Thursday, November 25, 2010

Keeping Jesus 'alive'

When emphasis is placed on the divine at the expense of the human (the conservative errror), Jesus becomes an ethereal authority figure who is remote from earthly life and experience. When he is thought of as merely human (the liberal error), he becomes nothing more than a superior social worker or a popular guru.

Gregory Wolfe, The New Religious Humanists, quoted in Kathleen Norris' Amazing Grace (pg 174).

Norris adds: The orthodox Christian seeks another way, that of living with paradox, of accepting the ways that seeming duatlities work together in Jesus Christ, and in our own lives.

And in the next paragraph: When I confessed this [her Christianity missing its centre] to a monk, he reassured me by saying, 'Oh, most of us feel that way at one time or another. Jesus is the hardest part of the religion to grasp, to keep alive.'

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