To All,
Any comments? the following is from a different board.....
Dear CWG room,
Here is an exerpt from a "moderate" Christian scholar, N.T. Wright, in "Millenium Myth," which gave me serious pause in my current
pleuralist thinking. Is he making a strong arguement for the uniqueness of Jesus Christ? What do you think based on this short excerpt? I hope I do his ideas justice by just cutting out a part of his book.
The [central Christian] story concerns the creator God and the whole creation; it is focussed on the relationship between this God and
the chosen people, Israel; and this, in turn, is focused narrowly and tightly on the one man, Jesus of Nazareth, who was declared by the
creator God to be Israel's Messiah through his resurrection from the dead. In this man, and particularly through his death, the justice and
the peace which the creator God intends for the whole cosmos has been unveiled once and for all, offering renewed humanness for all who give him their allegiance.
This story then challenges all other large-scale stories of God, the cosmos and the human race. But it challenges them not as one
power-play to another, but as the subversion of all power-plays by the self-giving love of the creator God. Those who live within the
story and make it their own - that, indeed, is what is involved in Christian faith - have constantly been tempted to subvert it again, to turn the message of God's generous love into the means of their own self-aggrandizement. But the story retains its power, and produces, for instance, people like St. Frances, who lived and taught a radical alternative in the midst of the pomp and pride of medieval Catholicism; or, in our own generation, people like Archbishop Janani Luwum of Uganda, who faced the tyrannical Ida Amin with the message of
God's love, and suffered the consequences.
Only when the Christian story is made to serve other ends, then, does it become the sort of "metanarrative" that post modernity justifiably objects to. This is not to say that the message is comfortable or soothing. Those who hold to other worldviews, including those
of other great religions, find it uncomfortable. The pressure has been on those who adhere to the Christian story to make it conform to
the ideal either of the Enlightenment, accoring to which all "religions" are basically alike, and are all partly helpful and partly misleading pointers to the truth which ultimately lies beyond them all, or the ideal of post modernity itself, according to which all religions, being simply different ways people construct their own private space, are equally valid insofar as they help people to do just that. But the Christian story, with its insistent message of the creator's love, gently but firmly resists both of these power-plays, as it resisted those of imperial Rome on the one hand and revolutionary Judaism on the other."
... Wright then asks, "But how does one live within such a story and make it one's own? The answer is, as with any worldview, by
adhering to the symbols which it generates, in which it comes to visible form."
these "dramitic" symbols are "The water and the meal: baptism and eucharist." He also keys in on prayer, "a practice largely ignored" by
most.
Here's the clincher "...While quick-fix books related to "spirituality" continue to flood the market, the deep hidden stream of Christian meditation, mysticism, adoration, thanksgiving, wrestling with the anguish of the world in the presence of God, is waiting to be
rediscovered and explored. When that happens, a key part of the symbolic universe will be put in place."
Whew! That, by the way, that was not an intentional Catholic bash! While Wright makes a strong point on the uniqueness of Christ, I do
not find him exclusionary. Although he is generally against the concepts in CWG, I hope his point is received in this place as prophetic, authentic and perhaps some may meditate upon it. I will re-member tonight, God's love expressed through the death and resurrection of Christ...
Baptised and likin' it, sharing bread and lovin' it...,adoring Christ, enjoying CWG and all the cool folks in this wonderful place,
fishbaydoc
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