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A batch of the best highlights from what Todd's read, .
The Christus Victor theology fell out of favor, not because of intrinsic inadequacies, but because it was subversive to the church’s role as state religion.
The Powers That Be
Walter Wink
it’s important to learn that you can tolerate hunger.
The Beck Diet Solution
Judith S. Beck PhD
It’s difficult to disentangle the political and economic aspects of our battle with the principalities and powers from the underlying spiritual struggle. Both conservative and progressive Christians tend to miss how these are two sides of the same coin. Conservatives tend to focus exclusively upon the spiritual aspects of spiritual warfare. This “spiritualizes” the struggle, which drains it of any political or economic impact or import. Spiritual warfare in the hands of many conservative Christians reduces it to something spooky, fretting about disembodied spirits floating around in the air. Progressive Christians, by contrast, tend to ignore the spiritual aspects of the struggle, focusing exclusively upon the political and economic arena. Where conservatives spiritualize spiritual warfare, progressives politicize the struggle. So when it comes to the riots in Acts, both groups overlook the spirituality of political and economic systems, how these systems are supported and animated by values, morals, worldviews, and cultural norms, that economies are guided by a spirit—a Zeitgeist—an unseen and animating spiritual center. That’s the critical piece of the puzzle doubting and disenchanted Christians miss when they stop talking about the Devil and spiritual warfare. The animating spiritual center—the spiritual heart and soul of civic life in Philippi and Ephesus—is precisely what was being disrupted by the coming of the kingdom of God in the book of Acts. And since doubting and disenchanted Christians miss this, they miss what was and is so subversive and unsettling about the kingdom of God. Consequently, doubting and disenchanted Christians can’t locate the key to unlock one of the great paradoxes of the book of Acts—the secret to the kingdom’s revolutionary, riot-inducing power.
Reviving Old Scratch
Richard Beck
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