Radically Rooted Reexamination
A New Radicalism
Back to the Root of Things
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It was a conversation with a friend that brought up M. Scott Peck, I looked for what I might have written on him in recent years. Here is a piece I wrote.
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We are being called to radicalism in the same sense that M. Scott Peck called himself a "radical conservative" - one who goes to the root of things and seeks to conserve that ideal.
Sometimes the roots are buried deep beneath the surface. Sometimes they are in plain view. Always, they provide the strength and stability to the life they support.
To determine what the radix of the Jesus message is, one must focus on the person, work, and message of Jesus in His context and beyond His context.
No one was ever more forgiving; yet no one was ever more brutally truthful. His judgment did not condemn and His forgiveness let no one off the hook of personal or collective responsibility for their choices.
It is going to take some radical and disturbing voices to bring us back to true center and remind us that the standard for orthodoxy cannot be found in the last 100-200 years of the church as wonderful as some of those years might have been and as mighty as many of their preachers were.
Nostalgic faith can only carry us so far back into the history of God's salvific work in affairs of humankind.
The quest for roots must go back much further than that and be reexamined in light of timeless truths revealed by God. The message must be contextually and linguistically translated to each new generation without losing its core.
Then, concepts such as forgiveness will be meatier and more potent and the personal message of pietism and spiritual vitality will be seen within a Kingdom context.
We have some digging to do to get to the root of things and that can be uncomfortable.
The conviction that we need, besides the obvious conviction of our sins, is a deep conviction that "it" is all about God and not about us.
Perhaps that will be one of the contributions of a new generation of radical believers.
Back to the Root of Things
-----------------------------
It was a conversation with a friend that brought up M. Scott Peck, I looked for what I might have written on him in recent years. Here is a piece I wrote.
-----------------------------
We are being called to radicalism in the same sense that M. Scott Peck called himself a "radical conservative" - one who goes to the root of things and seeks to conserve that ideal.
Sometimes the roots are buried deep beneath the surface. Sometimes they are in plain view. Always, they provide the strength and stability to the life they support.
To determine what the radix of the Jesus message is, one must focus on the person, work, and message of Jesus in His context and beyond His context.
No one was ever more forgiving; yet no one was ever more brutally truthful. His judgment did not condemn and His forgiveness let no one off the hook of personal or collective responsibility for their choices.
It is going to take some radical and disturbing voices to bring us back to true center and remind us that the standard for orthodoxy cannot be found in the last 100-200 years of the church as wonderful as some of those years might have been and as mighty as many of their preachers were.
Nostalgic faith can only carry us so far back into the history of God's salvific work in affairs of humankind.
The quest for roots must go back much further than that and be reexamined in light of timeless truths revealed by God. The message must be contextually and linguistically translated to each new generation without losing its core.
Then, concepts such as forgiveness will be meatier and more potent and the personal message of pietism and spiritual vitality will be seen within a Kingdom context.
We have some digging to do to get to the root of things and that can be uncomfortable.
The conviction that we need, besides the obvious conviction of our sins, is a deep conviction that "it" is all about God and not about us.
Perhaps that will be one of the contributions of a new generation of radical believers.
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