Perplesso

Bergspredikan i kondenserad form

Do not be egoistical or self-absorbed. 
Weep over the pain of this world.
Be gentle, tender and kind.
Wake up wanting to be a better person.
Show mercy to others.
Be sincere, genuine and real.
Work for the cause of peace.
People should notice that you are different, in a good way.
Let go of your anger toward others. 
If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.
Reconciliation is more important than going to church.
Try to resolve conflicts face to face.
Do not sexually objectify others.
Honor, and do not easily break, your marital vows.
Live with integrity and be true to your word.
Practice non-violence.
Give and serve generously.
Love your enemies and pray for them. 
In practicing your faith you should look religionless to the world.
Keep your prayers short.
Forgive.
Do not be materialistic.
Let go of worry.
Stop judging others and take a hard, honest look at yourself.
Guard your heart around the callous, hostile and brutal.
Ask, seek and knock trusting in God to care for you.
Don’t follow the spirituality of the crowd. The way of the Kingdom will never be a fad.
Orthopraxy is the test of orthodoxy.
Obedience is where it all starts.
This isn’t an academic exercise. This shall be your Rule of Life.

Hittat på Experimental Theology

Bra teologi får man väl alltid låna, eller hur?

Jag hittade detta genom min fine vän Joachims tweet och fann det så läsvärt att jag väljer att skicka det vidare även på min kanal.

The heart of the Bible is not the presentation of history but a font of imagination that hosts a world other than the one in front of us. By “imagination” Brueggemann does not mean “irreal” but quite the opposite. He claims that the world we live in, the world where the empires of man rule, is the parody. All empires are acts of imagination: they present a world that lures humanity into its false hopes and lays claim to our hearts and souls as the unquestioned status quo.

Before you know it, you are duped. You take what the world offers–commodities, prejudices, fears, injustices, violence, false gods–and you accept it all as a given.

To this tired life, accepted as unquestioned reality, scripture offers another world, another way of being, that is both unsettling and comforting as it stands in prophetic judgment over the empires of the world. Scripture, in other words, is counter-imagination, a “rival eschatology,” as N. T. Wright puts it, to any system that claims “we have now arrived.” Empires do not like the promise of scripture because promise implies the the present is inadequate. Counter-imagination makes empires nervous.

Scripture itself demonstrates the clash of empires. Israel’s deliverance from Egypt takes the Israelites from a world of slavery to Pharaoh, where all they do is never enough and they are enslaved to producing “banks” (storehouses) where the king of that empire can keep his excess wealth. God delivers Israel to a world where their God is not a task master but a deliverer and where their world is not defined by “commodities” but by “fidelities” (i.e., the covenant).

The God of Scripture is not the “omni” god of the Enlightenment  (omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient) or of nineteenth century higher criticism (to which both liberals and fundamentalists ironically bow), but a God who is embedded as a character in narrative, the subject of active verbs, the God who is on your side and fights for you. Brueggemann finds both the pre-critical (literalistic reading of scripture) and critical (dis-integration of scripture) spiritually unhealthy. The former is naive and the latter is suspicious of scripture. A post-critical attitude is a way forward that retrieves pre-critical devotion in conversation with true critical insights.

For example, he argues that the prophetic corpus was assembled to speak to the realities of the exile (a critical insight of the last two centuries), which helps us today see the urgency of speaking God’s word into analogous situations. He referred to 587 BC (when the exile began) as the “9/11 of the Old Testament,” meaning the moment when Israel became utterly disoriented, for “such a thing should not happen.” Likewise, Good Friday is the 9/11 of the New Testament, for a crucified King of the Jews, a slain Messiah, is unthinkable.

Both events, though utterly disorienting, are transformative events that further God’s purposes in the world. Against all expectations, God was on the move in both cases, and delivered a blow against the claims of false empires to define how God is supposed to appear (comfortably in support of empire).

Prophets are truth-tellers and the hope-tellers. The role of biblical prophets is to deconstruct the world of power through poetic rhetoric. Power structures are in a state of denial, meaning they hold on to power at all costs. By his truth-telling poetic critique, the prophet introduces despair to the halls of power and to those who place their hope in them. Once such despair is fully embraced and lamented, the prophet declares a word of hope, envisioning a time when God will bring something utterly new and counterintuitive out of despair.

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