Status Updates From The Divine Embrace: Recover...

“We do have truth. It is the story of God handed down in Scripture, in the church, and in its ministry of worship. The antidote to an intellectual spirituality is not an anti-intellectual spirituality but a spirituality rooted in God’s story that stands on its own. What I mean by this is that God’s story is a vision of reality that does not need to be supported by reason, science, or any other discipline.”

“The Christian way of knowing,” I continued, “is reflection on Scripture within community.”

When someone asks me the question, “Do you have a personal relationship with God?” I always answer, “You’re asking the wrong question. What is important here is not that I in and of myself achieve or create a personal relationship with God, but that God has a personal relationship with me through Jesus Christ, which I affirm and nourish.”

“To suggest “I am a spiritual person because I felt the forgiveness of God in a particular experience” places confidence in my experience rather than in God’s embrace of me on the hard wood of the cross.”

The first section of this chapter is an interesting origin, overview and critique of evangelical legalism. Webber notes the danger of a spiritual culture defined by what it’s against, rather than what it’s for.

“In the ancient church we enter God’s story in repentance, baptism, and the reception of the Spirit (Acts 2:38), whereas pietism emphasizes a conversion by faith that has no real place for the divine significance of the baptismal ritual. Baptism becomes my response instead of God’s sign of creative power expressed through water.”

“ancient spirituality focuses on the whole story of God, whereas pietism focuses on faith in the death and resurrection, reducing the story of God to less than its whole.“

“The confidence in spirituality is not my experience but my baptism into Christ, with the focus on Christ embracing me in his death and resurrection.“

“Louis Bouyer, the famed Catholic critic of the Reformation and subsequent Protestantism acknowledges the enormous debt we all owe to Protestant Christianity for its history of song.”

At least the Catholics like our hymns :)

“By replacing contemplation and participation with justification and sanctification, the Reformers set up what was to become a severe problem in the modern era—the separation of spirituality from a relational, lived theology to a spirituality rooted in a forensic justification that did not encourage the mystery of contemplation or participation but instead turned spirituality toward intellectual knowledge.“