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Clement and Polycarp and moved on from there. I found Athanasius more relevant than the Christian bestsellers. I resonated with Gregory of Nyssa. I found a kindred soul in Maximus the Confessor. I read Augustine’s spiritual autobiography Confessions several times in different translations
Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy.
N.T. Wright, Walter Brueggemann, Eugene Peterson, Frederick Buechner, Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, René Girard, Miroslav Volf, Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, David Bentley Hart, Wendell Berry, Scot McKnight, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr,
Ignorance is bliss, but so is certitude—they’re first cousins. Yet none of this is to be confused with faith.
George MacDonald, the Scottish writer whose works had such a profound influence on C.S. Lewis,
Real faith is not afraid of doubt, but the faux faith of certitude is afraid of its own shadow.
The mistake of pop apologetics—the silly kind that looks for an ancient boat on a Turkish mountaintop or Egyptian chariots on the bottom of the Red Sea—is that it is an attempt to do away with the need for faith altogether!
Didn’t Skye say these people also remove the authority from scripture in their attempt to “prove” it?
God refuses to prove himself and perform circus tricks at our behest in order to obliterate doubt.
“Kierkegaard. Provocations.”
For the most part the Americanized church has unconsciously bought into this script and concocted a compromised Christianity to endorse the script point for point.
Fundamentalism was born as the wrongheaded reaction to the crisis of modernity.
fundamentalism takes a “scientific” approach to the Bible—which is perhaps the worst of all ways to approach Scripture.
What Scripture gives us is inspired glimpses into the divine mystery.
Fundamentalism is to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.
Christianity is a confession, not an explanation. We will attempt to explain what we legitimately can, but we will always confess more than we can explain.
If we want to eliminate all mystery we will do bad theology and produce an inferior Christianity.
if the Jesus we follow doesn’t lead us into the community of other followers, we are following a mostly made-up Jesus,
With both the Left and the Right, individualism has triumphed over a vision for shared wellbeing. Neither the Left “do your own thing” nor the Right “do your own thing” is compatible with the “love your neighbor as yourself” ethic of Christ.
The Apostles don’t call us to “accept Jesus into our heart”—they call us to belong to the body of Christ.
The central issue that initially energized the movement was abortion.
That’s the right used and propagandized to bring together DIFFERENT groups of Christians with DIFFERENT political views…they all took the bait
I suddenly realized I was nothing more than a puppet in a high-stakes game of power politics. I was being used.
Along with all white evangelicals
It’s not that Jesus is apolitical. Far from it. Jesus is intensely political! But Jesus has his own politics—and they cannot be made to serve the interests of some other political agenda.
God cannot serve some other interest, God can only rule.
Unlike all other political agendas, the supreme value of the politics of Jesus is not power, but love.
The kingdom of God persuades by love, witness, Spirit, reason, rhetoric, and if need be, martyrdom—but never by force.
In the politics of Jesus the world will be changed by non-coercive love or not at all.
It’s not the task of the church to change the world by legislative force.
Say it louder for the people in the back!!
With a naďveté that was breathtaking, evangelical Christians thought that Christlikeness in a culture could be achieved by coercive legislation and the American electoral process.
Trying to change the world by coercive force is not changing the world; it’s simply reconfiguring the structures of power.
Cross. Mystery. Eclectic. Community. Revolution.
Without a primary orientation of the soul toward God, life gets reduced to the pursuit of power and the acquisition of things. Attempting to yoke God to that kind of agenda is what the Bible calls idolatry—God harnessed as means, the holy reduced to utility.
Barth and Bonhoeffer, Wright and Brueggemann, Yoder and Hauerwas, Jürgen Moltmann and Miroslav Volf, David Bentley Hart and William T. Cavanaugh...and
Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus, Luther, Wesley
Please be careful about saying things like, “I don’t care about theology, I’m just into Jesus.” I want to say, “What Jesus?” The moment you begin to try to answer that question you are doing theology—it’s
Prayer and theology go together!
To belittle the work of the theologian is to advocate a spiritual poverty.
all Christians need to be taught by teachers and pastors who take theology seriously.
More seriously than party lines, even…
American Christianity has far too many pastors who will read business journals and leadership books but can’t be bothered to take theology seriously.
Or find one-three favorite commentators or theologians and trust them for everything
as long as we travel the road of self-help we will never really be able to pray.
Prayer is not a “technique” for making our lives “better” as understood by the assumed cultural values of consumerist America. Neither is prayer something we can be in charge of.
True prayer is found, not on Self Help Avenue, but in the sacred space of Christian liturgy.
This feels boldly prescriptive
the “I’m-not-religious-but-spiritual” motto is really just a modern rejection of time-tested wisdom in favor of a make-it-up-as-you-go approach.
The dogma of vague spirituality is that we are all capable of properly forming our spiritual lives as private individuals independent of any received tradition.
Obv we are not. I’m no Calvinist, but I have heard about this “fall” thing…
neither should boutique “spirituality” be confused with the practices that have been historically identified with Christian spiritual formation.
the “spiritual but not religious person.” If they pray at all, they will pray their own prayers, which is to say, they are not being formed by prayer, they are only “expressing themselves.” They wish for what they want and call it prayer. It’s window shopping imagined as prayer. This is the prayer of the consumerist, the secularist, the spiritual individualist.
This relates to why I’m often so uncomfortable with prayer…it can’t be right to give god a wish list, even if it’s accompanied by praise and confession…
We are formed as Christian people as we learn the regular rhythms of praying well-crafted, theologically-sound, time-tested prayers.
We pray whenever we feel like it...and too much of the time we don’t feel like it.
The church in the West is no longer public or prayerful. We are now private. The only way we know how to be public is to be political.
The church bell is a good metaphor of how the church should be public. The ringing of a church bell is a public act, but it’s not a political act.
It was assumed that the way to learn to pray well is to pray prayers composed by a wise teacher. So Jesus said, “When you pray, say...” And he gave them a prayer. You want to know how to pray? Here, pray this.
This was not JUST a “formula” or example
