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We will attempt to explain what we legitimately can,
but we will always confess more than w...
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Room for mystery is necessary for orthodox theology. Mystery is good for theology. And mystery is good for the soul.
If we want to eliminate all mystery we will do bad theology and produce an inferior Christianity.
The Spirit blows where it wants, and you can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going.
arrogant sectarianism.
A Christianity that is sufficiently broad and eclectic liberates us from an arrogant and impoverished sectarianism.
This much I’m sure of, Orthodox mystery, Catholic beauty, Anglican liturgy, Protestant audacity, Evangelical energy, Charismatic reality—I need it all!
If I can unite in myself the thought and the devotion of Eastern and Western Christendom, the Greek and the Latin Fathers, the Russian with the Spanish mystics, I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians... If we want to
bring together what is divided, we cannot do so by imposing one division upon the other. If we do this, the union is not Christian. It is political and doomed to further conflict. We must contain all the divided worlds in ourselves and transcend them in Christ.[2]
We had a deep sense that we belonged, not only to Jesus, but to one another.
Instead of trying to trust their own erratic feelings, they can trust the testimony of the church that says to them, “You belong to us.”
To belong to the redeemed community that lives under the reign and rule of Christ (the kingdom of God) is to enter into the Lord’s salvation.
Instead of being defined by ethnicity, circumcision, and Torah observance, the people of God are now defined by faith, baptism, and obedience to Messiah. The
By believing in Jesus, being baptized, and being added to the salvation community that is the church. It
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.
Marxism emphasizes collectivism. Capitalism emphasizes individualism. Christianity emphasizes community.
What Christianity repudiates is the selfishness of individualism.
As the Desert Fathers were fond of saying, “One Christian is no Christian.”
I was discovering that the revolution of Christ is the radical alternative to the unimaginative politicism of the religious Right and Left.
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.
Eugene Peterson says, “The gospel of Jesus Christ is more political than anyone imagines, but in a...
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The problem with both the Christian Right and the Christian Left is that they reduce “Christian” to the diminished role of religious adjective in service to the all-important political
noun.
God cannot serve some other interest, God...
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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.
It’s the task of the church to be the world changed by Christ.
adopting the means of partisan power politics is an abject betrayal of the revolutionary way of Jesus.
If we are going to attempt something as grand as “changing the world” at all, we do so by being that part of the world changed by Christ.
The church doesn’t need to enforce this revolution, the church only needs to live it.
But this also means our message feels a bit dangerous. We talk about Jesus and the kingdom of God in a way that doesn’t seem safe.
Risk
Cross. Mystery. Eclectic. Community. Revolution.
It wasn’t prayer as a form of God-management. It wasn’t prayer as a practical tool. It wasn’t acquisitive prayer. It was prayer as faith itself—the orientation of the soul toward God.
Yes.Lord bring us into this space
I began to try on the theological shoes of Barth and Bonhoeffer, Wright and Brueggemann, Yoder and Hauerwas, Jürgen Moltmann and Miroslav Volf, David Bentley Hart and William T. Cavanaugh...and
“Lose your passion for dumbness.”
serious-minded, praying people had been thinking about the God revealed in Christ and writing about it for two thousand years.
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 just a matter of whether or not you’ll do it well.
Prayer and theology go together!
To belittle the work of the theologian is to advocate a spiritual poverty.
At its best, theology is an act of worship—it is the act of loving God with all our mind.
all Christians need to be taught by teachers and pastors who take theology seriously.
American Christianity has far too many pastors who will read business journals and leadership books but can’t be bothered to take theology seriously. In
One of the sad things about spiritual poverty is that the impoverished hardly ever know they’re suffering from it.
Theological ignorance may not be a sin, but it’s not a virtue, and it’s certainly not something to boast about!
authority flowed from her holy otherness.
Humility, poverty, and prayer—this has always been the open secret of the saints.
Prayer is unmarketable. Prayer gives you no immediate payoff. You get no immediate feedback or sense of success. True prayer, in that sense, probably is the most courageous and countercultural thing an American will ever do.[2]
the most important factor in my second half of life journey has involved learning how to pray well.
And neither should boutique “spirituality” be confused with the practices that have been historically identified with Christian spiritual formation.
