Archive for February, 2009
The devil is in the details
My kids want to know where we got the story of the fall of the devil… .how he was originally an angel and chose to stray… is this actually an Orthodox belief? I couldn’t find it in the Bible… is it?
Less explaining, more doing.
The early church did not seek to formulate a theory of illness; instead, it healed the sick. It did not attempt to explain how the demonic could exist in a good world made by a good God; instead, they cast out demons. They had no hypotheses about how prayer works. They simply prayed… Their attitude was not anti-rational or anti-theological, but merely concrete. They looked, not for adequate ways to conceptualize the Kingdom, but for ways to actualize it. — Walter Wink in Engaging the Powers
Cold-Blooded Christianity
To scan the popular Christian publications today is to conclude that the category of heresy has not been lost, but it has been relocated. The new anathema is “cultural Christianity.” “Missional Christians” disparage it. The supposed demise of Christendom is the rallying cry of young, hip evangelicals. Many would prefer to be labeled “Arian” than derided as “Constantinian.” They suspect even classical Christian doctrine, infected as it supposedly is with the cultural categories of Greek thought.
What happened at Whitby?
For the first Anglo-Saxon Christians, Easter was the central point of the year, the moment when by baptism they entered the new life in Christ about which they had heard from the missionaries sent from Rome and from Ireland. it was not to them an arbitrary date but the pivot of the whole of the cosmos, the central moment when reality was revealed in the face of Jesus Christ… That the missionaries who preached the Gospel to them should differ about the date on which this Paschal mystery should be celebrated was both confusing and scandalous; where external practice was not something separate from internal faith, the implications of such division were not trivial. More…
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