Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Sentimentality
"The deepest enemy to Christianity is not atheism, but sentimentality. And
sentimentality is seen most clearly in Christians' unwillingness to have
their children suffer for their convictions. They just don't want to think
that to be a Christian means you might have to pay some prices for it. Being
a Christian puts us at odds with the world. Try being against war
or...greed. Christians think that they know what they are talking about in
sexual issues, because they know what lust looks like. But I think most
forms of lust today are really forms of greed, because you never get enough.
So, our lives are deeply challenged by noticing that we are formed by greed
in ways we don't even know how today. What would greed look like? Two SUVs?
So we concentrate on sex because we think we know what that looks like when
we get it wrong. We don't know what greed looks like, so we don't even
notice it. So how to recover a sense of what it really means to be a
Christian, putting us at some odds with the sentimentalities that determine
what most people mean by 'morality'..that's what's needed. Therefore it
deeply angers me that in the accommodated form of Christianity that so
possesses our lives today, we hardly know what an alternative would look
like". Stanley Hauerwas on Christian Sentimentality
Nick Davis
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During the last decades I've been a part of pentecostal/charismatic/apostolic and NCMI churches,
ReplyDeleteand I have heard many sermons about living victoriously (rightly so!), but when I talk to friends who suffer, they are confused and fall apart. Maybe we need to rediscover a Biblical theology of suffering, especially in the West. When was the last time you heard a sermon on suffering? Any thoughts? Walter from Casino/Australia