Goldberg does not deny the tensions involved in this conservative project within a liberal democratic capitalist system but rather accepts it as the challenge we face. The question is whether we are up to it.
Continue readingCommodification has led most people to view God as a device to be used rather than an all-powerful Creator to be revered. This also explains our abundant and careless words about him. Is it any surprise that a divine butler would fail to provoke reverent silence? What need is there to rein in one’s tongue if God is merely a cosmic therapist? The god of Consumer Christianity does not inspire awe and wonder because he is nothing more than a commodity to be used for our personal satisfaction and self-achievement.
— The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity” by Skye Jethani
I enjoyed Bryan’s approach: an acknowledgement of the contributions of historical criticism and a return to reading scripture in its context but with it an understanding that we read from a position and from within a community – the community of faith.
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I enjoyed Bryan’s approach: an acknowledgement of the contributions of historical criticism and a return to reading scripture in its context but with it an understanding that we read from a position and from within a community – the community of faith.
Continue readingHere their emulation of Jesus proved fatally incomplete. In their quest to be inclusive and tolerant and up-to-date, the accommodationists imitated his scandalously comprehensive love, while ignoring his scandalously comprehensive judgement. They used his friendship with prostitutes as an excuse to ignore his explicit condemnation of fornication and divorce. They turned his disdain for the religious authorities of his day and his fondness for tax collectors and Roman soldiers into a thin excuse for privileging the secular realm over the sacred. While recognizing his willingness to dine with outcasts and converse with nonbelievers, they de-emphasized the crucial fact that he had done so in order to heal them and convert them-ridding the leper of his sickness, telling the Samaritans that soon they would worship in spirit and truth, urging the women taken in adultery to go, and from now on sin no more.
Given the climate of the 1960s and ’70s, these choices were understandable. But the more the accommodationists emptied Christianity of anything that might offend the sensibilities of a changing country, the more they lost any sense that what they were engaged in really mattered, or was really, truly true.
— Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics
Here their emulation of Jesus proved fatally incomplete. In their quest to be inclusive and tolerant and up-to-date, the accommodationists imitated his scandalously comprehensive love, while ignoring his scandalously comprehensive judgement. They used his friendship with prostitutes as an excuse to ignore his explicit condemnation of fornication and divorce. They turned his disdain for the religious authorities of his day and his fondness for tax collectors and Roman soldiers into a thin excuse for privileging the secular realm over the sacred. While recognizing his willingness to dine with outcasts and converse with nonbelievers, they de-emphasized the crucial fact that he had done so in order to heal them and convert them-ridding the leper of his sickness, telling the Samaritans that soon they would worship in spirit and truth, urging the women taken in adultery to go, and from now on sin no more.
Given the climate of the 1960s and ’70s, these choices were understandable. But the more the accommodationists emptied Christianity of anything that might offend the sensibilities of a changing country, the more they lost any sense that what they were engaged in really mattered, or was really, truly true.
— Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics
The Christmas story simply is not about incarnation. It is about kingdom.
Continue readingThe Christmas story simply is not about incarnation. It is about kingdom.
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