We like to jump to conclusions, don’t we?
As I begin to share the contents of my book, Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity, I’ve had several people comment on the Facebook page and a blog post I wrote for Emergent Village. The first was from a gentleman who said:
“Here is another way to look at all this. What if we have gotten it all right? If you are teaching anything other than that Man is a sinner and God sent his Son to die a sinners death and that we have to Repent and believe in the shed blood of Jesus, anything else is WRONG!!. Usually when someone says we have been wrong distort the truth.”
Another gentleman said:
“While I like what you have to say and believe that it adds to our understanding of the Atonement, I’d be more careful in tossing out hundreds of years of Christian understanding of the substitutionary death of Christ. Not to mention the OT sacrifial system pointing forward to the Atonement. Yes there are problems with the “legal” presentation of Christ’s death and that view alone does not tell the whole story. But I agree with the previous comment; the Atonement is about God acting unilaterally on our behalf.”
Another gentleman said:
“Professing them selves wise they became fools. There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end thereof is death. You are accountable to God for this convoluted effort to shape the “sparing not of His Son” into something that you “feel comfortable with” . You are preaching another Gospel! The offense of the cross is not in your message. Wow.”
I actually get these types of comments. The immediate assumption is that what is new cannot possibly shed new light on the old, or even reframe it in a way that adds to conversation. It’s just easier to stick with what has come in the past. The problem is that none of these people have actually read the book. Instead of jumping to conclusions, the harder thing to do is actually wrestling with the possibilities presented in the book. I just hope they do to see that their concerns are misplaced.
