It makes you wonder if guys like John the Evangelist and Paul and Moses wouldn’t look at our systematic theology charts, our lists and mathematical formulas, and scratch their heads to say, Well, it’s technically true; it just isn’t meaningful.
...I think ideas have to sink very deeply into a person’s soul, into their being, before they can effect change, and lists rarely sink deeply into a person’s soul.
- DONALD MILLER
If you like your religion outside the box, you’d probably like Donald Miller’s books. Blue like Jazz. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.
And this one, Searching for God Knows What. It’s been out for 8 years (reprinted and revised in 2010), but I just read it this year (thanks for the loan, sis).
Miller believes God wants a relationship with us, not have us follow a list of rules or live by a formula. He asks hard questions and doesn’t give easy answers in this book, but he gives real ones, through his stories and his own wonderings and wanderings.
Here are some highlights:
* ...what if we stopped looking at the rules and lists and formulas and rather looked through them at the larger and more obvious message? What if the motive behind our theology was relational?
* Becoming a Christian might look more like falling in love than baking cookies.
* Few places in Scripture speak to the Christian conversion experience through any method other than relational metaphor.
* There is moral law, to be sure, but moral law is not our path to heaven; our duty involves knowing and being known by Christ.
* The hijacking of the concept of morality began, of course, when we reduced Scripture to formula and a love story to theology, and finally morality to rules.
It is a very different thing to break a rule than it is to cheat on a lover. A person’s mind can do all sorts of things his heart would never let him do.
If we think of God’s grace as a technicality, a theological precept, we can disobey without the slightest feeling of guilt, but if we think of God’s grace as a relational invitation, an outreach of love, we are pretty much jerks for belittling the gesture.
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