Mercy Not Sacrifice
I’ve been in a pissy mood today, and it’s for a lame reason. I’m tired of reading other bloggers share how successful their year has been and realizing that I’ve been leap-frogged by a whole lot of people who started after I did and are now on their way to lapping Rachel Held Evans herself. And then I’m getting congratulated for the one post that I wrote that kind of viralized in which I wrote down a few quotes from some youtube sermons from Rafael Cruz showcasing his dominionist theology and wondering how big an influence this theology had on the government shutdown. The reason it did well was because it said what people already wanted to believe. And that disgusts me. When I write things that actually have substance, nobody reads them. So I figured I would write another post that nobody will read sharing the 10 posts I wish people had read instead of reading the ones where I was either intentionally or accidentally being a meme-whore.
1) Is Jesus saving the world from us?
This was originally going to be a guest-post for Rachel Held Evans, but it didn’t work out. Basically, I put forward an argument that the best way to understand salvation is to think of Jesus not as saving us from the world but saving the world from us.
2) What is the difference between spirit and flesh?One of the biggest misunderstandings that Christians have is the distinction that Paul makes between living by the spirit (good) and living by the flesh (bad). It isn’t wrong to enjoy physical things. It’s wrong to reduce other physical objects to meat to be consumed (flesh) instead of enjoying all creation as sacraments that glorify their Creator (spirit).
3) Holistic sexuality, distorting pieties, and the pursuit of heavenThis post is an attempt to articulate a holistic Christian sexuality which deals with the underlying issue of escaping idolatry for the sake of worship without the distorting pieties of Platonism, patriarchy, and middle-class piety.
4) How the despised ones bring everything to nothing
One of my key life verses, 1 Corinthians 1:28, says that God has chosen the despised ones to bring nothing to the things that are. I tried to start a bloggers’ collective based on this verse. This post seeks to grapple with that verse. The despised ones are the vanguard of the Christian movement. When Jesus says to take up our crosses to follow Him, I believe that He’s saying we need to renounce our worldly legitimacy in order to be His disciples. The problem is that both “social justice” and “family values” Christians are invested in using their faith to legitimize themselves.
5) In defense of the “so-called” Wesleyan quadrilateral and the experiential breath of GodThe anti-gay Methodists declared war on the Wesleyan quadrilateral of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, in particular experience. So this is a defense of experience, pointing out that experience is not “emotion” but is often actually the intuitive living out of the scriptural truths we have assimilated into our character even if we can’t chapter-verse every single one of them.
6) Worldviewism and the nature of truthThere is little that is more obnoxious in fundamentalism than the phenomenon known as “worldview studies” in which you learn how to dismiss other peoples’ ideas on the basis of their sounding Marxist or secular humanist which are taken to be utterly incompatible ways of looking at the world with the “Biblical” (American middle-class) worldview. So in this post, I argue that we can learn things from Marx and Freud and whomever without being taken hostage by an alien worldview.
Fundamentalists really like the word “obedience” because it sounds hard and it usually means that you’re supposed to obey me because I’m speaking for God. Obeying God is not about going through some arduous sacrifice (as a means of earning salvation), but rather about discovering an inspired (Spirit-breathed) way of living as God makes us into His poetry (Ephesians 2:10).
8) The painter’s studio: a metaphor for thinking about worship
After listening to some Jonathan Martin sermons and reading Andy Crouch’s book Playing God, I had some thoughts about a different way to think about what we’re doing when we worship God. It’s not so much that God has an ego need, but rather that God is a painter who wants us to come delight in His art and paint with Him.
9) Fearing God vs. carrying a fearsome God-puppet who agrees with you
Many Christians say that they fear God, but what they’re really doing is carrying around a fearsome God-puppet who agrees with everything they say and spews wrath out onto all their scapegoats.
10) Eternity is living in the moment
After watching Ed Dobson’s video series on living with ALS at our men’s retreat this past May, it hit me that eternal life is paradoxically being capable of living in the moment. When we are living according to the flesh, we are actually not living in the moment. Most of our moments are spent anxiously trying to escape the moment with idols and drugs and distractions.
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