It is a good book, Debra Hirsch comes from a very different background than many theologians who write on this subject and lets her life story and personal expe...

What’s the controversy?

This Sunday I talked about the sacramental life at the corps. It was a nice service with good worship (Thanks Boris) and the teaching flowed nicely. As I am preaching my way through my “Life is my religion” teaching we where talking about life as a spiritual practice and apart from sacramental living we got into a discussion about apotheosis, deification or divinization.

Divinisation is the teaching that the church has held for the first 1500 years. That the goal of salvation and the Christia...

The return of the blog

After a sorely needed hiatus, I have decided to reopen my blogs. I write these blogs because I need to work through my journey in writing and because I really need the feedback I get from doing this in public.

Some people think I like to provoke on purpose (to a certain degree it is true, I challenge the status quo often and without hesitation) but none of my posts are written as provocation. They are my thoughts, and I love to challenge myself and my own thinking.

I believe that we all need...

Prophetic vision

Today I want to talk about transfiguration, it is a big religious word that ranks right up there with eschatology and soteriology and yet, I think, should be part of our daily practice as Christians.

Transfiguration, from Latin transfiguratio, is primarily a religious term, and refers to the experience of momentary divine radiance. The most famous account of transfiguration is the Transfiguration of Jesus. (Wikipedia)

Jesus transfiguration

Lets read that passage from Marks gospel:

Six days la...

The mind is not infallible

We live in a society that has for centuries prioritised the mind. We have listened to Descartes who said Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am and so we believe that we are the sum of our thoughts rather than the sum of our being.

God gave us the mind to protect the heart, not usurp it. (John Eldredge, Killing Lions)

The mind is a great tool, it is there to help us navigate reality and try to make sense out of things. But the mind is ever so impressionable and if we allow the mind to take th...

I am the truth

In the Christian world we continuously repeat the mantra: Jesus is the answer, Jesus is the truth! Vi repate it over and over again and it most often seems to mean that outside the person of Jesus there is no truth. We seem to believe that Jesus statement means that everything else is untrue, lies.

I think that it is about time that we dive deeper into this statement and have a look what Jesus actually is saying here.

Jesus says Kai he Aletheia, literaly: and the truth. The word does mean truth...

Feelings are not dangerous and unreliable

If you have been raised in church or spent a longer time as a member of some sort of church, then I am sure you have been told not to trust your feelings. I was certainly told time and time again that feelings are a roller coaster, they come and go and cannot be trusted.

It is not strange that this is our teaching as we live in a society that prizes the mind over everything else. We have bodies and hearts but it is in the mind that we live and exist.

“Cogito ergo sum”, I think therefore I am. W...

Shameless!

A while ago I wrote about the importance of self love and how self love is the first step to loving others since you can only love others as much as you love yourself. Now we know we should love ourselves, and we hopefully feel that it is ok to love oneself. The question then becomes why don’t we love ourselves.

The answer nine times out of ten is shame!

What is shame

Shame is a negative, painful, social emotion that “…results from comparison of the self’s action with the self’s standards…”.[1]...

Self actualisation is not self-worship

“For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore theproblem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem offinding out who I am and of discovering my true self … Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.” (Thomas Merton, *New seeds of contemplation*).

Often times when stating “Becoming and being all that I am is my cal...

Seeing the divine in all things is not heretical

Look around you, what do you see? Are you not surrounded by grace? By walking talking miracles gifted with the gift of life and love?

How is it that within the Christian church, it has become heretical to see and to point out the divine outside of the confines of our little community, outside of our own sphere of theological thought and outside our own tradition? For some it is even hard to acknowledge the divine in other Christian churches.

St. Bonaventure writes:

“By God’s power, presence, an...