Friday, April 25, 2008

Nothing More Than Feelings...(Part 2)

So I've finished "Blue Like Jazz" and I think this is the most telling quote of the entire book:
"Believing in Jesus is something that you feel."

That pretty much sums up my major problem with the book.  He never treats the kingship of Jesus Christ as a fact, but something that you either do or don't feel.  If you feel it, then you're probably not a Christian.  If you feel it, then you are a Christian.  Obviously, he deals with major issues of doubt, as do most of the other Christians he knows.  He's always trying to drum up these feelings that are really very temporal things.  He places his entire eternal salvation on a feeling.

He had one other illustration that I really appreciated.  It accurately represents our culture today and why I couldn't identify with him, or with the fundamentalists that he left.  He said that Christians in our culture used to be part of the game, but now they're sitting on the sidelines.  He's upset at the fundamentalists who have gotten angry, taken their ball, and gone home.  He believes that we should sit "humbly" on the bench, waiting to be put back in (so who's the coach here?).  I disagree with both.  We should be asking ourselves why we were trying to play this game in the first place.  We should repent of even attempting this secular game with pagan coaches and obeyed our Lord instead.

One other note on his aversion to fundamentalists.  I did a bit of internet research on his church, Imago Dei in Portland, Oregon.  Their theology is very similar to our local emergent church, Vintage Faith.  It's surprisingly orthodox and faithful, with basically Baptistic theology.  In fact, most "fundamentalist" churches would have exactly the same theological statements.  What this rejection of fundamentalism really amounts to is disliking the un-hipness of fundamentalism.  They've taken the same theology, and then gotten tattoos and cuss.  It's fundamentalist theology that looks cool.

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