We sometimes hear it said that Jesus was just a teacher full of punchy aphorisms and turns of phrase: a mystic who wandered around saying nice things about the niceness of being Nice.  But his stupid disciples, being 2000 years stupider than Extremely Clever Us, managed to completely misunderstand him and construct an elaborate religion around him that he absolutely never intended.  It’s a narrative in which our culture places an extraordinary amount of faith — far more faith, in fact, than the Christian story requires, since the Christian story does not require us to believe in absolutely ridiculous claims about human psychology that nobody would ever advance for one second were it not for the special need to debunk Christianity.

 

—Mark Shea, ‘Palm Sunday’

 

http://dougwils.com/s16-theology/an-odd-credo.html

I believe that God is God, and that we are not.

I believe that Jesus is our Savior, and that we are not.

I believe that the Holy Spirit is our wisdom, and that we are not.

I believe that Jesus died under the wrath of God for our sin, and that He was raised from the dead because God was so pleased with Him. Because of that death and resurrection, God was just as angry with us and just as pleased with us as He was and is with Jesus.

I believe the heavens declare the glory of God, as do the buttercups.

I believe that the Bible is offered to Christians as the smoothest bourbon ever distilled, and that we are supposed to drink it straight.

I believe in the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of the undistributed middle, world without end, amen.

I believe that God is directing all of human history to a glorious culmination, and that He is doing so through a recurring pattern of high action death and resurrection adventure stories.

I believe that the material creation is saturated with His kindness, and that we are called to squeeze everything we can out of it.

I believe that the only way to squeeze out that kindness effectively is by taking hold of the impulse to be cool and crucifying it daily.

I believe that we are charged to conserve everything that the Spirit has done in history, and that we are to progress toward everything He intends to do.

I believe the foundation of our lives should be the cornerstone of worship on the Lord’s Day, as we gather in response to His call, in order to confess, sing, pray, hear, eat, and drink. We then receive the blessing and go.

I believe that the kingdom of God is like an endless river, like a sawtooth mountain range, like whole milk, like a cultivated plain, like a marble city with gardens, like a marbled steak on the grill, like aged cheese, like smart phones, like a high mountain meadow, like the laughter of family at the table, like the way of a man with a maid, like a moonlit ocean, and like a warrior crying high defiance. The kingdom of God is like everything.

I believe.

“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time most intellectually resisted fact”.

Malcolm Muggeridge

“Grace perfects nature.”  –  Thomas Aquinas

“I don’t believe in God, but I hope my valet does so he doesn’t steal my spoons.”

– Origin.

The modern criticism of religion can attack the whole world of religious Christianity, but not this unreligious cross. There is no pattern for religious projections in the cross. For he who was crucified represents the fundamental and total crucifixion of all religion: the deification of the human heart, the sacralization of certain localities in nature and certain sacred dates and times, the worship of those who hold political power, and their power politics. Even the disciples of Jesus all fled from their master’s cross. Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way…More radical Christian faith can only mean committing oneself without reserve to the ‘crucified God.’ This is dangerous. It does not promise the confirmation of one’s own conceptions, hopes and good intentions. It promises first of all the pain of repentance and fundamental change. It offers no recipe for success. But it brings a confrontation with the truth. It is not positive and constructive, but is in the first instance critical and destructive. It does not bring man into better harmony with himself and his environment, but into contradiction with himself and his environment… The ‘religion of the cross’, if faith on this basis can ever so be called, does not elevate and edify in the usual sense, but scandalizes; and most of all it scandalizes one’s ‘co-religionists’ in one’s own circle. But by this scandal, it brings liberation into a world which is not free. For ultimately, in a civilization which is constructed on the principle of achievement and enjoyment, and therefore makes pain and death a private matter, excluded from its public life, so that in the final issue the world must no longer be experienced as offering resistance, there is nothing so unpopular as for the crucified God to be made present reality through faith. It alienates alienated men, who have come to terms with alienation. And yet this faith, with its consequences, is capable of setting men free from their cultural illusions, releasing them from the involvements which blind them, and confronting them with the truth of their existence and their society.

from  The Crucified God.