Andrew McNeely > Recent Status Updates

Kathryn Tanner complicates our inside/outside dichotomy:

“Systematic refusals or attacks on other cultures simply as such both underestimate the standing of those cultures and overrate the standing of Christians ones in the light of God’s grace” (p. 119).

“The anthropologist extracts from social practices cultural elements–characteristic beliefs, values, and so forth–and goes on to organize them into some coherent or consistent framework. But in use these cultural elements are unlikely to demonstrate those same logical or structural properties” (p. 44).

“God’s giving indeed breaks all the usual boundaries of closed communities. In creating the world, God goes outside the community of the divine Trinity to offer gifts to the stranger, to what is not divine…Jesus aligns himself with those without favor or good standing within the community of God’s people; and brings all within the very life of the triune God despite all their differences…”

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“As Christians we must identify ourselves, immerse ourselves in the world of change, struggle and conflict as the Word did for us, for the sake of the world’s own betterment” (p. 63).

“Any belief in the inevitability or fixity of a certain understanding of Christianity erodes before a sense for the flexible richness of so variegated a Christianity ever dissolving and resolving itself again into new wholes” (p. xviii).