I am increasingly unimpressed with what people call ‘orthodox’ Christianity. It has become a kind of religious straitjacket into which all Christians must be bound or face expulsion from the faith community by those who think of themselves as the true believers. To be called an orthodox Christian does not mean that one’s point of view is right. It only means that this point of view won out in the ancient debate.John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 19
Rationality is the capacity to make problematic what had hitherto been treated as given; to bring to reflection what before had only been used; to transform resource into topic; to examine critically the life we lead. This view of rationality situates it in the capacity to think about our thinking. Rationality as reflexivity about our groundings premises an ability to speak about our speech and the factors that ground it. Rationality is thus located in metacommunication.Alvin Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology, p. 49
…What distinguishes the members of this genre [theory] is their ability to function not as demonstrations within the parameters of a discipline but as re-descriptions that challenge disciplinary boundaries.Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, p. 9
Most Frustrating
What I find most frustrating, more than just about anything, is when a church’s actions and words are not coherent.
But, whatever, after thorough investigation and reflection, you find to agree with reason and experience, as conducive to the good and benefit of one and all and of the world at large, accept only that as true, and shape your life in accordance with it.Buddha, Kalama Sutta
Belief
…When we read of how we should confess with our lips and believe in our heart that Christ is Lord this does not mean that we ought to make some intellectual confession. The text is abundantly clear that to confess with one’s lips means to speak love, grace and mercy and that to believe in one’s heart means to demonstrate these virtues in the very texture of one’s life. This is why I reject the religious/spiritual debate. For me Christianity is “none of the above.” It is nothing less than a material faith i.e. a mode of being that transforms one’s material actuality.
Peter Rollins from blog post: I Believe in Child Labour, Sweatshops, and Torture
The Problem with Religious Communication
The problem with so much religious communication is that it aims at changing our minds. The result is that we can hear the message of the preacher without necessarily heeding the message; we can listen to the ‘truth’ and agree with it, yet not change in response to it… In the parable, truth is not expressed via some detached logical discourse that would be employed to educate us, but rather it emanates from the creation of a lyrical dis-course that inspires and transforms us–a dis-course being that form of (mis)communication that sends us spinning off course and onto a new course… Parables subvert this desire to make faith simple and understandable. They do not offer the reader clarity, for they refuse to be captured in the net of a single interpretation and instead demand our eternal return to their words, our wrestling with them, and our puzzling over them.
Excerpt from The Orthodox Heretic: And Other Impossible Tales by Peter Rollins.
The reasonable madman
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Joyous participation
When the gospel is understood primarily in terms of entrance rather than joyous participation, it can actually serve to cut people off from the explosive, liberating experience of the God is an endless giving circle of joy and creativity.
Rob Bell, Love Wins
First post
I’m totally sold on the idea and the simplicity of tumblr, I only wish I could import my posts from an already established Wordpress blog.
