I have always enjoyed David Dark's writings. A few years ago I wrote some posts about one of his books, The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-Blessed, Christ-Haunted Idea:
Transcending the tribe of America
Dark's review of Rob Bell's Love Wins is worth checking out. Here are a few snippets that I liked:
As Barth argues in The Epistle to the Romans, the gospel has to be (and remain) a question mark sitting strangely next to whatever we dare to deem orthodox and sound in our own thinking. And when it comes to what we hope to understand of the judgments of God, we have to leave an awful lot to unwritten history lest we believe ourselves to own the copyright on them or find ourselves explaining them away.
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As Bell has it, one job of the community that might rightly be called “church” is that of a clarifying, lyricizing, parabling stewardship concerning the mystery of God’s redeeming presence in the world. In this sense, the church names the people who “name, honor, and orient themselves around this mystery. A church is a community of people who enact specific rituals and create specific experiences to keep this word alive in their own hearts, a gathering of believers who help provide language and symbols and experiences for this mystery.”
...I was stuck (or in danger of being stuck) in what Bell terms “an entrance understanding of the gospel” which views it “primarily in terms of entrance rather than joyous participation.” To remain there is to hold to and, more tragically, embody that “cheap view of the world” that is born of “a cheap view of God.” While there is for some, perhaps inevitably, a developmental stage of this kind in religious formation, it can become what Bell deems “a shriveled imagination.” He observes that “An entrance understanding of the gospel rarely creates good art. Or innovation.”
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Life in the age to come is as inescapably social and ethically laden as this one, only moreso. With Jesus’ counsel to the young man to sell everything he has and give to the poor, we’re given a vision of here and there which is anything but neutral (economically, politically, what have you).
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In a very last minute way, I will get to spend Easter Sunday with my Oklahoma family and at Snowhill, however I wish the circumstances were better. We will celebrate the life of one of the sweetest women on Saturday, not even 50 years old, who passed away last night after a battle with cancer. It will be a weekend full of thoughts on death and resurrection, on so many levels.
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