Notes from the Balcony

Ongoing comment and dialogue on being a new church in a new world - A Blog by John Montgomery

[The Bible] is not, for a start, a list of rules, though it contains many commandments of various sorts and in various contexts. Nor is it a compendium of true doctrines, though, of course, many parts of the Bible declare great truths about God, Jesus, the world and ourselves in no uncertain terms. Most of its constituent parts, and all of it when put together (whether in the Jewish canonical form or the Christian form), can best be described as story. This is a complicated and much-discussed theme, but there is nothing to be gained by ignoring it. - N.T. Wright

Saturday, March 17, 2007

God as Mysterious Power

When Bultmann speaks of the deity, he uses the image of a “mysterious power” (and the complementary phrase “the activity of God”) that drives human beings (and all creation) this way and that by care, yet cuts each aspiration off in its finitude. This has always begged the question of whether the Most Holy One is a personal entity with a unique purpose intimately and directly interacting with the world or not. This, of course is where I part company with Spong and his “a-theism” or Tillich who speaks of his God not as a being, but Being Itself, Being's ground. Also, I finally part company with Barth and his wholly transcendent understanding of divinity. Seems to me that if we affirm that we are “Christian,” we carry the baggage (much of which is poorly packed) of an involved God standing in mutual inter-relationship with all of creation (even you and me). It is a deity that acts in a direct and intimate way. So then, God is not wholly an object, but also a subject.

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