Wow. Eric posted this link this morning, and I’ll have to say I agree with Eric that it is VERY POWERFUL Christian stuff.

ICTHUS: The Purpose Driven Gnostic – PDL day 13

What is missing in this account of worship is that worship is both a communal act of resistance as well as an act of constructing an alternative social reality. Worship is a political act in which the Church, as a gathered people, enacts the new reality of God’s work in the world in the face of an old world of death, violence, consumerism, and idolatry. Christians are that people group who gather around the body and blood of Jesus who is The Word, and offer the world a counter-reality in which all creation is reconciled to God and people everywhere worship their Creator. Its not fundamentally about my personal/individual experience of communing with the Spirit. Why do you need to gather with other believers for that?
As an act of alternative reality making, worship also helps the Church to rightly see the world. It teaches us that reality begins with God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus, the individualist description of worship (when you really mean it in your heart) is starting at the wrong place. Inasmuch as God is more concrete than myself, to begin your description of worship with the individual “soul” is both abstract and – yes, I have to say it, – Gnostic.

I’ll also say that in reading “Performing the Faith”, I find myself becoming more and more distant from that blasphemous social phenomenon known as the American Church, and there are example sto be had in every major denomination, and I always have to lay much of this squarely at the feet of my “alma-mater” Church, the Southern Baptist Church, which has capitulated to a Constantinian, all glory and honor to “the God’s man named Bush”. The individualistic, narcissitic, “me and Jesus” approach of the “Purpose Driven” shit, is a match made in heaven for a regime that wants and must work in the cover of dark and deception to achieve its ends which would not pass otherwise.

Clapp continues in his book that the Christian act of Baptism in worship can especially be construed as a political threat to the Empire. It says that people so initiated by baptism are part of a new people who aren’t constrained by the violence or provincialism of a nation state.

I have also begun reading an exploration of the Apostle Paul written by John Dominic Crossan and archeologist Jonathan L. Reed, entitled In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom. An indication, in the Preface, of what is to come:
Paul’s essential challenge is how to embody communally that radical vision of a new creation in a way far beyond even our present best hopes for freedom, democracy, and human rights. The Roman Empire was based on the common principle of peace through victory or, more fully, on a faith in the sequence of piety, war, victory, and peace. Paul was a Jewish visionary following in Jesus’ footsteps, and they claimed that the Kingdom of God was already present and operative in this world. He opposed the mantras of Roman normalcy with a vision of peace through justice or , more fully, with a faith in the sequence of covenant, nonviolence, justice, and peace. A subtext of In Search of Paul is, therefore: To what extent can America be Christian? We are now the greatest postindustrial civilization as Rome was then the greatest preindustrial one. This is precisely what makes Paul’s cahllenge equally forceful fro now as for then, for here as for there, for Senatus Populusque Romanus as for Senatus Populusque Americanus.

I have the sense that we are moving into a crucial time as no other in this nation’s history (aside from , arguably, the days of slavery), where the stance of the Church renders it in a postion to HAVE to make a choice between the Kingdom of God and Empire. Bonhoeffer faithfully strssed this theology which stands for truth in the face of Empire’s attempts to create their own “truths”. This is what scares me about the Bush administration person who boasted that “they make their own reality”, and those who oppose them are living in a “fact based” reality. That lays bare the intent and mission of the neoconservatives for me: the construction of a new American ideology (“A New American Century” is the name of their project which produced the “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” paper). It’s message of subjugation and conquest and the applicaiton of “American strength” to “solve” the world’s problems (which amount to those who resist the advancement of such imperial American aims) is scary, and I feel that much must be done to expose and question this underlying ungodly and peace-threatening agenda.

Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven worship is stripped of any political or world generating significance. In its final performance, it is a description of salvation and faith that is private, a-historical, a-cultural, and politically irrelevant. In short, Gnostic.

Their theology (the neocons) loves Gnostic ways, for it removes the burden for justice, and gives them “the blessing” of the royal prophets. THe message of the Old Testament prophets will also become more relevant to us as CHristians in a rising totalitarian, greed-driven state which is handing over public trusts to profit driven corporations (ie. the Environmental, Health, and Education agencies).