today is my day-off. i don’t get many days off but when i do i value them a lot. I usually do some thinking that I should do, reading that I want to do, and praying that I’m compelled to do followed up with lots of tea, maybe a nap here or there, and a lot of n-o-t-h-i-n-g.

so as i sit here i have been thinking about a wide variety of topics lately, none with a whole lot of congealed thought — but that’s ok, the thought of a thought is often more exciting than the actual thought. (that’s Heideggar speaking, not me — although i tend to agree)

Thought of a thought 1: Forgiveness. In the last couple months i have really been thinking about what salvation is, and what salvation means, and why salvation matters to the here and now. On this thought journey I have bumped up against two things. One — the typical theory of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins) is incredibly limited and is steeped in legal metaphors and not impacted by relationship at all. Two — since I am thinking about starting a church the need for me to have an understanding of salvation is incredibly important. Otherwise what do I call people to? This is where I think many churches run-amuck. Instead of calling the faithful to salvation churches will call them to politics, or to be against ‘agendas.’ or to isolation from culture. But that is a conversation for another day and another topic.

So my researching of what can be called relational salvation led me to the territory of forgiveness. In reading Moltmann, Barth, Grenz, and Pannenburg there are undertones (or overtones) of forgiveness being necessary for salvation. Therfore I hopped on Amazon and went to town looking for books on salvation and forgiveness. To my surprise and strange delight I found a book written collectively by a therapist and a theologian, The faces of Forgiveness: searching for wholeness and salvation. I was instantly hooked. Could this be the beginnings of a relational salvation? After all, forgiveness is a relational act that is necessitated by an interpersonal injustice.

As it turns out the book is excellent. The first part runs through forgiveness from a therapeutic perspective an apart from talking about ‘face’ a lot it does a really good job of differentiating the ways in which the word ‘forgiveness’ is discussed. The second part though, being a wanna-a-be theologian, is the part that i ate up. Leron Shults examines forgiveness throughout the Bible, starting with the Jewish understanding of a forgiving god and then goes into the Greek understanding of god forgiving through Jesus and the Spirit. Shults then does a brief examination of how the global ‘C’-hurch has viewed forgiveness as it informs salvation. All that to say, what i am coming to believe is that salvation to the emerging post-modern Christians is a deeply relational act that has forgiveness and reconcoliation as its conduits. Without either of these, salvation tends toward escapsism, and after-life-isms that do not inform the fact that I have 70+ years of life on this Earth that I get to participate in the Kingdom of God now. Forgiveness is also deeply important, in particular, to the emerging generation because we see the global harms that both the myth of progress and the Enlightenment era have done to global health and global welfare. So on a very basic level, the world can not continue as is — forgiveness and repentence and therefore reconciliation must occur.

Thought of a Thought 2: I had more, but now i forgot them and have spent all my blogging time already.

peace
joel

p.s. the next book on forgiveness and salvation i plan to read 9starting tomorrow) is No Future without Forgiveness by a South-African Genius Bishop by the name Desmond Tutu