Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

Why?

Why forsake one to embrace another?

The Affirmations are to reflect what the person embracing them accepts as appropriate?

Do they actually reflect what you accept?

Say, what the heck does number 12 really mean?

I mean, dang, if you are going to be a heretic why not be your own heretic?

They are wordy, imprecise, and camel like in a horse way.
Also they are earthbound, faddish, politically correct, and pseudo liberal in the extreme.

In short they are more gravel than rock.
 

1. Why? Because I honestly don't believe there are any Lone Rangers when it comes to this studd. Srsly. And I adhere to lots of lists of ideas, more or less, which just mean "I think a whole hell of a lot like these people do."

2. You are under no obligation to adhere to these or any other affirmations, creeds, agreements, covenants or contracts.

3. Speaking as one who is earthbound, ocassionally faddish, politically correct within certain circles and liberal, pseudo and otherwise ... what's your point?

4. Gravel beats fucking sand, and it for damn sure beats the whimsy of contrariness for the sake of being contrary.

5. There are no Christian loners. Not even those who think they are loners. Nope.
 

And you're going to have to tel me what the heck is unclear about No. 12. 'Cause without it here in front of me, it basically says, as best I can recall, that each of is here for a purpose, and that not one of ourr purposes is more important than any other, and that in convenant, or in community, with others in prayer and conscious fellowship, we're to live out lives in answer to our understanding of our call and purpose.

What?
 

"Affirmation 12: Acting on the faith that we are born with a meaning and purpose; a vocation and ministry that serves to strengthen and extend God's realm of love."

Let's see. Is it, "Acting on the faith that we are born with, a meaning and purpose;..." or is it, "Acting on the faith, that we are born with a meaning and purpose;.."

"..."the" faith..?"

Actually aside from superfluous words and lack of commas, number 12is not a sentience, is it?

I mean where is the subject or the verb? Or are you to supply those yourself. How would it diagram?

ER: "...I honestly don't believe there are any Lone Rangers when it comes to this studd."

Studd?

"No lone rangers..."? You mean no personal theological understandings, revelations, insights, beliefs, out side of a group with like type stuff?
No Prophets I guess then, except inside the church? All Christians experience the Kingdom of Heaven in identical form?

ER: " Speaking as one who is earthbound, occasionally faddish, politically correct within certain circles and liberal, pseudo and otherwise ... what's your point?"

God isn't and should never be presented that way.

ER: " Gravel beats fucking sand, and it for damn sure beats the whimsy of contrariness for the sake of being contrary."

Gravel does beat fucking sand alright, but under Morisawa's Stream Laws which describe God's natural law, when you double the volume you square the scour. It may take twice the flood size to wash away gravel but bed rock won't be scoured in human time even by ten times the volume of adversity..


ER: "There are no Christian loners. Not even those who think they are loners. Nope."

Brought it up twice you did, it must be a strong point you are making. Accepting that a Christian by definition has Christ/God in his life and heart why could there not be Christian "loners"?

Finally:
ER:"You are under no obligation to adhere to these or any other affirmations, creeds, agreements, covenants or contracts."

You mean me? Gee thanks. I think I might grow my own however, and water it with enigma and see if it bears seeds of zen.

Word Verification is: foolit
 

Busy with actual research papers today. Maybe I'll get back to this. Not in the mood to defend an attack on the very effing notion of these kinds of affirmations. Not in the mood to defend anything at the moment.

So, I take it back. Forget it. Ride on Easy Rider. I don't believe an effing thing and the world can burn. How's that?
 

Sorry 'bout that. Go ahead and tease it all out to your heart's content. I've just got bigger chickens to fry today.
 

"Accepting that a Christian by definition has Christ/God in his life and heart why could there not be Christian 'loners'?"


Definitions: human personhood: normatively constructed in and from a context psychosocial relations which offer mental models and psychological resources without which the human person does develop.

Definitions: the christian god: a perfect com-union of three divine persons, one divine nature.

So, no. Since there are no lone rangers among the godhead or among human person, there can be no lone ranger of faith.

Faith is communicated, mediated, held in community though no community may be corporeally at hand.

