Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Timely comment for Easter

“Here I am reminded of a story about civil rights legend and Christian iconoclast Reverend Vernon Johns, Martin Luther King Jr.’s predecessor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1960, white Southern Baptists and black National Baptists gathered at the Seventh Baptist Church in Baltimore to discuss racial tension in the city. During the worship service, historian Taylor Branch recounts that Vernon Johns sat visibly annoyed as he listened to the white preacher preach on salvation and being “washed in the blood of the Lamb.” When it was Johns’ moment to address the assembly, to the consternation of white preachers and the humiliation of most black preachers in attendance, the ecclesial journeyman went right after the preacher who went before him. 'The thing that disappoints me about the Southern white church,” Johns said, “is that it spends all of its time dealing with Jesus after the cross, instead of dealing with Jesus before the cross.'

“He then turned directly to the preacher and said, ‘You didn’t do a thing but preach about the death of Jesus. If that were the heart of Christianity, all God had to do was to drop him down on Friday and let them kill him, and then yank him up again on Easter Sunday… You don’t hear so much about his three years of teaching that man’s religion is revealed in the love of his fellow man…That is what offended the leaders of Jesus’s own established church as well as the colonial authorities from Rome. That’s why they put him up there [on the cross]… I want to deal with Jesus before the cross. I don’t give a damn what happened to him after the cross!’”

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In this my personal Christian blog, I hope to be discursive and now and then critical. What I write here is tentative and tensive. I post thoughts, feelings, and observations somewhat randomly and often in immediate response to current events and posts on other blogs.


"Serendipitous Creativity" from Gordon Kaufman

"I suggested that what we today should regard as God is the ongoing creativity in the universe - the bringing (or coming) into being of what is genuinely new, something transformative; …

"In some respects and some degrees this creativity is apparently happening continuously, in and through the processes or activities or events around us and within us(…) is a profound mystery to us humans(…) But on the whole, as we look back on the long and often painful developments that slowly brought human life and our complex human worlds into being, we cannot but regard this creativity as serendipitous …

"I want to stress that this serendipitous creativity - God! - to which we should be responsive is not the private possession of any of the many particular religious faiths or systems …

"This profound mystery of creativity is manifest in and through the overall human bio-historical evolution and development everywhere on the planet; and it continues to show itself throughout the entire human project, no matter what may be the particular religious and or cultural beliefs."

Gordon Kaufman, Mennonite Life, December 2005 vol. 60 no. 4

Melville is a rational man who

"Melville is a rational man who wants God to exist. He wants Him to exist for the same reasons we all do: to be our rescuer and appreciator, to act as a confidant in our moments of crisis and to give us reassurance that, over the horizon of our deaths, we will survive." (John Updike)

And that is a problem for me.

Fragmented Notions

Fragmented Notions
Copyright © 2007 Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University

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