{"id":57427,"date":"2019-03-30T05:04:44","date_gmt":"2019-03-30T09:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=57427"},"modified":"2019-03-29T12:16:25","modified_gmt":"2019-03-29T16:16:25","slug":"cooking-with-christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2019\/03\/cooking-with-christianity.html","title":{"rendered":"Cooking with Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Jim Burklo<\/a> offers this helpful illustration between Christianity and cooking, between the Bible and a recipe book.<\/p>\n

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Imagine that you memorize a book of recipes.\u00a0 You quote passages from the recipes, with breathless enthusiasm, to other people \u2013 whether they care to listen or not.\u00a0 You follow each recipe to the letter.\u00a0 You chop and mix and bake and cook according to the instructions.\u00a0 You show off the finished product, proclaiming its absolute superiority to all others.<\/div>\n
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But you never bother to eat the food.<\/div>\n
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Conservative Christianity is like that.\u00a0 It\u2019s all directions, but no dinner.\u00a0 Because if you actually ate the food, you might or might not like it.\u00a0 There are recipes that, if faithfully followed, will produce bland, boring, unpleasant, and even nasty dishes.\u00a0 Because rigidly orthodox religion worships the recipes, actually eating the results might lead to questioning them.<\/div>\n
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That\u2019s why conservative Christian preachers warn against trusting your emotions when interpreting the faith.\u00a0 Your emotions and your subjective experiences are like taste-buds.\u00a0 A bitter orthodox teaching should be obeyed on authority, and not be subject to evaluation by your God-given sensorium.\u00a0 Oh no no no, don\u2019t follow your gut.\u00a0 Don\u2019t follow your nose or your tongue before you even get to your gut.\u00a0 Follow those megachurch pastors and long-robed clerics who declaim with stentorian gravitas from their pulpits, ordering you to eat the recipe, but not the food.<\/div>\n
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But I say try out the recipes in the Bible and in the Christian tradition.\u00a0 Taste and see.\u00a0 Don\u2019t memorize the faith and gush about how perfect it is.\u00a0 Practice it, which is a much messier business.\u00a0 Don\u2019t just talk about God.\u00a0 Taste God in mystical contemplation.\u00a0 If the results are great, consider repeating the exercise.\u00a0 If you follow a religious recipe and get perfectly prepared lutefisk, which tastes like the residue left in a sink trap after a Drano treatment, consider shelving that one and trying another.\u00a0 If you get okay results with a biblical recipe, but get a bright idea for improving on it \u2013 maybe even radically altering it \u2013 go for it.\u00a0 Be playful and free-spirited.\u00a0 A dash of this, a dash of that.\u00a0 Don\u2019t be a slave to the details.\u00a0 Experiment with the recipes of the great mystics and contemplatives of the Church over the past 2,000 years.\u00a0 Poke your finger in the batter and lick it.\u00a0 If it works for you, make it part of your repertoire.\u00a0 Trust your taste.\u00a0 If if doesn\u2019t pass that test, play further with the ingredients or move on to something else.\u00a0 Come up with your own recipes!\u00a0 There\u2019s always room for innovation in the Christian kitchen.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Click to read the rest<\/a>. Along similar lines, Richard Beck found that his theological journey made him think of soup<\/a>.\u00a0See too Vance Morgan\u2019s recent post<\/a> on arguments about the existence of God, which includes two quotes from different sources, from which the following are excerpts:<\/div>\n

[N]othing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and:<\/p>\n

One sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the great enemy of tolerance . . . Our faith is a living thing precisely because<\/i> it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Visit his blog<\/a> to see them in the context of his post, and to find out where they come from.<\/div>\n
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Here\u2019s a cartoon from David Hayward<\/a> about different perspectives on what he unhelpfully calls \u201cdeconstruction\u201d \u2013 by which he doesn\u2019t mean it in the sense that Derrida made famous and which everyone else associates with it, but \u201cthe changing of life-long hard-held beliefs\u2026 the loss of faith.\u201d<\/div>\n
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And finally, thanks to commenter Daniel Wilcox for encouraging me to turn a quote from yesterday\u2019s blog post into a meme<\/a>!<\/div>\n
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Jim Burklo offers this helpful illustration between Christianity and cooking, between the Bible and a recipe book. Imagine that you memorize a book of recipes.\u00a0 You quote passages from the recipes, with breathless enthusiasm, to other people \u2013 whether they care to listen or not.\u00a0 You follow each recipe to the letter.\u00a0 You chop and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":60853,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[163],"tags":[14481,5723,9597,10046],"class_list":["post-57427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-progressive-christianity-religion","tag-cooking","tag-jim-burklo","tag-progressive-christianity","tag-recipes"],"yoast_head":"\nCooking with Christianity<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Jim Burklo offers this helpful illustration between Christianity and cooking, between the Bible and a recipe book. 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