crazy mixed up kid

Tags: God, Christianity, Evangelical, spirituality

Date: 27 March 2012 23:25:05

Forty blogs of Lent

31

I'm a crazy mixed up kid. Well not a kid really, the bald head and white beard testify otherwise. But I'm mixed up. My theology and spirituality don't match. Theologically I'm Evangelical. You could call me Open Evangelical if you like, as I am open to suggestions from others, but most Open Evos are open to more liberal ideas than I am. Now I welcome input from people who are theologically liberal. They make me think about what I believe. They make me test what I believe. The result of that testing is that I have to conclude that I'm not a liberal. I still enjoy the dialogue though. Spiritually though I have to admit that the conservative end of Evangelicalism can be piety lite. There are rules: You must have a quiet time in the morning. You must read your Bible daily. There are Bible study guides which tell you how you must understand a passage. Now as an Evangelical I have a high regard for the authority of scripture. There is no substitute foe a thorough intellectual study of the Bible, of how the people lived, what the words of the prophet, or Jesus, or the apostle would mean in the context of the culture into which it was written. This all helps us to find out what the Bible has to say now. But spiritually I find this approach has little depth. Heres how I compensate. I said I was open to other ideas. Some of those ideas come from traditions other than my own. The Roman Catholic Church has some good ones. The first I use is Lectio Divina, a slow deliberate reading and re reading of a passage meditatively to find out what God is saying. Much of the time I hear nothing, but it is worth persevering with for the times when insights come through. This works well for me as it fits in with my personality. (For those into stereotyping I come out as INTP on the Myers-Briggs scale.) The other thing that helps is to go against type. Ignatian style reading does this, reading the passage and imagining you are there. Feel the wind in your face, and the pebbles under your feet, smell the fish. But for someone like me this approach is very difficult. So I have to conclude that I'm theologically Evangelical but spiritually Catholic. As I said, a crazy mixed up kid.