Radical Reformission Quote #5

From the introduction: my personal reformission and the growing reformission movement. (Note: There are a lot of funny one-liners throughout the book that give the flavor to Mark's personality. I'll post a bunch like this some Fridays.)

• I wasn't much of a theologian at the time, but killing Jesus did seem like a bad move.
• To me, sins were terrible things that very bad people do, such as rape, murder, drug dealing, and what my construction-worker dad called being antiunion.
• I had a class in women's studies in which I learned that men are a plague ruining the world and that I needed to get in touch with my feminine side, which made about as much sense as telling a dog to get in touch with its feline side.
• To pay the bills, I edited the opinions section of the campus newspaper, writing inflammatory columns that led to debates, radio interviews, and even a few bomb threats -- which was wonderful, because the only thing worse than dying is living a boring life.

Radical Reformission Quote #4

From the introduction: my personal reformission and the growing reformission movement.

Shortly thereafter, I found a good church that met my criteria. First, the pastor was a man who had been in the military and knew how to kill people in self-defense. Second, he taught the Bible verse by verse, so that I could learn to trust the Scriptures and love Jesus without feeling like we had a thinly veiled homosexual relationship. [...]

After graduation, Grace and I moved back to Seattle and began visiting churches. We finally settled into a large suburban church where I felt at home because it met my criteria. First, the pastor (who looked like Mr. T) had been an NFL linebacker and knew how to kill people in self-defense. Second, he taught me the Bible verse by verse in a real way, one that enabled me to have a relationship with Jesus that did not feel like he was my lifelong prom date.

Radical Reformission Quote #3

From the introduction: my personal reformission and the growing reformission movement.

That week, I started teaching my first Bible study. At the time, The Simpsons on television was all the rage among drunken college guys. My dorm room had cable television, also known as evangelistic bait. So I gathered the guys from my dorm floor together and told them they could watch the show if they also attended my Bible study beforehand. Much to my surprise, about ten guys showed up.

It then dawned on me that I had been a Christian for only a few days, had never been in a Bible study, and did not really know anything in the Bible other than the fact that I sucked and that Jesus is God. So I told the guys they could ask me any question about the Bible and I would take the following week to research the answer, since I didn't have any answers yet. This was my first ministry, and it inspired me to begin buying commentaries, reference materials, theology texts, apologetics books, and the like, which were more interesting by far than most of my classes.

Radical Reformission Quote #2

From the introduction: my personal reformission and the growing reformission movement.

In my first college philosophy class, I read Augustine, who said that sin naturally flows from our polluted hearts like sewage out of a culvert. He explained that the root of sin is pride and that the worst sins include things like false morality and autonomy from God. This was, I believe, God's extending to me the right foot of fellowship.

I then read the entire New Testament over the course of the next few weeks. God opened my eyes to the fact that I was a Pharisee and that the worst sinners are often the most moral and spiritual people who, like I was doing, pursue righteousness apart from Jesus.

Radical Reformission Quote #1

From the introduction: my personal reformission and the growing reformission movement.

Growing up, I thought that as long as I believed in a nebulous Sky Fairy named God and was a decent, moral person outperforming those below me on the ethical food chain, I would end my life hearing the old theme song to The Jeffersons television show and be "movin' on up" to heaven with all the other good guys. So I worked through high school and graduated Most Likely to Succeed and student body president. I was very proud to have never drunk alcohol, smoked a cigarette, tried a drug, or voted Republican. [...]

[In college] Without a car and majoring in boredom, I began reading a nice Bible my high school girlfriend had given me as a graduation present. She was a pastor's daughter who, in retrospect, should not have been dating me. Nonetheless, she has turned out to be an amazing wife who is the embodiment of her name, Grace. To this day, I preach each Sunday from the Bible she gave me, even on the Sundays when, as a good professional hypocrite, I tell the unmarried people never to date non-Christians.

Good News Quote #5

From the Introduction: Why Trying to Be Christian Makes Us Anxious.

We're all in this together, which means part of our job is to keep reminding each other about the Beloved, the Bridegroom who is ours, who is also the glorious one whose coming we await. Which is another way of saying: it's our job to keep preaching the gospel of Christ to one another. We don't stop needing to hear this good news just because we've become Christians. This good word, the gospel of Christ, is the bread of life that feeds our souls, because it is the way we keep receiving Jesus Christ every day. It is our daily bread, so we need to keep hearing it and feeding on it in our hearts by faith.

Good News Quote #4

From the Introduction: Why Trying to Be Christian Makes Us Anxious.

To everyone who reads this book, I say: don't believe any of this just because I'm saying it. Please do think critically -- and that includes thinking critically about what I say in this book. Above all, search the Scriptures to see if these things are so, like the Jews and Gentiles who first heard the gospel in Berea (Acts 17:11). Bad theology cannot stand up against the Scriptures, and does not fare well under the gaze of critical thinking either. But truth is different: if what you believe is true, it can stand up to critical thinking and Scripture will confirm it. So if you seriously believe your faith is true, you don't need to be afraid to think critically.

Good News Quote #3

From the Introduction: Why Trying to Be Christian Makes Us Anxious.

