Learning From Others, Seeking The Way
An Emerging Viewpoint
The cumulative effect of these subtle ideological changes was to convince an ever-broadening number of Christians in the United States that they had the power within themselves to discover the true meaning of sacred texts, the power to see things in general as they really were, the power to act effectively against those in the wrong, and the power to choose righteously when faced by moral dilemmas—if, that is, they would only put their minds to the task.
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Nowhere was the Christian-Enlightenment marriage more clearly illustrated than in the pervasive belief that understanding things was simple.
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The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium by Walter Wink
The Powers That Be reclaims the divine realm as central to human existence by offering new ways of understanding our world in theological terms. Walter Wink reformulates ancient concepts, such as God and the devil, heaven and hell, angels and demons, principalities and powers, in light of our modern experience. He helps us see heaven and hell, sin and salvation, and the powers that shape our lives as tangible parts of our day-to-day experience, rather than as mysterious phantoms. Based on his reading of the Bible and analysis of the world around him, Wink creates a whole new language for talking about and to God. Equipped with this fresh world view, we can embark on a new relationship with God and our world into the next millennium.
God wanted something other than blood and smoke, buildings and citadels. He wanted justice, mercy, humility. He wanted what was invisible. He wanted their hearts—not the outside, but the inside. There is no way of exaggerating how strange a thought this was.
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YHWH is not Baal the bull, not a storm god, after all. He controls the weather, since he is its Creator, but he is not in any of its elements; he does not belong to the special effects. He is in us, the still, small voice, the murmuring of personal conscience. For once, we are given a description of the Voice that has played the central role in all our narratives, and it sounds quite other than what we might expect.
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There is no way around life and its sufferings. Our only choice is whether we will be consumed by the fire of our own heedless fears and passions or allow God to refine us in his fire and to shape us into a fitting instrument for his revelation, as he did Moshe.
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Praying is rattling God’s cage and waking God up and setting God free and giving this famished God water and this starved God food and cutting the ropes off God’s hands and the manacles off God’s feet and washing the caked sweat from God’s eyes and then watching God swell with life and vitality and energy and following God wherever God goes.
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Once a religion attains sufficient power in a society that the state looks to it for support, that religion must also, of necessity, join in the repression of the state’s enemies.
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The focus moves from ourselves to God, in whom we trust—what Jesus calls “dying” and “losing” our lives.
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The need for certainty is sin because it works off of fear and limits God to our mental images. And God does not like being boxed in. By definition, God can’t be. I believe we are prone to forget that.
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Learning From Others, Seeking The Way 