We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
In the Wilderness of Religion
Eric Bryan via Compfight
There are an awful lot of us in the Church today who are no longer feeling at home in Evangelicalism. Regardless of how you feel about World Vision’s hiring policy decisions, the spectacle of thousands of people discontinuing their child sponsorships (relationships with flesh and blood children in need) because of a theological disagreement left many of us aghast. Is this what American consumerism has done to our faith?
Ed Cyzewski wrote a blog entitled We Know Where to Find Jesus, But What If We Don’t Want to Go There? If you’re feeling like you’re wandering in the wilderness of religion, it might comfort you to know that the wilderness can be a holy place.
From Ed’s blog post:
The riddle of Jesus was as confounding to John as it would be for us today. There’s no doubt that many Christians today would struggle to believe in and follow a religious “leader” like Jesus who wasn’t married, didn’t have a large following, and never assumed any kind of official office or put together an organization/denomination.
Jesus wasn’t organized, systematized, or influential according to our own terms. While he had a certain amount of authority and clout because of his powerful teachings and miracles, he never took on a formal position. That latter point made no sense to John.
I was reminded of these lessons about John from my book Unfollowers when I read a post by Sarah Bessey over the weekend. Sarah gives evangelicals “permission” to step away from labels, traditions, and positions for a season in order to grieve and to rediscover what following Jesus may look like for them. Everything in her post resonates with my own experiences in evangelicalism: the need to grieve its worst parts, the desire for distance and space, and the reassembling of my faith out in the wilderness apart from religious structures.
We don’t get to remake faith according to our own terms. We can only seek out Jesus wherever he may be found, and as the story of John the Baptist teaches us, Jesus spent a lot of time in the wilderness.
Category: General
Tags: Doubt, Ed Cyzewski, Evangelism, Faith, Jesus, Religion, Religious Idolatry, Sarah Bessey, World Vision
Related Reading
The Cross in the Manger
There has been a strand within the Western theological tradition—one that is especially prevalent in contemporary American Evangelicalism—that construes the significance of the cross in strictly soteriological terms. The cross is central, in this view, but only in the sense that the reason Jesus came to earth was to pay the price for our sin…
Thankful for the Passion of God
The classical view of God has held that God is impassible, meaning he is above pathos (passion or emotions). The main reason the church came to this view was that, following the Hellenistic philosophical tradition, they associated emotions with change while believing God was above all change (immutable). Moreover, experiencing emotions implies that one is affected by…
Why Bart Ehrman Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Christmas (Or Your Faith) Part 5
This is the fifth of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? In this segment, Greg points out that none of Bart’s material are new discoveries. Even the most conservative scholars in this field are aware of them, and yet, none of them…
Why Doesn’t God Make Himself Obvious?
Why is faith so difficult? Why isn’t God more obvious? Why doesn’t God come out and provide irrefutable proof that he is God so that there is no more doubt? Greg’s father raised such questions and Greg’s responses are recorded in the book Letters from a Skeptic. _______________________ What would happen … if God individually…
The Incarnation as an Example of Cross-Cultural Love
Beautiful Faces of Palestine via Compfight Christena Cleveland wrote an excellent piece about the radical cross-cultural nature of the incarnation. I’ve never thought of it quite this way before, but the incarnation is the most profound instance of entering into another culture in a selfless way. Moving outside of our “cultural comfort zone” to more…
Don’t all religions believe in the same God?
http://youtu.be/BKmSr6lKWsk Bruxy Cavey takes a swing at this question and scores a home run.