With permission I thought I would pass on some of a fascinating post on “The Next Reformation” from Sef’s blog (ref below) that are themselves excerpts from a book by Carl Raschke.
“That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible”
“The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.” That is because “the love of God, which lives in man, loves sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong. Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good. Therefore, sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.”
“…the Next Reformation will be all about radical humility and lack of pride not just in our lives, but in our thought. On both the left and right, Protestantism -with its denominational, ministerial, and ecumenical councils, its political action committees, its preoccupation with palaces proffered as church buildings, its elaborate financial schemes and fund-raising- has swallowed the theology of glory with one gargantuan gulp. It has buttressed these totally worldly ambitions with regal rationalism that aggrandizes the institution of the church and its claims at the expense of broken souls crying out for grace and forgiveness.”
“Deconstruction is not faith per se, Caputo insists, but it leaves a wide berth for faith. It is the trek into the desert so that faith can experience the pure presence of the One who is not present as an object at all. One cannot be saved by philosophy or even by theology. Every destiny is God’s, and God’s alone.”
“God can only be “known” through faith-through stripped down, bare-bones, noncontentious, unassuming faith. At the same time it is an “alliance” with what is coming, with advent, what Derrida refers to as l’avenir -not “the future” in the literal sense of the French word, but with the meaning that can never be iterated with the bounds of any given syntax, with the signification that God is continuing to supply as we seek his face, with the plenitude of unthought thoughts and unsaid sayings with which the Holy Spirit continues to provision us.”
“The desert is where we cannot philosophize. It is where the sand bites at our beard and the wind howls in our ears… The desert deconstructs our Greek eye for geometry and detail. It is where we are tempted, as was Jesus by the devil, to translate our infinite spiritual longings into material satisfactions and dominance. In the desert there is nowhere to look back, but only to anticipate what is on its way, what has in no manner yet arrived, what is l’avenir. In other words, the desert of faith turns our hearts and minds toward everything that is wholly not our own and what is wholly God’s. ”
“Faith is presuppositionless. Faith shatters the idols of the age. Faith is open to radical thought, even a radical thought that seems to question the very precept of “foundationalism,” because it is secure in itself. It is secure in itself because it is secure in the illimitable Lord of all time and history, who offers no ultimate security-theological, scientific, ontological, or otherwise-besides the security of faith. There is no security whatsoever in the desert.”
-Next Reformation by Carl Raschke 
(more on the author at http://www.du.edu/~craschke/pub.html and at sefsider.com).
Thanks for posting this.
Thanks for posting this. It resonated here. I particularly appreciated the thoughts regarding humility. Although there have always been elements in the church that harbor such a humility, they’ve been marginalized. This kind of humble faith is much more likely than the War on Terror, IMO, to bring any kind of change in places like the Middle East.