The illustrious Zoomtard has spewed forth not one, or two, but three posts in response to my last post. I will hopefully get around to putting some thoughts on these up here soon, but go read his posts first. There’s some good stuff there.
Our correspondent has also produced a post in response to a comment from Steve that I enjoyed. Here is a comment I left on that post (the quote is from the post itself):
“Christianity is not meant to be about individuals. The tradition Steven and I share, Evangelical Christianity, has maybe, perhaps, possibly, please-don’t-kill-me-for-the-heresy, fetishised the role of the individuals’ response to Jesus.”
As Eugene Peterson might say – Oh yes! Christianity, and protestant evangelical Christianity in particular, has become so deeply entrenched in an enlightenment-spawned modernistic worldview that we can’t see straight anymore. We have swallowed whole a philosophy based on the importance of the rational self and the centrality of the individual that is so far from the view of NT christianity that the two can’t even shout rude insults at each other anymore.
The teaching of the NT is so steeped in a communal, ecclesial outlook – that of God acting in history to draw a people to himself, redeeming them, and through them redeeming the world – that to seperate ourselves from this sort of outlook is to fundamentally misunderstand the gospel.