Most modern Christian content you find online and in books seems to assume that people ate “brains-on-sticks”, in James K.A. Smith’s phrasing. Christianity becomes a matter of simply giving mental assent to a long list of statements about God.<\/p>\n\n\n
But how long does the list need to be? And whose list is the right one?<\/p>\n\n\n
Most churches readily and proudly offer their Statement of Faith and expect members to adhere to each carefully worded phrase. Each Statement is a bit different, but somehow they are all orthodox according to the respective teams.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Sure, from week to week during worship there might be some preaching on good works as a necessary part of faith, but the really important thing is … do you agree that the Trinity is three Persons but one substance?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Does regeneration come before or after belief?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Should a baby be baptized?<\/p>\n\n\n
Will the Church be raptured before or after Christ’s millennial reign?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Or is that a trick question and is there no literal millennium at all?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Think carefully … your salvation hangs in the balance!<\/p>\n\n\n
This approach to Christian “faith” fosters plenty of debates, endless creeds, and frantic denunciations of heretics, but it’s unclear how much it moves the Kingdom forward.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Most modern Christian content you find online and in books seems to assume that people ate “brains-on-sticks”, in James K.A. Smith’s phrasing. Christianity becomes a matter of simply giving mental assent to a long list of statements about God. But how long does the list need to be? And whose list is the right one? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6202"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6203,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6202\/revisions\/6203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}