"Where two or more are gathered, there I am in the midst of them." Sometimes it may just be me and the Gospel of John and Aquinas and Christ in my heart. Or me, Job, the Haitian people and Christ in my heart. Or me, Rainer Maria Rilke, the New York Times and Christ in my heart. Or me and two hundred others and my family and Christ on a Sunday morning with Christ and millions around the world in my heart. Or me and Maria Kret, a Krakow pensioner (NYT: For Now, a Refuge for the Catholic Church in Poland) and Christ in my heart.

But it's never just me, a lone Ranger. Christ himself doesn't even work alone.
 

Re, "though no community may be corporeally at hand."

And I think that at times the ER community is DrLobo's community. And certain aspects of the DOC.
 

(Dr. ER asks me to point out that she's pretty sure the Lone Ranger was a Christian.)

;-)
 

(She also points out, and reminds me, that I should never, ever let a conversation with you veer off into gravel and sand and such. Freakin' geographer!)
 

And probably Catholic, too, with all that silver stuff going on... and hi-yoing away.
 

I might also point out that the Lone Ranger may have been the solitary surviving Texas Ranger of a sucessful ambush, that upon resurection he, in fact, did not ride alone.
Right Kemosabe?
Get-em up Scout!

Another thing, TLR was definately Swiss. Why you ask?
 

He rides to William Tell.
 

Thank you Feodor.

ER, consider T. Jefferson's comments on creeds: "[Creeds] have been the bane and ruin of the Christian church, its own fatal invention, which, through so many ages, made of Christendom a slaughterhouse, and at this day divides it into castes of inextinguishable hatred to one another.

-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Whitmore, June 5, 1822, quoted from James A Haught, editor, 2000 Years of Disbelief

And consider that TJ thought of himself as a "Sect of One".
 

If it were a creed, it would demand total accdeptance. i do do not give it that.

And I love ol' Thom. J. but I don't he considered himself a Christian, so I won't accuse him of bein' one -- which should not taken at all as a comment on the state of his immortal soul. Or whatever.
 

and who had not time for the OT except the decalogue and cut up the NT with a pair of scissors in order to excise things he could not believe in... in other words, he simply followed the creeds and dogma of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Thank God there are better and more honest options for non-Christians these days.
 

Well, I do have to have some respect for what he was trying to do. We all have our ways of dealin'.
 

F:"...in other words, he simply followed the creeds and dogma of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution."
Yes, TJ was a simple follower.
 

With due respect, Feodor is right on this one. Citing a two-centuries dead American President as an authority on our contemporary approach to the question of creeds doesn't really make sense (anymore than citing a two-centuries dead President on pretty much anything does, really). It wasn't the creeds that killed - it was the people who killed, and did so for any damn excuse they could grab hold of. And Jefferson's heroes in France marched Catholic priests and Protestant clergy to the gibbet with gusto, so credal affirmation should not be equated with a willingness to get one's hands bloody.
 

Thomas Jefferson was an inventor, innovator, and a bright mind extraordinaire. Where he led was constructing the theory and polity of a modern democracy. In doing so, he applied enlightenment principles of rationality, rights, law, and sociology to the task.

Mind you, he did not advance the creeds and dogma of the enlightenment, but he did apply them to political polity with admirable eloquence.

It is unfortunate that he did not lead in the enlightenment grounding of individual rights. Were he to have been more of a leader than a follower, he perhaps would not have led so well in the rational organization and "husbandry" of slavery.

He had colleagues and competitors who knew better than he.
 

And algebra, too. He followed there as well.
 

Well ole TJ certainly had his flaws. As a man closer in science and society to Caesar's Rome than to our 21st Century he made many bad calls.

Sleeping with his dead wife's younger slave sister is certainly considered one. Then there was his concept that if he pressed the slavery issue the Southern States would refuse to join the war for the United States or later ratify its Constitution, thus there would be no America to free the slaves. He also saw that slavery was fast becoming an unprofitable system in the South and would die on its own. How the hell did he miss predicting the impact of the cotton gin? And of course there was his short sighted Indian Policies. He knew that it would take a thousand years to fill up the expanded America under his Louisiana Purchase so his policy was geared to that world. Damn those trains and steam boats how was he supposed to guess what they would do. Not to mention that gold stuff in California.

