Ramble Ramble Ramble

Apologies to the ones of readers of the blog as my humor, wit, insight and commentary have been absent.  Alas my cerebrum has begun to awaken from its long winter’s nap, and frankly with the Vancouver Olympic games dominating so many of the myriad television channels on the home boob tube, I suppose I might as well compose the prose that will put you in a delightful repose.

Filed away somewhere on my laptop I have a four page long rambling elucidation of Martin Luther, Protestantism, and Modernism and how it has led to the relatively dry spirituality of evangelicalism.  Actually if I ever get around to a master’s degree that sounds just boring enough that it may make a wonderful thesis paper.

But alas this is not an academic forum for my verbose tedious pontifications, so I shall try to distill what I was thinking into something more concise (Is it just me or am I in desperate need of an editor?).

While there has been a resurgence of it as of late, I think much of the mysticism of Christianity has been lost and we are the worse off for it.

Now I realize your experience in the Vineyard may have been different, but from personal experience and others I have talked to from conservative evangelical denominations we were fairly limited in practices towards God.

You had prayer: talking to God.  Worship: singing to God.  Bible study: thinking about God.  And all of these activities were based on a fact orientated regimen of “If it wasn’t done or didn’t happen in the Bible, it can’t be done or shouldn’t happen now.”  The reformation and the modern thought still clung to by the evangelical church has stripped us of so much in terms of church traditions and practices. 

I can’t think of a protestant church I know that still practices or preaches about Lent, let alone the Advent or uses any sort of liturgical calendar.  Back in the day, the whole year was organized around the Church and liturgical year.  With feasting and fasting, worship and celebrations, and times of sacrifice and silence.

The reformation I believe overcompensated for “Salvation through faith” and has left us with a church were any “work” is solely optional, because heaven forbid you earn of live out your salvation.  Which I find a little ironic because if there was anything the Puritans were trying to do it was appear to earn their salvation through their piety.

It is this dry spirituality, which comprises of little more than ten minutes of worship, sitting through a sermon, dropping  a twenty in the offering plate that has led to the us against them feeling I get from Protestantism.  We are here to share the good news and save the world, not condemn it.  We need to participate in the tough discussions going on in the world not turn our backs and go home because it doesn’t jibe with our worldview.  And we need to open our eyes to things like climate change and not assume that  because it is an issue pioneered by those who see things different politically it is some trap to take away freedoms and religion.  In fact I could write a whole other post on how abjectly stupid conservative Christianity’s objection to global warming is.

 I feel sometimes like we are in a new renaissance, computers have completely  revolutionized the world in the last 30 years.  And while we are living in it I think the Church has yet to catch up.  And the interesting thing is that with a fractured church now with Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox there is no unified response.  And I think the protesting nature of the Protestant belief system will leave it behind the times and out of relevance.

Okay I just re read everything I just wrote and I have no idea how I got here.  Damn I need an editor.