[em]I bought it last year mainly because I was reading negative things about it in some circles and heard it was baned from some Christian bookstores. I was curious about what was in it to cause them to ban the book.[/em]

That’s about what happened to me. I kept seeing all these negative comments about it on blogs and internet boards. Since the people being so negative were mainly patriarchs/evangelicals, I knew the book was probably worth reading. I was exactly right. It was the best book I’ve read in a long time, certainly the best Christian book.

And yes, having been raised in the patriarchal church, it felt weird reading about God as a woman. Once I got over my hang-up, though, I realized that it was actually a great idea. God is Spirit; He/She has no gender. That’s just something He created in humans. Therefore, why shouldn’t God be shown as a woman?

I also loved the author’s rebuff of the “Trinity subordination” heresy. He did an absolutely wonderful job of boiling it down so that the average reader can understand why it’s such a wrongheaded theory. I now reccommend this book to everyone I can.

If it does, those Christians have been spending WAY too much time in a church building. Supposedly we believe that we’re supposed to spread the love of God in a tangible way, but a lot of Christians just hole themselves up in a Christian subculture in the name of being “not of the world” (I grew up in the thick of this subculture myself). That is just sickening to me. The institutional church with buildings and liturgies, christian bookstores, paid pastors, christian record labels… It’s not what God had in mind. You cannot convince me that this is what Jesus wanted when he was training his disciples.

I still believe in the Church – as in the Body of Christ, but I’ve had enough of what Christianity has become.

Unfortunately, I feel like I’ve been so trained by the modern “church” to equate the “spiritual” with an emotional response or with simply thinking ABOUT God that I don’t even know how to relate to and experience God anymore. What IS spiritual? How do we go about having a relationship with God sans religion? I suppose my faith has been damaged a bit by not knowing who or what to trust… I can read the bible, but what interpretation should I adhere to? I don’t want to put God in a box.

I love this line:

““Chain of command? That sounds ghastly!” Jesus said.”

; ) Indeed, ghastly.

Sometimes (well, more often than not, actually) I think we in the Christian community have a difficult time allowing other Christians to have a differing opinion on theological matters that are non-salvational in character.

I know this is all about the most important thing that matters in this world and the next — but especially it seems to me from the anti-woman preaching/teaching — complementarian front — they are so legalistic and rules driven that their tolerance level for an opposing view is way out of whack for what would be expected from a reasonable person.

I’m just reminded of this because of the impact “The Shack” has had.

I’m also just grateful that people aren’t burned at the stake anymore because unfortunately in some areas of Christiandom the author would be on the fire. Again, some Christians just don’t want anyone to disagree with them. Despite their public “Lord, Lord!” they exhibit actually a profoundly weak kind of faith.

Most Christians don’t even understand Who they are worshipping!:

Most think God is male, they think the Holy Spirit is a “symbol” for God and not a Person, and they think Jesus is Christian.

“The Shack” certainly helps shake off these false notions!

How interesting that Christian fiction is doing far MORE to educate Christians than some churches are!

PS: How do non-Christians view Christians? A few Sundays ago our Pastor informed us over 80% say Christians are “hypocritical” and “judgmental”. Sounds to me the church needs to be much better at self-reflection and where they’ve gone wrong rather than accusations at outsiders who are “sinners”.

And I have just finished reading an interesting statement by Torrance about how we should think about the Three Divine Persons, based on the Nicene Creed itself. Let me know what you think about this:

What then does it mean to think of the three divine Persons specifically as ‘Father’, ‘Son’, and ‘Holy Spirit’? This was a question that had kept cropping up in the Church since the Arian controversy when attempts were made to speak of divine Fatherhood and Sonship on the analogy of human fatherhood and sonship. While there is certainly a figurative or metaphorical ingredient in the human terms ‘father’ and ‘son’ as they are used in divine revelation, they are to be understood in ways that point utterly beyond what we mean by ‘father’ and ‘son’ among ourselves and thus utterly beyond all sexist connotations and implications. Both the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit are incomprehensible mysteries which are not explicable through recourse to human modes of thought. Hence, as Athanasius and Gregory Nazianzen insisted, we must set aside all analogies drawn from the visible world in speaking of God, helpful as they may be up to a point, for they are theologically unsatisfactory and even objectionable, and must think of ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ when used of God as imageless relations. ‘Father’, Gregory pointed out, ‘is the name of the relation in which the Father stands to the Son, and the Son to the Father’, but such that it is an ineffable relation which exceeds and transcends human powers of imagination and conception, so that we may not read the creaturely content of our human expressions of ‘father’ and ‘son’ analogically into what God discloses of his own inner divine relations. Hence Gregory Nazianzen, like Athanasius, insisted that they must be treated as referring imagelessy, that is in a diaphanous or ‘see through’ way, to the Father and the Son without the intrusion of creaturely forms or sensual images into God. Thus we may not think of God as having gender nor think of the Father as begetting the Son or of the Son as begotten after the analogy of generation or giving birth with which we are familiar among creaturely beings (“Three Persons, One Being,” THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD, pp. 157-158).

I am sorry for the length of the quote, but I believe Torrance addresses some of the points brought up by Francine (89440) in a profound way. And since I’ve been so close in studying his words, I may not see some things you all might perceive by the Spirit and so I need your help to see it from a fresh perspective.

For example, our Adult Class at church is examing Church history in the light of Rev 1-3, and we are to write a short essay on a key person, event, movement, etc. And I am working on an essay, “Athanasius: Defender of the Trinitarian Faith,” which I am attempting to write from an egalitarian perspective.
I am also, with some real concern, working on a two part essay, “The Law, The Gospel, and Modern Christianity,” addressing what I see as a potential, divisive teaching in my church.

There are some people, formerly Catholics, who have come under the influence of SDA tyoe teaching regarding the Ten Commandments and strict Sabbath observance. They now believe that the Roman Catholic arbitrarily changed the true day of worship, and so we should no longer worship on Sunday for that reason.

Consequently, they are convinced that our church ought to live by this eternal, moral law of God if it is to obey and worship God in a holy and appropriate way. However, because of what the NT says in Matt. 5:17-20; 1 Cor. 9:19-23; Gal.4:21-5:1; and Col. 2:16-19 that they are mixing and confounding the Old and New Covenants, the Mosaic Law and the Law of Christ in way that can lead to the legalism and spiritual bondage that both Peter and Paul warn us about.

So please pray for me as I write and share this essay with these people. For I want to speak and do the truth in love, not in pride, nor in harsh self-righteousness. “Truth without love kills, but love without truth is a lie.”