Creed
"I am well aware that I don't get to decide who God is. What I do get to decide, however, is to whom I pledge my allegiance. I am a free agent, after all, and I have standards for my God, the first of which is this: I will not worship any God who is not at least as compassionate as I am."
Want to find out more: read this article.
2 comments:
This is the most amazing article!! I found the whole thing here:
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:37j8oCGnbqYJ:www.youthspecialties.com/linker/index.php%3Fid%3D6194+Bart+Campolo+Articles+of+faith&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1
Youth Specialities is a Youth Work resource magazine and they have chosen to remove the pdf version from their site, but if you choose "view as html" on Google it came up. I've formatted it to a Word doc if anyone wants a readable version.
Absolutely Brilliant!!
What a wonderful quote!
John Selby Spong (who wrote "Why Christianity has to change or die") helped me to see that all we have is pictures of God, and that our pictures change over time. He used the example of the Israelites in exile in Babylon, who could not sing about God anymore, because their picture of God had been the One who dwells in the temple and protects them. The temple had been destroyed, and they had to form a new picture of God.
God is such a mystery, that it is diffficult to form a picture of her, and no two person's pictures look exactly the same. Today's picture for me is a blue sea-god, the sea at Cape Point is so intensely blue, I felt very close to her there.
The picture of a powerful (masculine) God who intervenes/protects does not work for me anymore. There is enough evidence (such as all the rapes and child abuse) that it is simply not true. The picture of the God who is present in our suffering makes more sense to me. As the old man in Cry the Beloved Country said, "I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi, for our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that He suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us to bear suffering. For He knew that there is no life without suffering."
Now, this old man has a different picture of God than I have (of Jesus being divine).
A children's book called "Because nothing looks like God" describes God as present in everything, in both the spider and the fly that is caught in the web.
My response to Ivan and Bart: change your picture of God to be true to what is within you. We do not have to believe the dominant picture of God, she is much too mysterious to be neatly defined.
elma
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