If you were a participant in Case Study 1: Fundamentalism, what would you take away, or how would you feel?

What do you think is the point of Case Study 2?

Re-written Nicene Creed on page 191

What is the point of Case Study 3?

Page 200: “I hope you will think of this book as a box of matches and these closing words as a plea to go and start some fires of your own. Fires that will burn away the Idols we so tightly hold on to, fires that will melt away the false certainties that we clothe ourselves in, fires that will keep us warm as we go about the difficult task of facing up to our anxieties, accepting the mystery of life, and embracing the world in love.”

In terms of religion every theistic system can be seen to have its atheistic opposite. There are as many atheisms as there are theisms.

Would you find value in Atheism for Lent or Omega Course?

We are confronted with a more disconcerting type of mystery. Not a mystery that lies beyond the world we understand but a mystery that lies within it.

What will a community, the Church, that seeks to enter in to and remain faithful to a way of life free from the relentless pursuit of certainty and satisfaction look like?

When we take a step back and look at our actions, do we not find that we stay mainly with those people who think like us?

When we accept our unknowing and brokenness, we are not weakening our faith, we are boldly expressing it.

How do you think you would react if you participated in the Last Supper and Evangelism Project?

The only way to break from our attachment to idolatry and the addiction to certainty is a change at the very core of our being, something that the apostle Paul called becoming a new creation. (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Have you felt faced with the similar two choices as Finn (the new christian) on pages 122/23 when starting to question the beliefs once taken for granted?

• Either leave the church or repress your questioning and insulate yourself from the outside world.

“It is not when we reject the Idol that we are freed from it but rather when we are directly confronted with the Idol rejecting its status as an Idol.” Rollins goes on to say that “The Cross testifies to a liberating logic where the prison of idolatry is shattered from within.”

Do you agree with Rollin’s analogy of how the church today largely teaches us to act like Oliver Hardy when it comes to the Crucifixion? (In the analogy, Rollins describes one of the Laurel and Hardy comedy motifs in which Hardy exhibits an excess of pride and arrogance, only to made to look ridiculous by a situation created by Laurel. It works because Hardy realizes by never accepts the reality of his humiliation.)

How do you understand the early church’s teaching of Jesus being fully human?

• I’ve always taken this to mean he was like me, but Rollins says he is fully human because he is unlike me. In other words, it is me who is not fully human, or not as originally intended. (page 134)
• Jesus lacked the lack. (without Original Sin)

I really like the second to last paragraph of the section “The Missing Link,” page 134

God of Christ is a reality that we experience as not existing. Instead, this God is present as the source that calls everything into existence.

God is not seen but is testified to in a particular way of seeing.

Quote at the end of page 138, “By revealing God as love, the Christian tradition rejects the idea that God is a meaningful being….”

To make the claim that you know God is actually to proclaim a no-God. It is to proclaim an Idol, masked as God.” (page 139)

In Christ we are confronted with a different understanding altogether, one in which God is not directly known (either as a being “out there” or as found in all things), but is the source that renders everything known.

Love is the crazy, mad, and perhaps ridiculous gesture of saying yes to life, of seeing it as worthy of our embrace and even worthy of our total sacrifice.

Ecclesiastes 5:18-20

Ecclesiastes 6:1-6

What do you think of Rollin’s depiction of the significance of as Christ dies on the Cross we read of the tombs breaking open and the dead coming to life?

A life in which the source of all is no longer approach as some being whom we ought to love, but as a mystery we participate in through the very act of love itself. (page 145)

Ironic how the original meaning of crucifixion, off being outside of the divinely given order has become the symbol for those who are within the divinely given order. Christendom.

Rollins says in page 101 that Paul describes a form of universalism as operating on a fundamentally different level by inviting everyone into a community in which everyone exists beyond or outside the operative power of any given identity, including a Christian one. What does this mean?

Based on what Rollins is saying about Paul, do we think that Paul would like the term “Christian?”

Page 108, “Paul understands participation in the life of Christ as involving the loss of power that our various tribal identities once held for us.”

In context of what Rollins writes about “universalism that is captured in the idea of the Christian as the trash of the world invites us to identify with the one who is placed outside all systems” what has been the affect of Constantine’s church?

Zombie movies have become popular in the last several years, what does the rise of zombie movies say about us?

The section “Give Me Freedom from the Pursuit of My Satisfaction” really speaks to me. In this section the focus is on obsession of the pursuit. Does the fact that “pursuit of happiness” is written in one of the founding documents of the United States say anything about that obsession?

Is selfishness natural or taught?

On page 79 Rollins writes, “Indeed, people who are driven to pursue something like wealth or fame are often painfully aware of this reality.” If that is the case, why are people driven for more, even when it is to their detriment?

“What we see here is a concrete example of how the freedom to pursue our highest ambitions is often not experienced as a freedom from an oppressive system but is itself felt to be oppressive.” (page 79)

How does the internal protest that Rollins describes on page 80 relating to parents, children and church?

Page 86, Rollins says the Good News of Christianity is, “You can’t be fulfilled; you can’t be made whole; you can’t find satisfaction.” Do you agree that this is good news?

Any comments on the reference to Ecclesiastes on page 91?

Any comments about Rollins’ take on atonement theories on page 93?

All the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves have a fictional quality. “A legend in our own mind.”

That which we are conscious of in ourselves is called the ego. This ego is the image we have of ourselves, the image that we present on a daily basis through work, recreation, and social medial. (page 54)

Our real beliefs are generally not to be found at the level of ego; rather they are more like the operating system of a computer they are the heart of the machine that causes it to act in certain ways.

We all have mythologies that we have constructed and adapted from infancy. The problem arises when we fully identify with these mythologies, viewing them as a complete and accurate description of who we are and how the world works. These narratives help us prop up the fantasy that we are in control of our destinies and are masters of our own actions. (page 60)

What do you think of Rollins’ explanation for Matthew 23:27-28? (page 62)

When we encounter a worldview different from our own, there are four common responses:

• One is a form of consumption, by which we attempt to integrate the other into our social body. We attempt to persuade them that they should believe and practice in a particular way.
• The second is a process of exclusion whereby we condemn and reject the other who cannot be consumed by us. “Vomiting the other out.”
• The third is toleration. There is an attempt to accept the other, even they they seem strange to us.
• The fourth is a dialogue aimed at finding agreement. It is the idea that beneath all our little differences, we’re really pretty much the same.
• In each of these we stand over the other

A different way to approach the other involves placing ourselves beneath them in the sense of allowing their views to challenge and unsettle our own.

Literalistic listening is different than what we normally do where we filter what a person is saying through our own experiences. Example of what we normally do on page 68. In literalistic listening we take careful note of everything the other says from their position instead of quickly interpreting it in relation to our own position.

It means that we don’t simply look at the other through our own eyes, but we attempt to look at ourselves through the eyes of the other.

The church often turns out to be the most extreme agent of this myth-making: it doesn’t simply offer a narrative that tells us who we are, why we are here, and where we are going, but it tells people that this narrative has been directly delivered by the divine. (page 71)

The question that faces us, then, is how Christianity, in its most radical and subversive form, critiques the church and offers real freedom.