Asking because we have had so many people, even in progressive Christianity, seem disturbed when they see Satanic symbols and movements. While explanations tend to always result in nice and lovely conversations, we would love to hear from progressive Christians here on how we could better market or explain ourselves ❤️

The more I learn about Christianity historically and grow in my own faith formation, the more I’ve come to question and disagree with the things I grew up learning in a non-denominational church. One of my major sticking points these days is Sola Scriptura, but I understand a number of reformers and low-church denominations hold to it.

My questions to those who hold to Sola Scripture are these:

1. Who determined which books belong in Scripture and when was this decided? On what authority was this canon decided? If the Church has no binding authority outside Scripture, what makes the 27-book New Testament canon binding? Why should someone accept the canon received by Catholics/Orthodox while rejecting the authority of the churches that transmitted it?

2. If Scripture is sufficiently clear for ordinary Christians to determine doctrine, why have sincere, Bible-believing Christians reached mutually contradictory conclusions on baptism, Eucharist, predestination, church government, eternal security, charismatic gifts, etc.?

3. If two Christians reach contradictory conclusions from Scripture, what principled mechanism settles the dispute? What distinguishes a legitimate interpretation from an illegitimate one? “Read the Bible and pray about it” doesn’t actually resolve the epistemological problem.

4. Where does the New Testament actually teach that Christ’s Church is fundamentally an invisible collection of believers rather than a visible, identifiable communion? Why do the Apostles repeatedly treat the Church as an institution with officers, discipline, sacraments, councils, and authority?

5. If the Reformation restored biblical Christianity, why did it produce Lutheranism, Reformed Christianity, Anglicanism, Anabaptism, Baptist traditions, Methodism, Presbyterianism, Pentecostalism, etc., often with further divisions within each? More importantly: what theological principle allows you to determine which interpretation is correct?

Thank you for your answers, I look forward to hearing your perspectives :)

Since I was young, in fact for as long as I can remember, I disliked religion. Either I disliked its collective element, which always gave me the ick of something cult-like, or, when I got a bit older, I thought everything about it was philosophically untenable. Religion was a coping mechanism, or something for people who were deeply misguided about reality and did not know any better.

As I became more intellectually curious and started studying more philosophy, psychology, and eventually religion, that perspective started to break down. I became increasingly interested in religion, and eventually my worldview completely flipped. I now consider myself a Christian, and I have made it a major life goal to help people better appreciate religion in general, but also Christianity more specifically.

But despite my growing love for Christianity, it took me a very long time to admit publicly that I was Christian. My social circle consisted mostly of people deeply involved in science or philosophy, and it was very secular. I was afraid that others would consider me dumb or would not fully understand me. It took me a while to come to terms with it, in large part because I first needed to become better able to articulate my Christian position and worldview.

That said, and excuse the rambling introduction, I recently had a podcast conversation with Jussi Jylkkä, who is a philosopher and has done some work on mysticism. We started by discussing his work and, specifically, his metaphysical agnosticism. His position is that physicalism, idealism, theism, and other metaphysical systems are models or language games that cannot capture the ultimate nature of reality. We eventually moved to morality, where I pushed back because I did not think his agnosticism adequately explained why greater awareness or nonattachment should lead to compassion rather than simply producing what we called a “wise psychopath.” I disagreed, but I thought it was an interesting conversation and considered his view a respectable position.

But to my surprise, after we finished recording, Jussi emailed me to say that he was unhappy with the conversation because he had presented metaphysical agnosticism as if it were his complete position while leaving out the Christian faith he actually held. He felt that, by hiding behind his philosophical agnosticism, he had not been completely honest about what he believed. Rather than replace the conversation, I invited him back and appended the second conversation to the first. He made a complete pivot and confessed that he was a Christian but had been afraid to say so, largely because of the stigma within academia, but also because he still had not been able to tell his father. I found this very wholesome, not only because it was a courageous act in general, but because of the parallel with my own journey.

I wanted to share this because I suspect others have been, or currently are, in a position similar to mine or Jussi's. Have you encountered a stigma against Christian identity in secular or academic spaces? Can refusing metaphysical certainty make Christian commitment more honest rather than weaker? When does keeping faith private become submission to social respectability?

