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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Where will it all end?
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
So, I'm now a postmodern, all-inclusive, neo-liberal neo-orthodox.
I love the ancient liturgy. The reading, homily, creed, prayers, confession, peace, Eucharist, dismissal.
The hymns ... are more problematic. Evangelical dirges.
Yesterday I caught myself wishing it were all in Latin.
Or Greek!
I was in a church in Malaga last year and LOVED reading the Lord's Prayer in Latin.
I suppose I should follow it in Aramaic.
Anyway, where I'm rambling to in my dotage is I'm reconciled more and more to the language of the liturgy, to worship and adoration (private, inner), mystery (Thomas Merton!), whilst feeling wildly radicalized. A mixed state. High and low - church - concurrently. Worshipfully bipolar. I LOATHE piety. I am not pious. So I struggle with pious language. Which gives me something to pray about, so that is good. I used to fail to repress intrusive thinking and now embrace and bare it all (not out loud! Well not publically) therapeutically in knowledge that that word means worship.
Forgive me, but this is context for what's actually coming. And I feel the wave, the swell, the tide of it all. But I doubt I can make anyone see the connection. But it's up there, postmodernism is the current now, the prevailing wind, El Niño, the irreversible tilt of the ocean.
The journey from cultic, literalist fundamentalism deeply coloured by wild millennial inclusivism, through charismatic evangelicalism, neo-orthodoxy, perichoresis to liberalism. With one thread in common. No damnationism.
And now, thanks to postmodernism, I no longer have to hold in tension what conservatives HAVE to. That Jesus was God the Killer and is and yet will be. All His hard sayings melt.
But once one starts down that road, where does it end? Not eschatologically. I'm all but done with that. Salvifically. Soteriologically. Then and now. In the Atonement.
Evangelicals are obsessed with the hopeless, failed, doomed task of saving everyone. Now. Desperately driven by the story, the narrative of Jesus. That is, His story.
He believed in penal substitutionary atonement. That that was His Father's will. That He must fulfil the prophecy of that.
I posited that here some months ago and it wasn't taken up. Because the liberal consensus and even I think the Orthodox ignores it like an elephant in the room.
But there's no way for me that it isn't there. BUT ... it's 'just' a narrative. A perfectly accurately portrayed one, recorded one, believed in utterly by Jesus God in the flesh Himself. Who believed in the Killer God He had been ... or did He?
And that He HAD to die to save us.
Now I, of COURSE, believe He did. But not from any legalistic binding. But from existenz. From being mud as evolved as it can get. And yes I NEED every metaphor including all the legalistic in my metanarrative of personal salvation. But none of them is sufficient, complete, AND I baulk at what appears to be a perverse, selfish, thanatophilic Santa Muerte death cult ... in the liturgy. In the hymns. Week in, week out.
Ah well.
And so much that goes with that. The desperate declaration of healings in ineffable yet micromanaged answer to prayer when there's no such thing. The deep terror of God the bitter, useless, predestinating killer.
My sins ARE as scarlet. My shame is bitter. I am broken in all this. I embrace them, myself as I am embraced. Utterly. And fail. And pick myself up. And stagger on. With my Brother by my side. And our Father and Gelert the Fie Hound - [The [Holy]] Spirit.
I'm sorry for the stream of consciousness, I'm not being deliberately obtuse, I'm done with that. I'm saying, including in the last strangeness that I have difficulty relating to ANY of it. Relating to God as Father, as Brother, as Spirit, as Triune, as my Redeemer. Though He is. And I 'get on' best with Him when I can say that and talk with the Hims in Him, the meta-Him of Hims as with a friend-counsellor-father-brother ... mute Zen Daddy nodding and slapping His thighs in the fog in the park where I'm lost and barking.
Know what I mean?
![[Biased]](wink.gif)
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
Yes - I know exactly what you mean because I am there too.
I believe the answer is not to over-think these things. Love God and neighbour and get on with it. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Our Minister asked me to lead the leadership team in our Church. I couldn't quite believe it. I said 'you know that I am no longer able to be evangelical?' and talked about my theology. She said 'We want you for your skills and positive encouragement, don't worry about the rest, I don't'.
Wow!
(I haven't said 'yes' yet, but I am tempted!)
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Martin PC
I love that OP. I have been, and still am, on a crazy chaotic journey, and I have given up trying to work it out. Something is taking me somewhere or other; in the meantime, I keep breathing.
There is God, or there isn't. Christ is in you and me, obviously. All religions lead to God - or maybe not. Stay away from the ayahuasca, too much vomiting. Today is Monday. High tide was at 1pm today at London Bridge.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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Dave Marshall
Shipmate
# 7533
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Posted
[reply to Martin]
Possibly.
That might be an ultra-articulated outline of where I was headed if I had not ended up ditching the whole belief-based salvation caboodle. Reality is so much simpler.
[ 26. May 2014, 14:43: Message edited by: Dave Marshall ]
Posts: 4763 | From: Derbyshire Dales | Registered: Jun 2004
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
I KNEW you would Gamaliel.
Boogie. You MUST. I'm sorry. That's the hand of God upon you. Or slapping on His thighs in the fog.
quetzalcoatl - beat me at my own game. And all true too!
Dave Marshall - I've NEVER been there! And I'm not talking about reality ...
Fie Hound?! I like it but I meant Fire.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Well, Martin, it seems to me that there is Godding, (not Godalming). In other words, there is the Verb, and nowt else. Errm, that's it really. The next high tide is approx. 1. 20 am, something to do with the Moon Goddess, I expect.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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balaam
Making an ass of myself
# 4543
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Posted
Tke a trip through life and trust God and the Holy Spirit will enrich you.
I've been enriched by lots of things along the way. By the Anglo Catholic Church I was at for a while, even though that was never my style. By the Charismatic Renewal I went through - I don't think I ever fully came out of that one, it's still there if I look. Then there's all the places I've never been, but I've brushed up against people from Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Quakers, fully fledged chandelier swinging pentecostals and Plymouth Brethren. All have enriched my journey past.
The holy Spirit has used them all. So here I am, still some sort of Evangelical, though I'm not always sure what sort. Where will it all end indeed?
The daft thing is that even if I now reject the abuses of rigid Fundamentalism, The Holy Spirit has used that too. That's God for you, always playing tricks to keep you on your toes.
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Last ever sig ...
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Posts: 9049 | From: Hen Ogledd | Registered: May 2003
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