05-04-2019, 04:56 AM
It's one of those nights when the Lord awakened me in the wee hours for reasons not obvious to me. So I sat down at my computer and reviewed some of the theology debates currently getting attention. It's a lot of tail-chasing. Most of it is not theology proper, but religion and the mechanics of how humans do what their faith demands. An awful lot of it is debating how folks debate, about being fair and reasonable by various definitions of what "fair and reasonable" mean.
Some of the big names right now are people like John Piper and N.T. Wright. They have a long-running feud over what Paul taught regarding the doctrine of justification. Piper is a traditionalist and Wright is suggesting some bright new ideas. I find both of them are tail-chasing over things that simply cannot be understood with the intellect. All of it stands upon wrangling over words.
I'm just about out of steam on my project to address "theology and practice" because of that. It's been a good thing to summarize and restate some of the basics, but I'm not sure it's addressing the needs of our own people to keep going with it in this concentrated form. Too much of what's popular with the mainstream is meaningless to us. The reason is obvious: There is a vast weight of assumptions we reject that takes us off into a totally new direction. And so far, we have garnered no attention from the heavyweights. They are ignoring the questions we raise about all those underlying assumptions.
But I will remain open to more questions, because that's where we are feeding the sheep. Our few virtual parish members need to see how our entirely different assumptions affect the big debates that preoccupy everyone else. After today's blog posts, I believe I have at least one more post that will sum up this one thing that sets us apart. That will wait until Sunday morning for posting. This hasn't been a waste of time and energy. It has refreshed for me just how different we are, and how we are different.
Some of the big names right now are people like John Piper and N.T. Wright. They have a long-running feud over what Paul taught regarding the doctrine of justification. Piper is a traditionalist and Wright is suggesting some bright new ideas. I find both of them are tail-chasing over things that simply cannot be understood with the intellect. All of it stands upon wrangling over words.
I'm just about out of steam on my project to address "theology and practice" because of that. It's been a good thing to summarize and restate some of the basics, but I'm not sure it's addressing the needs of our own people to keep going with it in this concentrated form. Too much of what's popular with the mainstream is meaningless to us. The reason is obvious: There is a vast weight of assumptions we reject that takes us off into a totally new direction. And so far, we have garnered no attention from the heavyweights. They are ignoring the questions we raise about all those underlying assumptions.
But I will remain open to more questions, because that's where we are feeding the sheep. Our few virtual parish members need to see how our entirely different assumptions affect the big debates that preoccupy everyone else. After today's blog posts, I believe I have at least one more post that will sum up this one thing that sets us apart. That will wait until Sunday morning for posting. This hasn't been a waste of time and energy. It has refreshed for me just how different we are, and how we are different.
