Archive for 'Emergent Theology'
Loving the world too much or too little?
Posted on 11. Apr, 2011 by Tim Stoner.
A friend asked me a question about my disagreement with Love Wins. I have to admit it kind of rankled me. It implied fear, inadequacy or inferiority. So, yes, it stung my pride. Though it had a bite to it, it forced me to uncover the motivation for my negative response to Rob’s core message. And in doing so I had to confront the masks we wear: misdirected love, reactionary love and, more to the point, a cold and careless apathy hiding behind proclamations of love.
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Hell’s response: “Let us alone!”
Posted on 24. Mar, 2011 by Tim Stoner.
Recently, a thoughtful young man asked a question that jarred me. This was how the question was posed: “What’s so special about the moment of death that it suddenly cuts off the availability of God’s grace?” I had no good anwer until I happened to read through the story of the encounter between Jesus and a demonized Jewish synagogue attendee. What he screams at Jesus wipes off any ironic, postmodern smirk and reveals a lot about the irrevocable line between life and death.
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No Doxology No (eternal) Hell
Posted on 19. Mar, 2011 by Tim Stoner.
Something has been steadily seeping out of our discourse over several decades–the gripping awareness of God’s majesty. It is in this generation that the resultant lightness of God’s being is becoming impossible to ignore. There was a time when men and women lived in a world drenched with God, they blazed with a white-hot devotion. As I read Love Wins I was compelled to pick up a book by such a man: Knowledge of the Holy. It shows us why where there is no doxology Hell makes no sense.
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A Ticklish Convergence: Part Two
Posted on 02. Nov, 2010 by Tim Stoner.
It is only a matter of time, Tickle affirms, before the church, out of compassion, adjusts its stance over homosexuality. “What is really at issue [in this debate]is the Reformation doctrine of Sola Scriptura.” When this issue is ultimately decided (in favor), “the Reformation’s understanding of Scripture as it had been taught by Protestantism for almost five centuries will be dead.” For this reason the battle over sexual identity “has to be the bitterest, because once it is lost. . . .It is finished.” Perhaps this is not such a bad thing. Maybe it was time for it to die.
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A Ticklish Convergence: Part One
Posted on 28. Oct, 2010 by Tim Stoner.
Phyllis Tickle is a formidable woman. She is leading the charge for the next great revolution in Christianity called the Great Emergence. She is an expert on religion who is to be taken seriously. She spoke at Mars Hill in Grand Rapids on “The Feminine Atributes of the Holy Spirit.” In it she makes a case for the Feminine Divine and in it we see where Emergent/Emerging Christianity may be heading. To hear her talk, what is on the horizon might better be called the “Great Convergence”–where Christianity and Paganism meld into one.
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Part One: Knowing that you are at war
Posted on 06. Jan, 2010 by Tim Stoner.
The most offensive stance you can take today is to believe that you are a part of a spiritually militant band of warriors. Many today believe that all of that noisy, sweaty, battle rhetoric was brought to a sudden halt by the violence of the cross. This view interprets the death of Jesus as this massive back fire that burned off everything that fueled spiritual conflict. Any residual warfare rhetoric that emphasizes dueling antagonists is antiquated or destructive. The problem? That is precisely how Jesus, the apostles and church fathers (and mothers) taught us to talk.
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The Gods Aren’t Angry
Posted on 17. Jun, 2009 by Tim Stoner.
If God is not angry then He cannnot be God. Nobody really wants a God who is so loving that He must overlook and ignore blatant and persistent evil. If anger is antithetical to love then the death of Jesus makes no sense, nor, for that matter, do His repeated angry verbal exchanges before His death.
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