I have three links for today:
1. David Nilsen has a good post in which he talks about his informal plans to start a church or a community. He states: “Eventually (and again, we are are making no deadlines or inflexible plans), we would like to create a community that would be a safe place for religious outcasts to come and know acceptance and grace and love and freedom, a spiritual triage center for the ecclesiastically disillusioned, the doubters, the questioning, the cynical, the fearful, the sarcastically-defensive-but-can’t-stop-believing, the gay, the straight, the humbly fervent, the sincerely agnostic, the apologetically or unapologetically unbelieving.”
For me, that sort of community was the New York Metro Adventist Forum when I lived in New York City (see here and here).
2. Sarah Moon talks about her plan to give up reading hateful comments for Lent. I can use a vacation from reading abrasive (and abusive) comments, myself!
3. Rachel Held Evans is still blogging through Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible. Smith has problems with biblicism (i.e., seeing the Bible as perspicuous, infallible, etc.) and believes in reading the Bible Christocentrically. In this post, Rachel discusses Smith’s (and, at some points, her) response to objections against that, like:
Should we discard the grammatico-historical method in order to read Christ in every passage?
We can only know Christ through the Bible, right, so is biblicism even avoidable?
Does a Christocentric reading really solve anything, since Christians have different views about Christ?
Isn’t Smith making a false dichotomy when he divorces biblicism from focusing on Christ?
For a variety of reasons, I can’t say that I’m satisfied with the responses, but they’re worth taking a look at.