This sermon by Pastor John Wright speaks to me (as have many of his) :
Even when we talk of God in the church, we talk of God only within what is already known, what is supposedly already given. In response to radical closure of the world, we open up a little place within our selves, psychological impulses from within, maybe a spot buried deep in the brain, and we can call that God. God does not really reveal God’s own self as Other to us. No, we have to discover god, and therefore god becomes the same as ourselves. We don’t need revelation, a gift that stands outside ourselves which calls us to God. We instead speak of spirituality, self-discovery, community, the assurance of our own subjective meaning as we struggle through the blandness that is the repetition of sameness that we experience. Nothing lies outside the system. God chased from the world finds residence in deepest self.
Revelation is not allowed; we live in a world that denies revelation by definition. Our talk of God has succumbed to the loss – often without even realizing it and we end up with an idol, a big projection of our own selves, our own culture.
This affirms and echoes something that has been going on within me for some time now, and in the last year or so, all the more as I have read those such as Bonhoeffer, Hauerwas, Cavanaugh, and Bell, to add to my previous years of having my concept (and the hope that it’s more than such) of church brought back time and time again by the vision of The Authentic Church (and the history of such a journey that has been taking place over the past 59 years at the Church of the Saviour). The awareness that God intends to do wholly different things that lie far beyond what is “the givens” that keep us enslaved in a history told by someone other than God. Gordon Cosby constantly talks and writes of an “alternate reality” (“alternate” in the sense of “other” rather than “just another option”. It is alternate in the sense of the only true reality).
Faith is the beginning of rationality, of thought, of desire that ends in love that is true knowledge. Faith is not wholly other than thought, than rationality.