A netfriend wrote: We are losing our love of history, literature and art, and if you don't know these, then much of our Christian tradition is meaningless. So much for our education system.

I replied: The fundamentalist/conservative wing of the church doesn't need these elements of tradition. Their orientation is forward-looking, driven in my view by two phenomena - a consumer culture in which goodies (especially eternal life) are offered in return for a payment of receiving-Jesus-as-one's-personal-Savior. The other is simplicity this side of complexity: the payment - also a contingent factor in terms of earning eternal life - is simple doctrinal/creedal orthodoxy...

OTOH the liberals are in danger of throwing out these two babies (eternal life now-and-later, and certainty in the meantime) with their intellectual bathwater...

Which is why people like Brian McLaren are up there with the best of today's prophets.

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Shalom! Rowland Croucher

January 2007