Anti-gay stands has become the new orthodoxy, the litmus test for true believers that tells all one needs to know whether one belongs or is an outsider. I can't see how Paul's vision of the church as a body, the belief in the divine commonwealth can ever be had in this situation. It makes me despair for the future of the faith. The future seems to belong to those who see difference as a "cancer" to be removed, instead of a place where God can challenge and grow us.
3 Comments:
Dwight,
If you're anything like me you're feeling something of a religious yo-yo these days: "Am a Christian - Am I not? Am I in - Am I out? Can I stomach it anymore - Can I not? Do I even want to be associated with the word Christian anymore? And the paranoid: is it possible I am merely the victim of a media (mis-)perception or can this truly be the reality of Christianity today?"
I've been wondering if I can call myself (borrowing an unlovely term from Kaufman) "christomorphic" and still convey my meaning? Certainly it does a better job than if the word Christian can only mean an idolatrous, superstitious, anti-intellectual and ethnocentric complex of stances most of which were intellectually laid to rest by the late 19th-century.
A last straw for me was recently reading an exchange between "emergent church" theologian Brian McClaren and evangelical Charles Colson filled with condescension, studded with proof-texts and exhibiting a polite disdain for each other masquerading as deference. All I could think was: "I can't stand either of these guys."
To paraphrase Eckhart, I keep thinking maybe it's time to take leave of Christianity for Christ's sake? (For which I now prepare myself to be flamed by the "it's our word too!" crowd of progressive Christians whose flaming I would really and truly love to be justified!)
I know what you mean. I also wonder if the name `Christian' has got muddied with this exclusivity.
> "it's our word too!" crowd of progressive Christians whose flaming I would really and truly love to be justified!
Well, there is this: but it occurs to me to wonder, if we have this text that I look at and read one way, you look at and read probably similarly, and then some other bunch of folks claim to have read and come up with different conclusions... just how much of this is in the text *at all*, compared to how much is coming from folks' predispositions-to-see-it-some-way?
"I also wonder if the name `Christian' has got muddied with this exclusivity. "
There is nothing exclusive about Christianity. All of us are called to come and to be transformed by God's grace, abandoning our old life of sin and taking on a new life in Christ.
All fall short of the glory of God.
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