Re: Interview with God

Rowland Croucher wrote:

No matter what a person’s faith-experience, this is really great!

Nathan responded:

It is lovely to watch and has lots of splendid thoughts within it, but it raises some questions for me too. I’m left wondering whether, in a funny sort of way, its message actually undermines the Christian gospel.

It seems to imply that salvation is merely a matter of realigning our thinking so that we are nicer to one another and get more out of life. If salvation was just a matter of correcting our faulty thinking or reordering our society, then perhaps the death and resurrection of Jesus would have been quite unnecessary. God could have accomplished the task with a few more gifted prophets or perhaps a video production house and a really good publicity and distribution house.

Perhaps what I’m thinking then (thinking out loud) is that this presentation doesn’t take sin very seriously at all. Rather than just faulty thinking, I read sin as us being inescapably in the grip of an addiction to dividing, excluding and victimising. I see it at work within myself, fragmenting my own being and setting me at war with myself. I see it in our world as we divide ourselves up, asserting our identity by excluding and victimising the “other”, and I see it in the relationship between humanity and God where we end up excluding and victimising Jesus, the incarnate God come among us. And salvation from the alientation, hostility, fear and guilt of all this will not be found in merely correcting our thinking with a few nice bits of potted wisdom. The only salvation to which we Christians can bear witness is a salvation found in the encounter with the risen Christ who embraces us in his gratuitous forgiveness – as our ultimate victim who is yet entirely without resentment – and who gives us his own Spirit to liberate us, carrying us in his own body into the promised land of new life and transfiguring us in his own likeness.

So, while I think the “interview with God” is a lovely bit of generic spiritual wisdom, I’m not sure that I’d be wanting to promote it as a Christian take on what God’s answers for teh world’s most pressing questions.

What do others think?

Peace and hope,

Nathan

______________________________________ Nathan Nettleton Pastor, South Yarra Community Baptist Church

I responded:

Nathan, you have a point

Put simplistically (a la Matthew Fox / Original Blessing) we have the Pharisees, Paul and Augustine and the Western Church until fairly recently (Vatican 2 for the Catholics, 1983 for Scripture Union) beginning ‘What the Christian Gospel is About’ with ‘The Fact of Sin’.

Then the liberals and progressive evangelicals and radicals reminded us of Jesus’ reiteration of the Great Commandment which doesn’t mention sin…

Are you saying Nathan it’s not ‘either/or’? I’d agree, but what comes first? (Clue: the beginning of John 3:16; the *first two* words of Jesus to the adulterous woman in John 8!).

Shalom!

Rowland Croucher http://jmm.org.au/