Wednesdays are Wright (and sometimes Thursday): Authority

by The RevNo Comments
As I read this text, I am writing and responding. You are getting my fresh thoughts, ones which are rather raw. So, hopefully, this means that we will end up in conversation where we can interact over them and flesh it out a bit. Up to this point I have been wrestling with how Wright was going to answer the Authority question.He does so by arguing for the necessity of theology in understanding the New Testament (and really any historical work) due to theology’s central role in world view. This then leads him into the question of authority which he answers this way: “I am proposing a notion of ‘authority’…vested…in the creator god himself, and this god’s story with the world, seen as focused on the story of Israel and thence on the story of Jesus, as told and retold in the Old and New Testaments, and as still requiring completion. (143)” Now that is a statement. I am not sure if...
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Who’s the Boss? or The Authority Question

by The RevNo Comments
This is the second post interacting with Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. Please remember that I cannot reproduce the book in these posts. I will do my best to summarize without being overly simplistic or reductionistic. Each post will be two parts. The first will be a summary of McLaren’s discussion and the second will be my reflections.The Authority Question: How should the Bible be understood?As with the narrative question, McLaren, sets up two opposing views of how to understand the Bible. The first is what he calls the “Constitutional View (78).” He sees this view as the cause for three critical problems he highlights regarding our use and understanding of the Bible: The scientific mess (68) The ethical mess (68) The peace mess (69) We come out on the “wrong side” of these issues over and over again because we have missed the very nature of the Bible. McLaren argues his case by using the issue of slavery and comparing how...
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Who leads this whole thing?

by The RevNo Comments
The one questiont that I have been wrestling with in conversation with a friend and as a result of reading The Forgotten Ways is the issue of authority. What does it mean? Who is in authority? Is there leadership anymore? What does it all look like in reality, right here, right now? Are we all to do what is right by our own personal hermeneutic? Are we simply to do what feels good? Is it “just Jesus and me”? What is the role of the community of God’s people? What are the individual roles within that body? Are some called to lead? Are some called to follow? What do we do with the Bible? What do we do with our heritage of the visible church?The answers are not easy in coming. But the list of questions continues to grow. Check out our conversation here....
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