Tuesday, August 12, 2008

The Year was 2002 . . .

The year was 2002. Pink's Get this Party Started could be heard blasting from car radios, the first Euros were printed in Europe, the US congress authorized the President to use force in Iraq and the first post on IndieFaith forum was submitted.

August marks the birthday for IndieFaith though the site itself has earlier unknown origins. For those of you who have felt some distaste over the name IndieFaith I will let you into its history.  I was originally experimenting with Angelfire's free websites and when you registered your domain name it always began with www.angelife.com the there were some choices for a /directory after which you added your /name.  'indie' was on of the few intelligable subdirectories to choose from and so www.angelfire.com/indie/faith was born.  The name itself has always left me feeling a little uneasy.  Indie can strike me as too pretentious or too individualistic.  Though on the other hand it can also garner feelings of marginal authenticity.  I am happy to remain a little uneasy with my title.  Here was my original post in IndieFaith Forum,
Theology of presence Theology of covenant, Tomaato, Tomahto. This is a quote from A Homily on Acts 2 “To have faith in the Bible is to believe its promises and to believe in its record of God's work in the life of human history. The Bible then becomes a whole. We see the promise to Abraham, the Exodus out of Egypt, deliverance of the Promised Land, the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the giving of the Holy Spirit to the Acts Church. However, these spectacular events are accompanied by the wandering in the desert, the exile, the destruction of the Temple. For whatever the reason God appears to break into history at different times with varying degrees of force. The Bible gives us no reason to think that, outside of God's own timing, does the present Church body need to perform in the same manner as the Acts Church. If anything the Bible illustrates how consistently we have misunderstood how it is that God will act and fulfill his will. It is impossible to reduce God's Spirit to a formula and so we must ask what it is that God desires of us.” This then is not a theology of presence, but to shift away from the academic, a theology of the present. In light of covenant promises and accounts God’s presence in the past, how is that God speaks to today. For this dilemma I offer another quote, “Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez extends Hegal's notion of philosophy into theology and says that theology rises only at sundown.” We cannot expect a Christian theology unless we commit to working our “days” amidst the brokenness of our world, and then seriously reflecting on that at the end of the day. I walk around my neighbourhood and I see hookers, dried puddles of blood, domestic disputes, and kids with knives. However, I also hear the sound of hammers, children laughing, and gardens being planted. Move past a theology that binds itself by well-seeming borders and opens itself to engage with those it purports to redeem.
Birthday wishes and monetary donations are welcome.

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