Thoughts to Ponder are my musings regarding community, things of the Spirit, and living as a Christ-follower. I don't offer the words of a professional or an expert; just a fellow traveler and explorer. Please don't take my musings more serious than I do. I've discovered a long time ago that I do not hold the keys of knowledge or wisdom. If I did, I misplaced them somewhere...typical.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Simply Christian

The following quote comes from N. T. Wright's book Simply Christian (Harper San Francisco). If you haven't read Wright, let me encourage you to pick up one of his books or check out his home page (www.ntwrightpage.com).

"One of the regular tactics the skeptic employs at this point is relativism. I vividly remember a school friend saying to me in exasperation, at the end of a conversation about Christian faith, 'It's obviously true for you, but that doesn't mean it's true for anybody else.' Many people today take exactly that line.

"Saying 'It's true for you' sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it's twisting the word 'true' to mean, not 'a true revelation of the way things are in the world,' but 'something that is genuinely happening inside you.' In fact, saying 'It's not true for you,' becuse the 'it' in question--the spiritual sense or awareness or experience--is conveying, very powerfully, a message (that there is a loving God) which the challenger is reducing to something else (that you have strong feelings which you misinterpret in that sense). This goes with several other pressures which have combined to make the notion of 'truth' itself highly problematic within our world.

"Once we see that the skeptic's retort is itself open to problems of this sort, we return to the possibility that the widespread hunger for spirituality, which has been reported in various ways across the whole of human experience, is a genuine signpost to something which remains just around the corner, out of sight. IT may be the echo of a voice--a voice which is calling, not so loudly as to compel us to listen whether we choose to or not, but not so quietly as to be drowned out altogethre by the noises going on in our heads and in our world. If it were to join itself up with the passion for justice, some might conclude that it would at least be worth listening for further echoes of the same voice." -N. T. Wright

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