The UmBlog

Good Friday is so good because it shows that no matter how bad we screw it up, even in his name, Jesus still wins. Jesus threatened the religious leaders of his nation, and in their narcissistic views, he was threatening God himself and his chosen nation. I call them narcissists because that's how Jesus describes them. Matthew 23:4-7 "Instead of giving you God's Law as food and drink by which you can banquet on God, they package it in bundles of rules, loading you down like pack animals. They seem to take pleasure in watching you stagger under these loads, and wouldn't think of lifting a finger to help.  Their lives are perpetual fashion shows, embroidered prayer shawls one day and flowery prayers the next.  They love to sit at the head table at church dinners, basking in the most prominent positions,  preening in the radiance of public flattery, receiving honorary degrees, and getting called 'Doctor' and 'Reverend.' The Message After Jesus raised a...

Back to a book I am not reading for review but for my own education, Jaroslav Pelikan 's The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition , book 1 in his series The Christian Tradition. The first chapter discusses the interaction of Greek philosophy and Christian theology. But I enjoyed this quote he used from Tertullian. In this manner heretics either wrest plain and simple words to any sense they choose by their conjectures, or else they violently resolve by a literal interpretation words which imply a conditional sense and are incapable of a simple solution, as in this passage. Against Marcion 4.19.6b .

i haven't been interested in contributing to the publicity of this yawner but the Extreme Theology blog has a in depth post addressing the wild claims called Archeological Identity Theft : The Lost Tomb of Jesus Fails to Make the Grade

Jim Hamilton gives a wonderfully gentle critique of NTW. here is a snippet When I read Paul’s letters, it sure sounds like he’s dealing with legalism. Correct. Wright likes to set statements that Paul makes in the wider context of the whole story of the Bible. This wider story often controls Wright’s interpretation of Paul’s words—to the exclusion of the words themselves. Okay, so if Paul isn’t confronting works based righteousness, what is he confronting? In Wright’s system, justification isn’t about “getting in” or “becoming a Christian.” Instead, justification is about being identified with the community God is going to vindicate when the final verdict is handed down. So the important point is not an individual conversion experience but participation in the community God is going to justify. So in Wright’s view, the “works” that Paul is opposing are not things people do to earn God’s favor, they are things people do to be part of the community. For Wright, circumcision in Galati...

it's all about the questions... The question that we should be asking is not, as Campolo claims, “God is a cruel bastard. How can we trust him?” but rather, “God is a Holy Sovereign. How can he tolerate my rebellion?” Rather than complaining that God doesn’t save everyone we should be asking why does God save anyone . All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Nobody deserves to go to heaven; everyone does to go to hell. As Sproul adds, “God never owes mercy….God is not obligated to treat all people equally.” the commenters are special too.

You scored as Chalcedon compliant . You are Chalcedon compliant. Congratulations, you're not a heretic. You believe that Jesus is truly God and truly man and like us in every respect, apart from sin. Officially approved in 451. Chalcedon compliant 100% Adoptionist 33% Nestorianism 33% Monophysitism 33% Pelagianism 25% Apollanarian 17% Monarchianism 0% Arianism 0% Docetism 0% Gnosticism 0% Socinianism 0% Albigensianism 0% Modalism 0% Donatism 0% Are you a heretic? created with QuizFarm.com

I saw this book in a catalog and was interested, but after reading Challie's review, i've lost interest...consider this from the review, Yancey has, in the past, hinted that he adheres to the doctrine of Open Theism and believes in a somewhat less than omnipotent or omniscient God. His clearest affirmations of this were in his book Disappointment with God , a title that is often referred to and quoted in Prayer . While this new book does not contain an explicit affirmation of that doctrine, Yancey again drops hints that he does believe it. Only a few pages into the book he says, "A hundred times a second lightning strikes somewhere on earth, and I for one do not believe that God personally programs each course." Much later, in the closing chapters, he writes, "I know a missionary whose wife and seven-month-old daughter were killed by a single bullet when the air force in a South American country mistook their plane for that of a drug runner and opened fire. '...

I call this flavor of nonsense affiliated with emergent church grunge theology (Pearl Jam, Alive specifically) with a twist of REM , or maybe SNL deep thoughts with Jack Handy theology . only if you drank deeply from popular culture in the 90's do you hear these echoes in odd paragraphs like this from a book. the commenters have no mercy. why are they so mean? because ideas have consequences and the commenters point this out over and over again. "Ed Gungor’s new book, Religiously Transmitted Diseases (Nelson Ignite, 2006), equates definitive answers with “dead religion.” In this excerpt from the book, Gungor affirms the life-giving role of mystery within our faith. Religion may be attractive on one level, but it always strives to remove all the mystery that congests life. It has answers for everything, because questions are way too untidy. “Jesus is the answer.” Right? But what if Jesus isn’t the answer? What if He is the question?" his website, in the "words" ...

The Ministry Report: Special Commentary: Heretics @ Home? : "Although far from being a 'biblical form of government,' democracy reflects the biblical principle that a lot of power in the hands of a few sinners can lead nowhere good. This same egalitarian notion is at the heart of the house church movement. It's the conviction that doctrine (like political power) should not be preserved by an ecclesiastical elite. It must be articulated, taught, transmitted and understood by the laity."

here is one article

Scriptwriter and believer Barbara Nicolosi blogs at Church of the Masses Basically, I hate talking about The Da Vinci Code because I have a personal relationship with Jesus. I have met Him and He isn't a proto-feminist goddess-cultic with a weak personality that could have been simply co-opted by power-hungry misogynists. I love Jesus. It makes me physically sick to entertain discussion about the ways in which the defining acts of His life - His Passion, Resurrection and establishment of the Church - could be a diabolical scam that He never anticipated not experienced. It would make me sick to hear salacious lies about anyone I love, how much more my Savior? Besides that, I don't think we should encourage people in the terrible sin against the Holy Spirit of speculating that things that are holy are evil, and that things that are evil are holy. Isn't that what is going on here? How is that not painful for anyone who knows the Lord? she proposes a third way between engageme...

There are so many things wrong in this interview. It's not even heavy lifting. Here's an easy snippet. "McLaren: See, this also comes from, I think, a very unhelpful way of reading the Bible where, we’re going to parse every sentence and say, oh, that means God’s doing it. I don’t think that Jesus or any of the other biblical writers—and you’ve got to remember that Jesus was a speaker. He wasn’t a writer. But you know, the speakers and writers of the Bible, I don’t think that they’re working in this technical theological way that we very often push them into. I think they are speaking the way we would speak. The way we are having conversation right now. Some day if you go and parse one of your sentences or parse one of my sentences and you know, 500 years from now be making really bizarre conclusions about it. You know, you said a couple minutes ago something about being a pain in the ass. Well, 500 years from now people don’t know that that is an idiom that is used today....