dougs digs

once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right

2.10.2005

The Contradiction of Christianity

The fruit of the Gospel community is not exclusion but embrace, not detachment but engagement, not credulity but critical thought. This is extremely difficult for Christians in a world where they have been offered, and taken, power along the lines of the ‘religious right’ in the US.

To be people of God is to lose the dangerous desire to ‘be in control’ and to recognise the significance of not being finally determined by who we are and what we do. This is what is meant by ‘being made in the image of God’.

So the challenge to the conventionally religious of Jesus’ day was to abandon the fearful misreading of their rituals, texts and institutions – the one that enabled them to condemn those who God loves: strangers, the poor, the excluded, the odd, the ‘unclean’ and the marginalised.

This is also the challenge in our day. Those who turn God into a sentimental sop for their own egos or into a tyrannical buttress for their own interests are not walking Jesus’ path. His is a road where you will find strangers and enemies, outcasts and friends – all those invited into the Feast of Life.

Does Christianity Kill or Cure?
|| doug, 11:57

0 Comments:

Post a Comment