for the time being » Brian McLaren http://geoffreyholsclaw.net/blog the provisional thoughts of a missional pastor amid emerging culture Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:54:28 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 NPR on Evangelicals http://geoffreyholsclaw.net/blog/2010/06/15/npr-on-evangelicals/ http://geoffreyholsclaw.net/blog/2010/06/15/npr-on-evangelicals/#comments Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:25:06 +0000 geoff holsclaw http://geoffreyholsclaw.net/blog/?p=507 Here is an interesting piece by NPR on Evangelicals, spurred on my McLaren’s book.  Listen to it below, or read it at NPR.

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]]> http://geoffreyholsclaw.net/blog/2010/06/15/npr-on-evangelicals/feed/ 0 Paul and the Kingdom of God http://geoffreyholsclaw.net/blog/2010/02/22/paul-and-the-kingdom-of-god/ http://geoffreyholsclaw.net/blog/2010/02/22/paul-and-the-kingdom-of-god/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:23:37 +0000 geoff holsclaw http://geoffreyholsclaw.net/blog/?p=364 It has become somewhat fashionable again to claim that Paul ruined the Gospel of Jesus by making it all bloody and such, for getting that Christ came proclaiming the Kingdom of God, not some atonement theory (yes, I’m referring to the Brian McLaren’s new book).

Well, this afternoon I came across this and thought it worth of spreading around.  It is from Albert Schweitzer‘s “The Mysticism of St. Paul.”

The inner character [of Paul's thought] is determined by the fact that Paul has thought out his concpetion of redemption through Christ within the sphere of belief in the Kingdom of God.  In Paul’s mysticism the death of Jesus has its significance for the believers, not in itself, but as the event in which the realisation of the Kingdom of God begins. For him, believers are redeemed by entering already, thorugh the union with Christ, by means of a mystical dying and rising again with Him…, this state being that which they are to possess in the Kingdom of God. (p. 380)

Is the alternative “Jesus or Paul” a real alternative, or should the phrase run, for us, “Jesus and Paul”?

Paul Preaches the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and of Jesus as the Coming messiah in the form which it must necessarily take in consequence of hte death of Jesus having already occurred, and of the assigning to this death of the significance of the initial event of the Coming of the Kingdom.  In the mystical redemption-doctrine of Paul the Primiteive-Christian faith discharges the task it had been set of bringing the belief in the expected kingdom, and the redemption which goes with the Kingdom, into logical connection with the belief that Jesus who had died was the Coming Messiah. (p. 390)

Schweitzer connects the death of Christ with the eschatological atonement through which the Kingdom of God comes.  Anyway, it just seemed like coming from a non-evangelical, German scholar, that at least we should be a little more thoughtful about how Paul and Jesus relate to each other, not assume a corruption or disjunction too quickly between the two.

Well, back to studying…

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