Perhaps the simplest expression of the main idea I took away from this book is that any objectification of God is an idol. When you believe you can contemplate God then you reduce him to an object. Any object is a graven image. Too limited. While your description may reflect a past experience of God it may be a barrier to an experience to come.
Peter Rollins tells us that we cannot experience life. Instead, "life" is the thing that allows us to have experiences. Thus the new life in Christ is not a propositional framework that sets a religious codified set of boundaries, but a transformation that gives new perspective on our experiences.
He argues that Christianity must constantly tear itself down because the Christian should ever be an advocate of the neglected and oppressed. If you fight authority, as Mellencamp tells us, authority always wins. Either you don't overcome the existing regime, or you do and find that you have created a new authority and new outsiders.
I learned a long time ago that no thing lasts forever. My self-centered response has been to withhold personal investment. The temporary nature of things was linked in my mind (if I needed any justification for cowardice) to the fact of the fallen state of man. Perhaps, though, it is not evil that brings all good things to an end, but God, who is the only Good. God who clears away the distracting idols. How then am I to act? As fully as I can understand until my understanding is next renewed?
It starts to sound like transcendentalism that left Walden pond and went to work in a homeless shelter.
Posted to Books at July 4, 2008 4:07 PM