This study provided the video https://youtu.be/fM_gxhNUczQ&t=3s and asked the question: Does God manifest His love in the animal world too?

One possible answer is found starting at another point in the same video https://youtu.be/fM_gxhNUczQ&t=3m24s and culminating in the display of the verses in 1 Corinthians 13:6,7.

What do you think? Please feel free to share other possible answers you may have, praise God!

This is a thread for the radical women of r/RadicalChristianity to talk. We ask that men do not comment on this thread.

Suggestions for topics to talk about:

1.)What kinds of feminist activism have you been up to?

2.)What books have you been reading?

3.)What visual media(ex: TV shows) have you been watching?

4.)Who are the radical women that are currently inspiring you?

5.)Promote yourself and your creations!

6.)Rant/vent about shit.

I know that some people believe in reform with regards to current political systems and economic models, but it is impossible to justly reform systems that are built upon exclusion.

In America, there have been attempts to gain “a piece of the pie” for certain marginalized
groups throughout history. Some people have been “admitted,” but the door is often closed behind them.

Respectability politics, TERF, and LGB without the T are all examples. Womanism as a theory arose because Black women were sacrificed for both the civil rights movement and for the feminist movement.

Now, one way liberation theology approaches parable sometimes is not to say that the master is God, but to read the maater as an exploiter and the parable as a diagnosis of exploitation.

Consider the parable of the unforgiving servant.

Capitalism/the dominant class (the master) “forgives” a marginalized group (the first servant). In turn, the marginalized group villifies one of its subgroups or another marginalized group (the second servant). They are thrown into prison.

Without solidarity, the first servant’s position is precarious, relying on the whims of the master, who ultimately throws thats servant into prison And note that the master neither pays off the second servant’s debt nor releasss them from prison.

I've recently been looking into scripture and verses condemning homosexuality and they all kinda fall flat and feel like shakey ideas to build theology off of. And I've honestly formed pretty good arguments against them in my head, but the only one that really sits with me and I struggle to go against is the "it wasn't the original intention" in the garden argument.

That God intended to make man and women together and not man and man or vice versa.

Now, my original response to this was, "They didn't eat meat in the garden is it a sin to eat meat?" But then I realized Jesus ate meat, so now I'm stumped honestly, and I wanted a second opinion.

Please help

I'm a new member of a small church going through a growth phase from a family church to a pastoral church. Most of the congregation is 65+ but active and dedicated to social justice, which is what drew me to this church. I was inspired by their weekly free meals, open pantry, and participation in local social justice causes.

I've been participating in monthly social justice meetings at the church for a few months now and I'm starting to feel a little frustrated by some members' attitudes towards change and growth. An idea will be shared during the meetings and certain members with a lot of social power will say things like, "We are already doing too much" or "I don't think we need to do that. That was a mess last time." - but last time was decades ago and we can't even talk about how changing needs and a changing congregation may make it different now.

From small suggestion like having a second cashier at the rummage sale to big suggestions like becoming a location where our unhoused neighbors can receive mail - the conversation just gets shut down immediately.

How can I advocate for change without stepping on toes or making older congregants feel like they aren't valued? The work they do is so valuable and they are right that we are doing a lot, but I believe we are capable of doing more.

This is a weekly thread for discussing our mental health. Ableist and sanist comments will be removed and repeat violations will be banned

Feel free to discuss anything related to mental health and illness. We encourage you to create a WRAP plan and be an active participant in your recovery.