Pastors and other Christian leaders have been taught to use these techniques and get you to use them too. They do this with good intentions, thinking that this kind of "practical" and "relevant" teaching will transform you and change your life -- precisely the kind of thing that consumerist religion always promises to do. Just look at the books on the self-help shelf in any bookstore: they all say they'll change your life! And the same thing with the New Age spirituality shelf, and the Christian spirituality shelf too. They're all competing in the same market.

Good News Quote #2

From the Introduction: Why Trying to Be Christian Makes Us Anxious.


The New Evangelical Theology
Every era in the history of Christianity has its own dangers and failures, which include its own particular ways of distorting God's word. This book is about the distortions of our time, as found in a new theology that has more or less taken over American evangelicalism in recent years. [...]


They are the words of what you might call a "working theology," which is not an academic theory but a basis for preaching and discipleship, prayer and evangelism and outreach. It's a theology that tells people how to live. It gives people practical ideas and techniques they're supposed to use to be more spiritual.

Good News Quote #1

From the Introduction: Why Trying to Be Christian Makes Us Anxious

"Do not be anxious about anything," says Scripture (Phil. 4:6). The problem is: this makes us anxious! We have enough things to be anxious about already in life, and now we have to worry in addition about how to manage not to be anxious about any of it. And so the way we respond to this word from God, which is clearly meant to comfort us, actually adds a whole extra dimension to our burdens.

The Four Loves Quote #4

From the Introduction.

I must now explain why I have found this distinction necessary to any treatment of our loves. St. John's saying that God is love has long been balanced in my mind against the remark of a modern author (M. Denis de Rougemont) that "love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god". [...]

I suppose that everyone who has thought about the matter will see what M. de Rougemont meant. Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself. [...]

Now it must be noticed that the natural loves make this blasphemous claim not when they are at their worst, but when they are in their best, natural condition; when they are what our grandfathers called "pure" and "noble." This is especially obvious in the erotic sphere. A faithful and genuinely self-sacrificing passion will speak to us with what seems the voice of God. Merely animal or frivolous lust will not.

The Four Loves Quote #3

From the Introduction.

Thus our Need-love, the greatest of all, either coincides with or at least makes a main ingredient in man's highest, healthiest, and most realistic spiritual condition. A very strange corollary follows. Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help? This paradox staggered me when I first ran into it; it also wrecked all my previous attempts to write about love. When we face it, something like this seems to result.

We must distinguish two things which might both be called "nearness to God." One is likeness to God. God has impressed some sort of likeness to Himself, I suppose, in all that He has made. [...] But, secondly, there is what we may call nearness of approach. If this is what we mean, the states in which a man is "nearest" to God are those in which he is most surely and swiftly approaching his final union with God, vision of God and enjoyment of God. And as soon as we distinguish nearness-by-likeness and nearness-of-approach, we see that they do not necessarily coincide. They may or may not.

The Four Loves Quote #2

From the Introduction. (This quote immediately follows Quote #1.)

But I would not now say (with my master, MacDonald) that if we mean only this craving we are mistaking for love something that is not love at all. I cannot now deny the name love to Need-love. Every time I have tried to think the thing out along those lines I have ended in puzzles and contradictions. The reality is more complicated than I supposed.

[...] Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God. But man's love for God, from the very nature of the case, must always be very largely, and must often be entirely, a Need-love. This is obvious when we implore forgiveness for our sins or support in our tribulations. But in the long run it is perhaps even more apparent in our growing -- for it ought to be growing -- awareness that our whole being by its nature is one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose.

The Four Loves Quote #1

From the Introduction.

"God is love," says St. John. When I first tried to write this book I thought that his maxim would provide me with a very plain highroad through the whole subject. I thought I should be able to say that human loves deserved to be called loves at all just in so far as they resembled that Love which is God. The first distinction I made was therefore between what I called Gift-love and Need love. The typical example of Gift-love would be that love which moves a man to work and plan and save for the future well-being of his family which he will die without sharing or seeing; of the second, that which sends a lonely or frightened child to its mother's arms.

There was no doubt which was more like Love Himself. Divine love is Gift-love. [...] I was looking forward to writing some fairly easy panegyrics on the first sort of love and disparagements of the second. And much of what I was going to say still seems to me to be true. I still think that if all we mean by our love is a craving to be loved, we are in a very deplorable state.

Introduction to Morning Manna

Hey everyone! This blog is intended as an accompaniment to any groups of Christians living their Christian walks out together on a daily basis. Depending on your group and the time available, this can include doing devotionals together, praying together, reading a book of the Bible or a good Christian book together, worshiping God together, and/or sharing a meal together.

For the blog, I plan to post one quotation from a good Christian book before every weekday morning of Caltech's 2011-12 school year, which starts on September 26, 2011. For the first term, the book we will be drawing inspiration from is Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I hope these quotations can inspire some discussion on the blog and in general encourage you in your various groups.

By the way, I stole the title, Morning Manna, from a missions trip that a friend went on. Their times of devotionals and sharing in the mornings were called "morning manna" and I thought it was a great symbol of how we look to God for sustenance each and every day.