Apophatica

If we were to ask 10 people what it means to be a Christian, you will likely get 10 different answers.  As adherents to the Christian faith, there are a number of tenets that tend to define our religion and comprise our theology.   While it is good to have these tenets to help us define what it is that we believe and what the core meaning of our faith is, it is also true that dogma can become a stumbling block that causes people to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  In other words, Christianity is typically comprised of theological themes such as salvation, atonement, sin, redemption, forgiveness, the Kingdom of God, the divinity of Jesus, crucifixion, resurrection, etc.  Many folks tend to have one definition for each of these themes.

Unfortunately, if people are opposed to the definition (or perceived reality) of the theme, they disassociate themselves with Christianity.  I feel that this is unnecessary as there are actually numerous ways to approach these tenets and it is even possible to do away with some of them.  Rather than giving up on the system, I would rather that we dialogue and engage in a process together of redefinition.  Indeed, discussions have been taking place over the past two millennia, but have been reserved for the academics.  I believe it is time that we become theologically conversant and discuss these tenets in the mainstream.  It is time that we realize that Christianity as we know it is merely the result of theological decisions made hundreds of years ago.  They do not necessarily represent truth, but rather we have allowed ourselves to be beholden to the definitions that others laid out.  Therefore, I am going to start a series on this blog engaging these themes starting with salvation.  Stay tuned!

This entry was posted on August 12, 2014 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.