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?
"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.
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?