• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1436 0

to inform us about what true knowing really is…. I believe that a biblical account of ‘knowing’ should take love as the basic mode of knowing, with the love of God as the highest and fullest sort of knowing that there is, and should work, so to speak, down from there…. When I love, I affirm the differentness of the beloved; not to do so is of course not love at all but lust. But at the same time when I love, I am not a detached observer, the fly on the wall of objectivist epistemology. I am passionately and compassionately involved with the life and being of that…which I am loving…. I believe that we can and must as Christians within a postmodern world give an account of human knowing that will apply to music and to mathematics, to biology and to history, to theology and to chemistry. We need to articulate, for the post-postmodern world, what we might call an epistemology of love” (The Challenge of Jesus [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999], pp. 197–98, emphasis mine).

14. Dojo is Japanese for a “place of the way.” See Mark Scandrette’s wonderful book Soul Graffiti (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008) for more on this idea of a Jesus dojo.

15. Some may wonder why I don’t identify worship as the one primary calling. Worship, as I see it, is a practice profoundly integral to the life of a disciple. In that light, forming Christlike disciples means forming worshipers—people who love God and express that love with joy and reverence. Trying to facilitate worship as a public spectacle without forming disciples in the way of love seems to me to be an adventure in frustration. So you can make worship your mission without forming Christlike agents of love, but you can’t do the latter without also forming people who worship.

16. By heuristics, I mean creative, practice-based approaches to learning that focus on desired outcomes. These approaches would include experiential learning, rites of passage, learning journeys or pilgrimages, spiritual direction, and action-reflection.

17. By space, I mean creative, social, spiritual space—not merely architectural space, although again, architecture isn’t a bad thing if it serves this purpose.

Chapter 17: Can We Find a Way to Address Human Sexuality Without Fighting About It?

1. A version of this introduction appeared as a foreword to Andrew Marin’s Love Is an Orientation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).

2. On this important revolution in Christian anthropology, see Joel Green’s work, beginning with What About the Soul: Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2004). See also Nancey Murphy’s work, including Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Kevin Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Materialist Alternative to the Soul (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006).

3. See, for example, levirate marriage in Deut. 25:5–10. Polygyny here refers to having multiple wives.

4. See Mark 2:27; also 1 Cor. 7:8–9, where Paul relativizes marriage and subordinates it to higher goals.

5. Jonathan Merritt, arguably one of the most courageous Southern Baptists in America, wrote, “According to Public Religion Research, 37% of evangelicals ages 18–34 have a close friend or relative who is gay. Only 16% of evangelicals 35 and older can say the same” (http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/04/an-evangelicals-plea-love-the-sinner.html#more). That difference goes far in explaining why younger Evangelicals are changing their opinion on sexuality. Knowing a gay person is like observing the retrograde motion of the planets.

6. Among social activists, there is a famous saying attributed to Mahatma Gandhi that roughly parallels this process: “First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they fight us, and then we win.”

7. As pointed out in n. 6 in Chapter 11, many are happy to put “the teachings of Paul on the same authoritative ground as the teachings of Jesus,” because they believe that “the Bible does not suggest that there are two levels of spiritual authority in the Bible—the more authoritative teachings