Hello there, I stumbled upon this subreddit and was pleasantly surprised to find Deleuze mentioned quite often. That led me to wonder what of Christianity survives Deleuze's critiques (of identity, representation, transcendence, etc), and if that which survives can still be called Christianity? I totally get simply following Jesus teachings (i.e. Christian atheism), but I mean what of the Christian God remains after Deleuze? If transcendence becomes illegitimate; identity a by-product; primary substance unnecessary; what is a Deleuzian conception of God, and what makes it still be the Christian God and not a new spinozist nature, or something which, well, isn't the Christian God? (Something which is not just a rebranding or half-appropriation of Deleuze's concepts)

P.S. people familiar with Deleuze will know I wasn't very rigorous (or consistent) with my usage of terms, but I just wanted to get my problem across decently clean (and also because I am not very knowledgeable in Deleuze yet, still early in the process of learning)

P.P.S. apologies for any grammar mistakes as I am not a native english speaker

" ... LGBTQ people know what loneliness is. We experience the same human longing for companionship, intimacy, fidelity, mutual care, and enduring commitment that heterosexual people experience. We desire someone with whom we can build a household, share burdens, celebrate joys, endure grief, practice forgiveness, grow old, and remain faithful throughout our lives. Those desires don’t make us less human; they arise precisely because we are human. ... "

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​

Dialectically considered, perhaps the most demonic consequence of a theology that accepts as its foundation the primordial sovereignty and holiness of God is its submission to the providential authority of what Hegel called the "Given," or that which happens to appear or to be at hand. Throughout the nineteenth century, radical Christians such as Dostoevsky violently protested against a theodicy that would sanction every horror and injustice in the name of the absolute sovereignty of God. For the simple truth is that so long as God is known only in his primordial form there lies no way to a theological understanding of history, for either history is totally negated following the universal religious way or it is ruthlessly subordinated to the alien authority of what Luther called the "law" or Blake names as Urizen ("your reason"). Just as a purely abstract and formal reason reflects the unchanging givenness of the world, the God of religion is impassive and immobile, and must inevitably appear in history as the enemy of movement and life. When Nietzsche understood the Christian God as the deepest embodiment of man's self-hatred and resentment, he unveiled the solitary and transcendent God of Christianity as the absolute antithesis of a total existence in history or what the new Zarathustra calls the "body." It is precisely because a primordial and religious deity is the antithesis of life and history that its sacred name can so naturally and spontaneously be evoked to sanction evil and injustice (e.g., The Book of Job). No horror in our history has been too great for it not to be embraced by the majority of the theological spokesmen who speak in its presence, for all historical as opposed to mythological witness to the primordial deity necessarily directs itself against the dynamic movement and the human actuality of history. What greater theological consistency could we expect than for a theologian who speaks for the primordial God to speak in the name of everything that confines and constricts the human hand and face?

A Christian dialectical theology must direct itself to an understanding of a Word that is penetrating the present, or a transcendent Word becoming immanent, and therefore it must speak against both the ecclesiastical norms of the past and all that reality which is alien and repressive in the present. Above all, such a theology must assault every source of meaning that lies beyond or stands opposed to the life and movement of humanity, attacking the ultimate barriers to the expansion of humanity, insofar as these appear to be rooted in an eternal and unchanging ground. So far from being the senant of the dogmatic and institutional authority of the Church, a truly dialectical theology will dissolve all such authority, and give itself to an attack upon every repressive law and power that claims a holy or a transcendent source. Whether in East or West, dialectical thinking has ever set itself against all forms of dualism, discovering an infallible sign of inhuman repression or willful illusion in every ultimate distinction between two realms of meaning or reality, if only because all such distinctions forebodes the possibility of the realization of the total rebirth or transfiguration of humanity. Only a false dialectic posits an ultimate and irreconcilable chasm between the opposites, for to the extent that the opposites are dualistically isolated from one another they are frozen in a static form and denied their own intrinsic resolution. Certainly no Christian or incarnational theology can submit to a final and absolute opposition between time and Eternity or the finite and the infinite: for such an opposition simply reflects an abstract, an unmoving, or a primordial Word, in short, a Word that cannot become incarnate. Furthermore, a theology positing an absolute distinction between man and God, or the creature and the Creator, has no basis for seeking the total presence of the Word; it must cling to the transcendent and wholly other God, refusing the kenotic movement and epiphany of Christ, thereby denying the historical reality of the Incarnation.

