1 Corinthians 2:1-3
1When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. 2For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling.
One should not take this verse too far, and one should not base much of anything on one passage, but it non-the-less represents very succinctly one of the directions I'm moving in, focusing more and more on Jesus Christ, and not on the minutia of theology, biblical interpretation, and the like. Though these things should not be set against one another, in practice, they often seem to be.
What am I getting at?
What I'm trying to say is that it appears to me, that the things that the Bible says a great deal about and the things Christians disagree about are not similar. We go to great lengths to discern the profound and the deep, while what Christ and the Bible seem to say most, we do rather poorly. I say this without hesitation because It seems most true in my life. I know something of the details of theology and the like, and do too little about what seems to be the more important things.
Everything I've just said has been said before and said better, (and please please don't here some type of fake holiness in this statement or anything earlier) However what might be mildly novel is that I find all of this very disconcerting. I wonder at times if the evangelical church/culture isn't more like the pharisees than we would like to admit. Maybe most of what we do is incredibly irrelevant. Naturally this begs the question, "what is relevant" and by "relevant" I don't mean "hip" or "cool", I mean relevant in a deep way, the things that cut to the core of who we are and what matters. Unfortunately on this matter I don't have an answer either. Some thoughts yes, but unfortunately, no answers.
3 comments:
My over-arching question, before hypothesizing further, is who gets to define what relevance is? By whose standards is something relevant or not? Isn't relevance, by definition, subjective?
I'm currently a sleep-deprived mom, so pardon me if my questions offend ;-)
no offense in any of that, and honestly, I'm pretty hard to offend, especially when it comes to intellectual musings.
"relevant" is absolutely subjective, (you like that "absolutely" subjective?) : )
Anyway, yah, I hear you.
At least for evangelicals, what the Bible talks about in terms of quantity may be a step in the right direction. But I imagine there may be some anomalies if one took that as the only measure.
One thought is that God calls us to different things at different times in different ways. The verse mentioned above was Paul at one point in his massive journey. I would say that is what makes it hard. We want to tell others were they should be at. What I do know is that I am to study to show my self approved so that I may be able to give an answer for the hope that I have and the way that I live.
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