Filed under: Thoughts on The Church of Peter
Let us not forget where our journey is leading us – to hope for authenticity and organicism through decomposition[1] of our own thoughts on the New Testament Church. I may be jumping around quite a bit in the NT but my main concern is to ideally help develop a biblical Church, tho not in the since of the word that we understand. By no means am I jumping on the hott new bandwagon of imitating or replicating first-century church, nor am I trying to make it generationally relative. I am instead trying to understand why our Messiah would choose a man like Peter to found the church that He intends.
I have a new found skepticism toward developing theologies from Paul, not from dislike of him, but because the Evangelical Church tends to idolize him as the true founder of modern Christianity. It seems that we strive to break down Jesus’ plan for His church into simple ‘do and don’t/black and white’ methods of doing church, and we have taken Paul’s suggestions of holiness and righteousness and created moral doctrines from them. My problem with our current dogma is that the name of Jesus can be removed from our Gospel and unfortunately our church would look the same as it does now. We have removed the organic dimension of faith that Jesus requires of His Church and replaced it with “7 Steps to a Better You”. Our pastors preach against Humanitarianism from the pulpit but fail to give us a corporeal alternative to put our faith in. Perhaps it is fear that their congregation will realize that humanitarianism is doing a better job of being the Church that Christ intended than they are. Of course some then would say that the emerging church is simply a humanitarian act to better society because it’s ‘the right thing to do’ and faith in any kind of God would be obsolete. At least that is what Evangelists tell me when I preach ‘sell your possessions and give to the poor’.
Anyway, as I was saying, I am simply striving to find, or rebuild, an Ekklhsia[2] that isn’t afraid to trade their moral regulations and traditions for a biblically supported living, breathing, life giving communion with God and his people. And I feel that we can better know how Christ intended for us to be if we decompose our set in stone ways of reading the New Testament. I suggested before that the book of Acts was not a prescriptive manual to making a Godly church, but rather a descriptive narrative of what kind of church we could be if we depend and rely on Christ and live by his teachings. I know it is cool to look through Acts, pick out rituals and traditions, and replicate it with an archaic and premodern feel, but I disagree with those who say that Acts is the only way God intended his church to be. In order to be an authentic Ekklhsia, I prescribe that we first spend time with Christ, listening and learning from Him, and then it will organically develop and we wont need hundreds of books and blogs about how to be a better church.
But what do I know, I’m an a/theist[3]…
[1] “Decomposition” RLV def. “To let die naturally and organically, to allow for rebirth through death of a process of breaking down, organic de-construction” (2009)
[2] Frank Viola, Pagan Christianity
[3]Peter Rollins “Set Apart” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M65JTRhObV4
Filed under: Random
My apologies for taking so long to update, tho I am excited to converse with you about some new ideas I have been wrestling with.
First of all, I was introduced to what is called “The Concordant Literal New Testament”, translated first in 1962 and finally finished in 1983. It seems to be known as the most accurate and, most importantly, unbiased translation of the original scriptures, using all resources available to make sure to literally translate each word, as it is believed that God intended and destined each and every word written. This is possibly the only English translation worthy of ever being considered “God breathed and divinely inspired.’ Nonetheless, translating anything into other languages can always fall short of the glory of the original. So adhering to the postmodern philosophy of skepticism, “The compiler of the CLNT, the late A. E. Knoch, was painfully aware of his shortcomings in this regard. He therefore sought to emphasize the necessity of shielding himself against his personal views, his inherited tendencies and traditional errors. This lead to the concordant method of translation.” [1] You could almost say he ‘De-constructed’ his own way of translating the Greek, and sought to truthfully translate the words, no matter what they might say when he was finished. But rest assured, his committee claims to hold the least amount of bias compared to any other translation. I suppose it takes faith more than a mustard seed to believe that this is truly what God meant to say to us, but for now, I will roll with it.
Secondly, I got to spend some time in the apocryphal writings of Peter, in which I intend to write about in this entry. To start off slow, I studied the relationships between 1 and 2 Peter, and compared them with the Gospel and Acts of Peter. So then let our journey begin with the letters that we Christians have easy access to, and we can discuss the Apocryphal literature later.
.. wait I will edit this later sorry
[1] CLNT, Introduction: The Concordant Method. ‘Concordant’ according to the Webster’s Third International Dictionary, means “Agreeing, corresponding, harmonious, consonant”. It was the purpose of the compiler to make a translation that agreed as closely as possible to the original language of the Scriptures.
Filed under: Random
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This was written by: Jimmy larkin
