Early last Fall, I placed a post on this blog suggesting that John Wesley, the Reformer and effective founder of Methodism, might be, in a manner of speaking, my spiritual emancipator. By that, I meant that his theology (mostly compiled by others from his written sermons) struck a resonant chord with me and helped me in dealing with some faith questions and struggles.
Of course one man’s thinking from the 18th century doesn’t begin to cover the entire gamut of religious or theological issues, to say anything about what we’re all now dealing with in the post-modern world.
Since Wesley’s time, we’ve passed through the period of “modernity”, which contained comfortable absolutes (“safe havens” to people like me), and into the “post-modern” era where nothing, apparently, can be considered certain. Now, if we desire and seek a degree of stability and certainty for our thinking, we apparently must pick and choose it, if we can find it, from a massive reservoir of individualistic thinking that supposedly offends no one.
Talk about needing more spiritual emancipation. I feel like I’m almost worse off now than when I started this journey. But there is hope.
My elder son has jokingly(?:-) suggested that my spiritual formation (the bases upon which we build our personal faith and theology or lack thereof) is quite undernourished – and I must reluctantly agree. I would also suggest that many, if not most, “moderns” like myself -- especially those who formed their religious thinking patterns within Christian “evangelicalism” or more particularly in “fundamentalism” -- could easily suffer from the same malaise.
One thing is true for sure: we moderns are quite uncomfortable with the shifting sands of post-modernism.
As I mentioned earlier, however, there is hope. Thank God for thinking, lucid biblical scholars. I’m presently reading a book by N. T. Wright, Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey and the former Dean of Lichfield Cathedral. He is considered by many to be one of the top New Testament scholars in the world; he is also a veteran of teaching New Testament studies for 20 years at Cambridge, McGill and Oxford Universities.
The book is titled The Challenge of Jesus - Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is. In it, this thoughtful theologian takes the reader through the often oblique secular history of the life of Jesus, sets it in the culture of the time, and interrelates it to the religious or theological Jesus that we find in the canon – not an easy task if intellectual integrity is a criterium. Further, he offers what he feels is important to consider as far as maintaining this integrity in our post-modern world -- and this is especially where my present interest lies.
When I finish the book, I’ll certainly have a post or three about it. Perhaps you might even find that these are issues you might want consider as well in your faith journey.
2 comments:
Wow. Don't remember saying anything like that about your spiritual formation. If I did say that, I'm sorry.
Maybe I said something like it's been one sided, but that has a different connotation to me. But in any case, it's a joy to see how you are stretching and reading and thinking, and that's a very good thing.
No apology necessary AT ALL, Gregg. I'm sure you remember things much better than I do. But I believe that what I said (you said) about my spiritual formation is true nonetheless.
I probably used the word "undernourished" as part of my idiom and out of your context. What's in my brain, unfortunately, is only what I THINK I may have heard, not necessarily what you said (it was a pre-Iraq war discussion about the Christian's view of the use of force). And what I think I may have heard is also not reliable anymore -- what with my full hard drive and STML (short term memory loss :-).
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