“The Church…looks in its message at this immeasurable and unfathomable fact, that God has given himself for us. And that is why in each really Christian utterance there is something of an absoluteness such as cannot belong to any non-Christian language. The church is not ‘of the opinion,’ it does not have ‘views,’ convictions, enthusiasms. It believes and confesses, that is, it speaks and acts on the basis of the message based on God himself in Christ. And that is why all Christian teaching, comfort and exhortation is a fundamental and conclusive comfort and exhortation in the power of that which constitutes its content, the mighty act of God, which consists in the fact that he wills to be for us in his only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ.”  – Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, pages 86-87.

Barth is simply a modern so-called Church Father, not infallible but always a Christian voice and conscience in the incarnational Church. – Fr. R.

We must beware of placing men and even certain Creeds alongside the Word of God. The Anglican apologist John Jewel (1522 – 1571) once wrote: “What say we of the fathers, Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Cyprian? … They were learned men, and learned fathers; the instruments of the mercy of God, and vessels full of grace. We must despise them not, we read them, reverence them, and give thanks unto God for them. Yet… we may not make them the foundation and warrant of our conscience: we may not put our trust in “them”. Our trust is in the name of the Lord.”  Yes only the Infallible Word Of God is our eternal trust!  This alone is the lasting truth of the Reformation. It alone will always reform and renew the Church and the true People of God!

Romans 1:17, “The just shall live by faith.”   The “just” are not some special group of super saints. It is the people of God whose hearts are turned by and toward God. The people who know that their own rightousness does not count for much and who therefore have accepted by faith that God alone is their righteousness!  This is Justification. Our Father Abraham had this faith! It is the covenant of grace.

“If only you had paid attention to my commands, your peace would have been like a river, your righteousness like the waves of the sea.” (Isa. 48:18, NIV)

Obedience to God, can only come from two sources, the love and fear of God!  And this life of the Christian is that in the kingdom, for the kingdom has come and is pressing its way into the world. But how?  It is the Church: a “continuing incarnation” – offering our hearts and minds to the will of God, weaving together both the inner and outer life of the Spirit/spirit. Union with Christ by faith, is nothing else, but a life “soaked” by a sense of the Triune God’s reality and the claim upon the redeemed soul. It is more, much more, than the mind and intellect moving about for God!  It is also the soul and spirit alive and under the development of obedience of discipline and the theocentric and christocentic reality of all this mystery at work in us, it is grace & glory!  Biblically, it is God In Christ, (2 Cor. 5:19). For this alone we exist, and nothing else!  And only here we become “effective” servants and “lives” of Christ – Himself!  All else is nothing, as St. Paul said, “dung” – “loss for the sake of Christ.” (Phil. 3:7-8)

Only when the Church lives out it’s life and union with Christ – Crucified, Risen, Ascended – will it have power to move, challenge, and even change the culture around her!  Only here, will we find God’s real “decree”!

The older definition of the Shekinah glory in Jewish theology was; The Divine Manifestation, through which God’s presence is felt by man. Someone had taken to task my constant term of the Judeo-Christian, but as the NT itself speaks that Christ is Himself that “glory” . . . “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from (of ) the Father, full of grace and truth.” (St. John 1:14)   The Greek means He literally “pitched his tent” (skenoo), and is an allusion to God’s dwelling with or among the people of Israel in the tabernacle (Ex. 25:8-9; 33:7).  Here indeed is the “Shekinah Glory” of God in the very person (man) and face of Jesus Christ!  Now, we approach and see that “glory” by faith, “For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Cor. 4:6, ESV)

Christian bloggers need to remember that we are not God’s lawyers, arguing well for him, but God’s witnesses, simply telling what his grace has done for us.  It is here really too that the “essential” or “immanent” Trinity is so important!  We really understand little of the “economy” of God without this great truth.  As the very nature of God’s unity is both transcendent and immanent.

“For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he  was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.” ~ Blaise Pascal # 72, Pensees

Has the doctrine of God become practical deism in the Emerging Church? Far removed from His people in doctrine and faith-life?

Among other things, the Reformation was a crisis of Christian vocabulary, a movement away from mere scholasticism seen in the Roman Catholic Church. As today, the deep inter-relation of human ideas, speech, behavior. These things are bound together in the bundle of life, acting and reacting upon each other.

This is true of all intellectual disciplines. But in the Judeo-Christian faith it is especially true, but always still different. As for us, we must return to the historical texts themselves. In the historical events, which are remembered, represented and proclaimed in the proclamation of the Word, and in those sacraments which are “visible words” themselves, we have the vocabulary of Faith. In our postmodern time, we can and must return to our Judeo-Christian vocabulary, and the Textual Revelation of God. And finally again to the historical reality of the “Word made (became) flesh” (St. John 1:14), the Incarnation Itself! Which is the reality in time of the Triune God Himself, pressing into history: Bethlehem, Calvary, Resurrection, Ascension…the full “sessions” of Christ above, at the Right hand, and Throne of God in glory! Also from here Christ will Come, and bring the great consummation, and eternal day once again! “Amen, come Lord Jesus

I have been thinking and observing for some time about the blog, for Christian use, etc. Often it is just a bully pulpit, rather than a tool to express truth and dialogue. This is very sad! Not much else can be said here. We can and do meet good people, but this is the exception again sadly!

I make this statement based - as I have sought to maintain constantly - that the culture today is both postmodern, and often too postchristian!