It’s still real early, but a few observations as I delve into Introducing Radical Orthodoxy (IRO). I love it. It is right on in many respects, as I see it.

I can’t help but “anticipate” the places in which I hear, becuase of his earlier article on his blog on Wallis and God’s Politics: a post he titled: Constantinianism of the Left? I think that title and that sort of language is totally uncalled for. To say Wallis is “Constantinian” is what I would call offensive. It is to ME, and I’m a pretty smart guy, and very sociological in my theology, which makes me completely excited about the ideas Smith is “mappping out” for me in the first chapter or IRO. I mean, for me, “Contantine” means capitulation to the state, consciously or unconsciously. Wallis does NO such thing. Now if Smith is going to elaborate on that, I’m certainly interested in that. But it seems to come down to how much we expect the whole world to immediately lay down all their ingrained assumptions and “use the right language”. I can be as crtical as anybody of ther church’s failure to be more careful or even mindful of this, but I think there are some other considerations when we talk about “evangelizing” or “presenting an apologetic” for the gospel. Does this concept even exist for Smith? How else does one “attract” people to the very idea of “testing the waters” by beginning to get involved in a community of people exploring the Jesus story, and seeking to live into it and out of it?

I mean I am a perfect example of how one can enter into the church as a sort of inheritance, but I did so through a variety of influences that attracted me as a part of my “adolescent intellectual muscle flexing; the questioning and wondering that goes on as I sougght to sort out what the gospel is. I entered in a big way through my own little community ; the youth group of my church in Owensboro, KY. MY youth minister gave us a well-rounded “theological traiing” via a healthy dose of “Serendipity” resources and activities, stories of what The Church of the Saviour achieved with a relatively small band of committed people (small in the eyes of today’s “successful churches”), and Clarence Jordan with his “Cotton Patch New Testament”. I began “getting into the Bible” via a rather fundamentalist, “Left Behind” , Schofield Reference Bible type reading, but I continued on beyond that (the dangers of getting into a “community” instead of the “individual and God and everybody reads the Bible for themselves” kind of thing is that one gets stretched by any number of “theological specialities”; the varying types of theological emphases that challenge previously held assumptions.

Tonyt Campolo was another such “heretical” influence (when one starts “paying attention” to and starting to “buy into” these various “radicalizing” or even “alternative” influences, one hears from the variuous “thought and theology police” about the dangers of this “new thinking”. Campolo was, as was Clarence Jordan, a target of such “protectors of the faith”. ASnd then there is my own denomination (or what formerly WAS my denomination, the Southern Baptists).

More to come very shortly.