the:shiverian

engaging culture

Jake is starting an ambitious journey into critical philosophy. I can only hope to try and keep up with him.

Interesting that I ran across this from Jerome today in a book about rhetoric and preaching:

What communion hath light with darkness? What concord hath Christ with Baliel? I will tell you the story of my own unhappiness..

I still could not bring myself to forego the library which I had formed for myself at Rome with great care and toil. And so, miserable man that I was, I would fast only that I might afterwards read Cicero. After many nights spent in vigil, after floods of tears called from my inmost heart, after the recollection of my past sins, I would once more take up Plautus.

[and in his dream].. preparations for my funeral went on; my body grew gradually colder, and the warmth of life lingered only in my throbbing breast. Suddenly I was caught up in the spirit and dragged before the judgment seat of the Judge; and here the light was so bright, and those who stood around were so radiant, that I cast myself upon the ground and did not dare to look up. Asked who and what I was I replied: "I am a Christian." But He who presided said: "Thou liest, thou art a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. For 'where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.'"

Resner notes of the Latin fathers, "Each struggled with this question: What from my pre-Christian life may be brought into my Christian life without compromising the purity of the faith?"

I think that for many of us in the emergent conversation but at least for myself, the question has turned to "What from my post-Christian life may be brought into my Christian life without compromising the purity of the faith?"

That is, since flights from fundamentalism and evangelicalism do I just simply baptize avant-garde philosophy, sociology and linguistics as if Constantine has taken over again? Do I let the pendulum swing the other way by reclaiming that everything is God's and hopefully find some balance in the middle? I think that this is a natural step in the move away from the evangelical ghetto.

But then I began to realize that classic liberalism tried this to an extent with complex theories of correlation and death of God theology and such. And there was something about the gospel that demanded separation and boundaries (maybe some Volf here).

And so I began to speak about appropriation. Confessing the primacy of the gospel as the norming standard, what can these previously off-limit ideas, works, and persons contribute to an emerging Christian theology. Yet the dichotomy still remains.

But I think the question changes from ultimate concerns of "purity of faith." Maybe something like this, "How can our community actively join with the active Creator in living into the dynamic work[s] of salvation that is particularly revealed in the life and work of Jesus Christ?"

Individual -> communal
What -> How (praxis)
focus on purity of faith -> focus on mission Dei
Categories of Christian/secular -> all creation in need of salvation
Neutrality -> Critical investment

Boundaries have collapsed. There is only living with God in mission. There is certainly still good/evil. These categories, however, do not break down the lines of Christian/secular.

So we can freely join with Jake in joining with God to co-participate in God's move toward the world. We follow Christ in this journey via the incarnation. We live for years actively searching for God at work in the most surprising places and then we join that work. And so we as confessors of Jesus Christ follow Christ to these philosophers eagerly expecting to join God's invasion of this world and this culture.

Posted by mark at 9:16 PM | | perm