Edgework

What we have been saying about using the Old Testament in our pursuit of a deeper spirituality has a corresponding application for using the New Testament.

Once we admit that the Bible is not a perfect book, doesn’t always speak with one voice, and reflects the contexts of earlier times we can no longer expect every chapter and verse to speak directly into our lives.

Modern Christian pilgrims who are prepared to move intentionally into the second half of life, as Richard Rohr describes it, are gradually confronted with the question of how the Bible helps them along the way.

In his book, Falling Upwards: The Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Richard Rohr asserts that normal spiritual development comes in two stages within a person’s lifetime.

It has now been nearly a year since I have posted articles regularly on mySteinbach. When I signed off last November, a number of factors had converged that influenced my decision to take some time away from an active writing life.

In a sense, this book is an apologetic for the 25 books Brian D. McLaren has written over the past decade or so which document his spiritual journey from his native fundamentalism toward becoming a “hopeful pilgrim moving forward in the journey of faith.”

I have been climbing mountains for most of my life. Not mountains made of rock mind you. Literally hanging by a rope from a cliff a few thousand feet above a gorge never really appealed to me that much.

I have come a long way from those days in early childhood in which I was first terrorized by the certainty of hell and finally giving in to being “saved” by believing in the penal substitutionary atonement theory.

Just as I was getting ready to wrap up this series on atonement I came across the reflections of a contemporary Franciscan Friar, Richard Rohr.

In his classic work, Christus Victor, Gustaf Aulén argues that atonement theories did not emerge until well into the second century A.D. when Irenaeus began to “theologize” about the work of Christ.