Real Christianity

I've been reading bits and pieces of a book we have floating around our house called Resident Aliens, which claims in it's subtitle to be "A provocative Christian assessment of culture and ministry for people who know that something is wrong," and it may well be just that. I've only made it through the first chapter and so far it's been insightful. I know nothing about it's authors, had never heard about it before, but it's first chapter is certainly enough to keep me reading. I'll probably post more about it; it's quite quotable.

Who cares, modern theologians asked, whether or not Jesus walked on water, or Moses split the Red Sea, or Christ bodily rose from the dead? The important matter is not these prescientific thought forms but the existential reality beneath them. Everything must be translated into existentialism in order to be believed. Today, when existentialism has fallen out of fashion, the modern theologian is more likely to translate everything into Whiteheadian process theology, the latest psychoanalytic account, or Marxist analysis to make it believable.

"We have come to see that this project, though well intentioned is misguided. The theology of translation assumes that there is some kernel of real Christianity, some abstract essence that can be preserved even while changing some of the old Near Eastern labels. Yet such a view distorts the nature of Christianity. In Jesus we meet not a presentation of basic ideas about God, worlds, and humanity, but an invitation to join up, to become part of a movement, a people. By the very act of our modern theological attempts at translation, we have unconsciously distorted the gospel and transformed it into something it never claimed to be- ideas abstracted from Jesus, rather than Jesus with his people." Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon