Friends. It’s good to be back. Did you catch the episode with Bob Doto this week? I was super nervous to talk to Bob because his content and ideas are SO fresh and SO different from what I was raised with.
Like, in what world do …
Seances.
AND.
Tarot Cards.
GET MIXED WITH.
The Holy Spirit?
Go listen to the episode to hear more, but one of the biggest things that jumped out to me is something that has become a recent fascination for me over the last year and that is the great diversity of thought in the church.
I was raised in a conservative Evangelical world where I was taught that our way is the right way. And not only is it the right way, but it’s the only way - it’s our way or the highway!
Our thoughts about God are RIGHT.
What we believe about Jesus is RIGHT.
How we understand the Bible is RIGHT.
Our doctrines are RIGHT.
How we pray is RIGHT.
In short, we’re right about God and the Bible and Jesus and all the things and everyone else is misguided.
Bob’s book is called “Sitting With Spirits” and in the book he explores how the margins of Christianity have thought about the spirit world throughout history and in the process brings out the fact that Christian history is much more broad than many of us have been led to believe.
The “margins of Christianity” - those branches of Christianity that are away from the center of power, those branches of Christianity that are maybe a little less known than that loud and almighty North American Evangelical Christianity.
Some branches of Catholicism.
Some branches of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Some branches of Gnostic Christians in the early centuries of the church.
Many of these Christians believed in an active spirit world that was much larger and more diverse than just “angels” and “demons” and the “Holy Spirit”. Many of them believed that the spirits of the dead walk among us, are able to communicate with us, and are here to help, comfort, warn, etc.
Guys, Evangelicalism doesn’t have the corner market on God. It’s not the only way to think about God, it doesn’t contain within itself all of the answers. Heck, even though it is often the loudest and seems to be the most dominant, it’s actually quite small … a tiny fraction of the larger Christian faith.
I mean, to put it in perspective, in 2016 there were approximately 2,400,000,000 people in the world identifying as “CHRISTIAN”.
Of those 2,400,000,000 Christians only 1 in 4 or 619,000,000 identified as “EVANGELICAL” and of those 619,000,000 evangelicals, only 100,000,000 of those evangelicals lived in AMERICA.
American Evangelicalism often times acts as if it has the corner market on God, but the reality is that it’s actually a minority in a much wider and larger and deeper Christian faith.
Added to that, Evangelicalism was founded in the early 1700’s and so that means that AT LEAST 1,700 years of Christian history precedes it, which makes it a relatively new branch of Christianity compared to the vast history behind it.
What am I getting at? For those of you who grew up in a world like mine where you were chained to certain evangelical doctrines …
Biblical inerrancy.
Original sin.
Hell.
Substitutionary Atonement Theory.
Rapture.
… And made to feel like questioning them made you a disappointment to God and everyone else in your tribe. Well. That’s simply not true. The reality is that many of those doctrines are relatively new and have been understood in much different ways throughout Christian history.
The same is true with Spirits - I’ve always felt that spirits were active around me, but I was also taught that believing such things was silly and only opened myself up to “demonic influence”.
BUT.
It’s simply not true and the deep roots of the vast history of our Christian faith prove it.
Pick up Bob’s book, you won’t be sorry!
Peace.
Glenn
PS - I’ll send these out every week (Wednesday? Friday? We’ll see.) or so to reflect on that week’s podcast episode; so if someone forwarded this to you or you clicked the link on Facebook and you found it helpful be sure to click the SUBSCRIBE tab below to make sure you get access to the AFTERPARTY! 🎉
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NEW BLOG POST.
“I had a dream the other night. I was in a classroom at Alliance Theological Seminary where I had my first panic attack back in the Fall of 2005. In the dream I was sitting in the classroom in full blown panic when all of a sudden a plane crashed into the parking lot.
And then another plane crashed into the other end of the building.
And then another plane crashed into the woods out back.
And then the ceiling started to cave in on top of me.
And then I looked out the window and saw a gigantic machine with extendable arms and it was shooting the arms into the air and grabbing the planes that were taking off from a launchpad of sorts that was in the parking lot.
Dreams are weird. Follow me …”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST
NEW DESIGNS AT THE HERETIC SHOP.
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