THE GOSPEL OF JESUS, JOHN AND PAUL
28/01/23 07:13
The speaker suggested a truth that the Body of Christ accepted but this particular community did not. In response a lady piped up and said, ‘I would rather believe what the Bible teaches.’ The trouble was the Bible did not teach that point of doctrine she believed it. But her community had assembled a chain of unrelated scriptures that gave credence to this doctrinal aberration. A crooked frame makes people lame.
CRIPPLED MIND
Stubbornness, a black and white mentality, puta a mental G-Clamp over our mind. Lazy mindset creates an unwillingness to embrace subtlety and paradox along with a prideful and boorish attitude that can limit our understanding. It encases us in ignorance, even as we are certain that we have the truth and can cite a scripture to prove it. Here are people who are certain about everything and right about nothing.
PRISONERS OF EGO
We can of course be embedded in an illusion without being a fundamentalist. We can just be people who are imprisoned in their own ideas through the social construction of reality, because of lazy thinking, the need to be special and a desire to have an identity and status that we can call our own. But unless we are willing to lose all to follow Christ we will not enter the Kingdom of God. Sure we will be in a community of the religious but we will not be harbingers of the Christ-life as were John and Paul.
‘YOU FOOLISH GALATIANS’
Richard Rohr observes that, “There is every indication that fundamentalism is a growing phenomenon in our society. Fundamentalism refuses to listen to what the Gospel authors are really saying to their communities. It enters into a nonhistorical love affair with words—I don’t know how else to describe it. The human need for clarity and certitude leads fundamentalists to use sacred writings in a mechanical, closed-ended, and authoritarian manner. This invariably leaves them trapped in their own cultural moment in history, and they often totally miss the real message, along with the deepest challenges and consolations of Scripture.” (1)
This is why a fundamentalist may reject Paul’s ‘Christ who is our life’ in favour of ‘my earning of my life by words. But to do this is to rob ourselves and rob others of spirit and life.
(1))Rohr, Richard. Jesus' Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (p. 11). Franciscan Media. Kindle Edition.
CRIPPLED MIND
Stubbornness, a black and white mentality, puta a mental G-Clamp over our mind. Lazy mindset creates an unwillingness to embrace subtlety and paradox along with a prideful and boorish attitude that can limit our understanding. It encases us in ignorance, even as we are certain that we have the truth and can cite a scripture to prove it. Here are people who are certain about everything and right about nothing.
PRISONERS OF EGO
We can of course be embedded in an illusion without being a fundamentalist. We can just be people who are imprisoned in their own ideas through the social construction of reality, because of lazy thinking, the need to be special and a desire to have an identity and status that we can call our own. But unless we are willing to lose all to follow Christ we will not enter the Kingdom of God. Sure we will be in a community of the religious but we will not be harbingers of the Christ-life as were John and Paul.
‘YOU FOOLISH GALATIANS’
Richard Rohr observes that, “There is every indication that fundamentalism is a growing phenomenon in our society. Fundamentalism refuses to listen to what the Gospel authors are really saying to their communities. It enters into a nonhistorical love affair with words—I don’t know how else to describe it. The human need for clarity and certitude leads fundamentalists to use sacred writings in a mechanical, closed-ended, and authoritarian manner. This invariably leaves them trapped in their own cultural moment in history, and they often totally miss the real message, along with the deepest challenges and consolations of Scripture.” (1)
This is why a fundamentalist may reject Paul’s ‘Christ who is our life’ in favour of ‘my earning of my life by words. But to do this is to rob ourselves and rob others of spirit and life.
(1))Rohr, Richard. Jesus' Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (p. 11). Franciscan Media. Kindle Edition.