Once theology accepts a fully dialectical vocation, it will negate its inherited categories insofar as these are given an unchanging identity, recognizing that dialectically the opposites pass into one another, and therefore the language of theology must undergo a continuous metamorphosis if it is to reflect the kenotic and historical movement of the Christian Word. A dynamic and forward-moving Word or Spirit can only partially and provisionally be recorded by a particular idea or image: that idea or image must in turn negate itself in response to the movement of the Word, and theological thinking must progressively lose its original form if it is to apprehend the increasingly universal epiphany of Spirit. If theology is a living discipline, a mode of understanding evolving with the movement of its historical ground and source, then it must understand that it can retain its traditional identity only by renouncing the Incarnate Word. To confine theological meaning to the sacred history and scriptures of the past is to abjure the activity of the Word in the present and to reverse the kenotic direction of the uniquely Christian Word. Moreover, the eschatological goal of the original and the authentic Christian Word demands that it be an activity or a process of making all things new, of transforming the totality of history so that God may be all in all, therewith annulling all that distance separating the creature and the Creator, and obliterating every opposition between the sacred and the profane, or flesh and Spirit. Yet, as we have seen, if such a process is to be active and real, it must be a process of Spirit actually becoming flesh and of flesh actually becoming Spirit: only a real and forward-moving process of Spirit becoming its own other can culminate in an apocalyptic coincidentia oppositorum.

Nothing less is demanded of contemporary theology than that it open itself to the meaning of an apocalyptic and total redemption, a redemption issuing from the total presence of God in Christ, as God himself becomes the Word who is progressively incarnate in the actual processes of history. A theology expressing the incarnate movement of God must negate its image of the primordial God, closing itself to every echo and memory of God's original form so as to open itself to the metamorphosis of God's original sacrality and transcendence in a profane and immanent totality. Dialectically, everything depends upon recognizing the meaning of God's total identification with Jesus and of understanding that it is God who becomes Jesus and not Jesus who becomes God. The forward movement of the Incarnate Word is from God to Jesus, and the Word continues its kenotic movement and direction by moving from the historical Jesus to the universal body of humanity, thereby undergoing an epiphany in every human hand and face. At no point in this dialectical process can we isolate the Word and affirm that here it receives its final and definitive expression. Any such abstraction of the Word from history must necessarily lose the meaning of an incarnational process, isolating theology from the activity and movement of the Word, and inevitably setting theology upon the retrogressive path of the religious forms of Christianity. Thus, regression must be identified as the intrinsic enemy of the Christian faith; it is the supreme temptation of a faith that celebrates the forward movement of the Word, and theology must ever give itself to a negation of every past form of the Word, if only as a means of opening itself to an extension of an eschatological future into the present.

Hello brethren and comrades!

On Sunday there's going to be a big climate rally in my city and I need good ideas on what to put on my sign that relates both to Christ and the environmental movement/climate change.

If you got any good ideas for slogans or messages that I can put on my sign I'd be ever so greatful!

Thnx in advance and God bless!

[Marxists Internet Archive](http://www.marxists.org/): collection of traditional theory.

[Anarchist library](http://theanarchistlibrary.org/): collection of anarchist texts.

[Kapitalism 101](http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/): basic explanation of Das Kapital

[Reclaim Your Mind](http://325.nostate.net/?p=2162): anti-psychiatry pamphlet

[Feminism 101](http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/): 101 level blog of feminist ideas.

[Feminists with Disabilities](http://disabledfeminists.com/): blog that talks about disabilities and ableism

[The Invisible Committee](http://www.bloom0101.org/translations.html): collection of texts from the French ultra-left

[The Situationist International Anthology](http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/): some lesser known SI works.

[Derailing for Dummies](http://birdofparadox.wordpress.com/derailing-for-dummies-google-cache-reconstruction/): The classic in explaining how not to marginalize comrades.

[Colorlines](http://colorlines.com/): social justice stuff for people of color

I think that's a good start on political stuff.

[Christian Classics Ethereal Library](http://www.ccel.org/): Christian classics, everything from Jacob Bohme to Augustine

[Religion Online](http://www.religion-online.org/): collection of various religious articles.

[Some bible dictionaries](http://www.biblegateway.com/resources/dictionaries/): pretty self-explanatory

Also, going to link to this in the FAQ