ken wilson online

I wonder if we’ve had the emphasis on the wrong syllable on the pressing issue of authority.  Speaking big picture, long time frame here.  The church at it’s inception had one creed: Jesus is Lord.  Simple.  All authority in heaven and on earth given to him, Jesus. What rolls off our tongue like a tired chorus, was, on their lips, incendiary. Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not, and Apollos is not and Astarte is not and the moon and the sun and the stars are not….and the powers and principalities that hold sway in this world are not.  Every knee shall bow before the One not the many, not the several, not the few.
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Something is happening.  After centuries wrestling with the “doctrine of biblical inspiration” believers have worked themselves into an exhausted lethargy about this book.  We’ve been so busy either debunking or defending it, that we’ve forgotten to simply enter it on it’s own terms to know what punch it packs.  But what I see happening is a growing body of people who have no dog in that old fight.  They don’t approach the Bible with any pre-conceived notions about its inspiration or lack thereof. They could care less about words like inerrancy or form criticism.  They may be completely uninformed about the Jesus seminar and reactions to it. They are outside the camp of insitutional religion, but not outside the reach of Jesus.  They are simply readers without rubrics, responding to the text as it is given to them and they are as disparate a group as Reynolds Price, the novelist, Leon Kass, the bio-ethicist at University of Chicago and Layzie Bone, the rapper.
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Maybe you noticed my silence of late in the blogging department.  I was listening in to the conversation prompted by the previous post, between Brenda, Archie, Billabong, Trenton, Metler and others.   People want to talk to each other about these things don’t they? They want to convince each other, poke, and prod, question and offer themselves in response to each other.  At stake in the conversation were questions of who gets to lead and why, who’s in and who’s out, what the gospel is and isn’t, and how we are to understand and engage the Bible.  Since the Bible touches on all the Big Questions–life and death and immortality among others–there is plenty to get worked up over in a conversation like this.  So now I want to ask, what would please Jesus in these matters?
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