Oh well, as for sects' creeds and Religious policy he did at least one thing. He built a Constitutional Wall to keep them out of secular America.
Oh yes, he did set the Enlightenment back a bit when he replace the pursuit of property with that of happiness.

GKS: "Citing a two-centuries dead American President as an authority on our contemporary approach to the question of creeds doesn't really make sense (anymore than citing a two-centuries dead President on pretty much anything does, really)."

1. Dead 200 years. So far that only applies to George. It will be sixteen more years until the bicentennial of TJ's death.

2. You mean our thinking is so fresh that it has no historical precedence? Has religious thought grown so much since his time?
 

As for happiness, Jefferson got that from William Wollaston and George Mason.
 

Gee, and they wrote it into the Decleration of Independence?
We all get stuff from others, but we sort it before we use it do we not?
 

William Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated (1722), "the truest definition of natural religion" is "the pursuit of happiness by the practice of reason and truth."

The Virginia Declaration of Rights, June, 1776, as written by George Mason:

"That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

Now, how much did TJ, autonomously, sort?
 

Yes?

He left out property did he not?
A real Enlightenment dude would have followed Locke and the pocessions deal. Instead he put happiness in the trinity of rights.
Did he take it from Mason? Did Mason get it from him? Did they both get it from....

Point is moot of course, even TJ might not remember. Benjamin Franklin was involved too. Ben, being a boot-strap guy himself, wanted to downplay "property", so maybe he had TJ take it out.

That whole point was an aside anyway. It was the wall against creediness that was the real point.
 

Oh yes, I will pe-emptively concede that Mason's writings on the rights of man was the basis for the Bill of Rights.
 

ER: "Ride on Easy Rider."
Maybe you better ask Dr. ER what that term actually means. Cause I hope you don't think I qualify.
 

"It was the wall against creediness that was the real point."

No, the point was that he was a lone ranger in his construction of his personal creeds. And as you now also indicate... he was not.
 

"No Man Is An Island"....no man can stand alone....reductio ad absurdum....

I identify more too the "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" experience:
"All my friends said the would stand beside me when the game got rough,
Well the joke was on me there was no one there to even bluff...."
 

i LOVE the psudeo-liberal affirmations. Eric Elnes was the pastor of one of my good buddies here at seminary... dude came from Scottsdale and gave me the book as a present, and i freak'n love it.

what i want to address here are two things: 1. you can't be a lone ranger and a Christian and 2. creeds are inherently divisive.

1. i firmly believe that you can't be a Christian and NOT be in a group of some sort. i think the biggest danger facing the church is a sort of theological libertarianism. even Jesus didn't do it alone! sure he prayed alone, he re-charged, took time to discern and what not, but he was in and leading group of people. we can't act like we're absolutely free with no connection or responsibility to anyone else. that is the point of being church.

2. the UCC is a non-creedal church. that doesn't mean NO creeds, it means that we use them as guide posts, but do not hold one over the other. they are helpful for identity and we can personally follow the one we like, but in church we cannot force our creed against another. in the church i interned at, i always had the Heidelberg Catechism guy talking against the Apostle's Creed folk against the Nicene Creed vs. the "you-can't-tell-me-what-to-do" open folk. it was a great mix! lots of great discussions. yet there was a recognition that we were all united by Christ's table and shared baptism.

that's where I stand. good convo, thought i'd weigh in here.
 

Thanks, Luke!
 

May God bless all of you with all of the community and fellowship you believe will be there.
 

Well, it seems hard to me, too. But then It's called communion.. and it's called faith. And it's never been easy. Because part of us hides from both and part of the world wants to help us hide.

It just isn't a bar or a ballgame or a beach.
 

Just to bring complete symetry to the metaphor of the lone ranger, note that he did not chose to be alone. Like wise consider Jefferson, as he progressed through life his positions and actions isolated him from the local "community" in which he lived.
It withdrew from him, not necessarily he from it.

If we examine the "solo" Christian in terms of compatible temperments and acceptable mores you may find more of them than you would think.

That brings up a question, What "community" does the church bring to these?