Abi's OrthoCreed

Since starting this blog, I have been less active on many of the other blogs I've clogged over the past 10 months...but there are a couple of threads over at Scot McKnight's blog that have gotten me thinking...and after I finished posting a comment, which referenced my Ortho thinking here of late, I thought I should bring at least some of it over here.

You can meander through the whole thread from Jesus Creed here. My comment is #136...it's been a blog-storm!

The thread is about a church planting pastor who has just about been kicked to death by some in his flock who are "hyper-Calvinists" and just are completely unwilling to discuss or listen to anyone with another perspective. The comments are, interestingly, all over the place...and the tone only gets testy a time or two... ;^)

These are the parts of my comment I want to share with you, given our recent flury of "ortho" posts:

I wonder whether we are talking about people's postures before God or people's postures with each other?

Certainly we all agree with more humility, love and deep reverence for God...the challenge, as I see it, is that God calls us to be humble, mutually submitted and loving of each other as we love ourselves--having reverence for each other out of reverence for Christ.

I have had my share of fairly brutal bashings from just about every faith stance...and it's a toss up for me between the Calvinists (whose 5-pointed-TULIPs I just cannot embrace for myself) and their zealous (over?) defense of God's nature against human's nature (I'll lump them over-generalizingly as orthodoxy focused) and those ultra-fundamentalists who don't seem to understand how to hate sin yet love sinners because their focus tends to be on outward appearances (I'll lump them over-generalizingly as orthopraxis focused) rather than inward reality.

I've been pondering the "orthos" quite a bit over at my blog, in connection with some threads at Alan Hirsch's blog, and have begun to realize that there are really four that have to all hang together to get the proper perspective lined up: we have to have right thinking and right actions (so -doxy and -praxy), but we must also have right perception (my take on -pathy) as well as right inspiration (don't have a good word for it yet...-pneumaxy isn't flying currently).

Thinking well and acting poorly just doesn't cut it. Acting well and thinking poorly isn't much better, but sometimes does less damage in the short term. Thinking and acting well but with poor perception of the context is ineffective and very damaging in the long term. Thinking and acting well with good contextualization but improper inspiration leads to doing our own thing rather than joining God's mission.

So, I'm all for asking God to help me start with proper inspiration (the Holy Spirit's rather than humanity's), perceive people and situations through God's eyes, engage in as wide and deep and diverse studying/ thinking/ discussion as possible, and then act as much like Christ as I possibly can.

For me, anything short of all four is, well, short of that to which Christians are called.

Abi's OrthoCreed, therefore, will be:

• LORD, in all that I see, think, do and say, let my inspiration come from your Holy Spirit rather than from human perspectives and desires;
  
• LORD, let me perceive people and situations as you perceive them;
• LORD, let me engage in as wide and deep and diverse a discipline of studying, thinking and discussion (especially listening) as I am able; and
  
• LORD, let me act enough like Christ in every circumstance that my feeble light will be magnified by your cHesed and shine forth in the darkness I encounter around me.
  

Amen.