Brilliant post by Richard Beck on his blog

[Melchizedek]

experimentaltheology.blogspot.co … ction.html

[BirdOfTheEgg]

This is the kind of stuff I love seeing in Christian discussion. Tying it all together. Love that blog.

There’s a lot of stuff on self-esteem neurosis from Adler on self-esteem complexes. And Jung called just about everything a neurosis (sounds crazy from the secular perspective; makes perfect sense from the Christian perspective).

The way this blog presents this, though, it would appear I killed my god (my deistic god) and lost everything last year. Although I’m still not clear on the whole born again thing.

[phillip_macdonald]

Thanks for sharing that post with us. That was a reality check for me. How often do we see in Christian ministry and in ourselves the drive to be a “hero” all the while stepping all over people or most often just neglecting them? And Jesus has told us over and over that the bottom line is love, that’s it. And we want to keep putting qualifiers on it.

Beck quoting Peter Rollins:

Resurrection faith is then manifested in a freedom and liberation in which we are able to courageously and fully embrace this world without repression, resentment, and fear. It is a way of living in love, a love that embraces existence, not because it is perfect, but because it is beautiful in the midst of its very imperfection.
…This God is affirmed where people are gathered together in love and is testified to where the sick are healed, the starving fed, and where those who dwell in death are raised into life. “Where two or three come together in my name,” we read in the Gospel according to Matthew, “there am I with them.” In other words, where people are gathered together in love, God is present.

And since I have been an Eldridge fan I was struck by this in the comments:

Perhaps it is that the Eldridge view is still centered on “self.” One is looking for that grand narrative, for himself. It is still ego. We are all guilty of it, it seems almost impossible not to be in our modern evangelical missional culture. The grand narrative we often seek seems to often be one that constructs ideas around the gospel, but that they are just that…around it. If we would just aim to love people, one at a time, then the gospel is manifested. If we start out aiming for the prize, to be the hero, we will most likely miss it.