DISQUS

Adventismo Progresista · 2 years ago

I Founded a Humane Education Based non profit organization "The Humane Foundation" and we work in the schools through "The Humane Alternative Clubs" My students know i am a Christ follower and all of a sudden I said i was an "atheist," some freaked out and others got really confused. I told the I was going to show them a video that was going to make the atheists, some conservative Christians didn't look at the TV in the beginning, they even covered their ears,I played Brian Maclaren's YouTube video "I am an Atheist and then I played the song, students got the message and sang alone, one of the students told me she was scared at first, to watch the video, I told her it happened the same to me initially but finally you get to agry and declare yourself an "Atheist."

"I don't believe what they believe, but I believe in YOU"

Great song.

matthewgamble.com · 2 years ago

Last month I attended a conference where McLaren was presenting. I really appreciate what he has to say and I especially enjoyed his book "A Generous Orthodoxy."

While I appreciate the message of the song, I think that McLaren is better off to remain an author and speaker... Let's leave the music (not lyric) writing to someone else.

Charles & Kiersten · 2 years ago

I understand and appreciated the sentiment behind the song and messages. However, it seems to me to be more of the emergent church's attempt to show that they are better than the rest of us - cause they are more like Jesus than anybody else.

Perhaps a bit self-righteous?

Perhaps a bit divisive?

Gordon · 2 years ago

There is an interesting play on words here. ‘I am a Christian’ and ‘I am an atheist’ – a Christian and an atheist wrapped up in one single package. Is Brian McLaren trying to steal one on Marcus Borg’s book title, where we are equally perplexed when we find that he has met Jesus again, but surprisingly for the first time!
It is possible McLaren’s headline is intended to shock us; drawing us into a conversation about many Gods with differing agendas (many of them bearing the name of Jesus himself). Adventismo Progresista uses the two nouns in his posting in just that way; allowing the words to hinge like appositional doors on a frame which is ultimately an entrance into the believing church. Charles and Kiersten hint at Brian McLaren’s emergent church being nothing other than a small part of the grand debate within Protestantism – which has raged for centuries and now displays it’s multifaceted image in over 20,000 protestant churches – all crying aloud that their existence is not only legitimate, but absolutely essential for declaring exactly who Jesus was and is at this particular moment in time (and that is quite aside from the additional 5,000 odd ethnic denominations found in South Africa).
Minus a few centuries from two millennia, we had the early church councils decide what it means to be a Christian – which finally included the defining of the New Testament canon, which had to fit neatly into the grand design of that great metanarative of God’s entering into history. That metanarative stretches far back to the great patriarch’s and even before that time - to creation itself. Almost two millennia down the road it is Albert Schweitzer who gathers together the various nineteenth century views about who Jesus was, and thus what it means (in his view) to be a Christian. In doing so he finally shattered the centuries old view of Jesus as the great God come down to dwell amongst us. So remarkable was his defining study that for fifty years any further scholarly search for the real Jesus was extinguished – and that particular Jesus would of course be far different to the Jesus of tradition – essentially the Jesus found in the gospel of John and the Pauline writings (let’s not exclude the books of Hebrews and Revelation).
I am beginning to wonder whether the Concise Oxford Dictionary’s definition of who a Christian is should not be redefined – or perhaps our unconscious assent to what a Christian ‘means’. When that venerable book describes a Christian as ‘one who has received Christian baptism, or is a believer of Christianity’, it is surely referring to the three major affirmations of traditional Christian belief; the Christian believes in the virgin birth, the resurrection of Jesus into the heavenly realms and finally Jesus is indeed God himself.
So I am wondering whether the words ‘atheist’ (or agnostic, for that matter) and ‘Christian’ are opposites, or may they perhaps be mutual bedfellows. Is it not possible to be a follower of the greatest of all men while being unable to accept his divinity? Many have been prepared to die for the same principles which Jesus uniquely lived out like no other man has lived. I must admit that I become intensely annoyed when others, who wish to legitimize their own discipleship by supposedly speaking on behalf of the wonderful Jesus, lay down boundaries where intellectual honesty may well be excluded.

Ellamae · 2 years ago

Unfortunately I can't get the video (it starts and stops). However, I think I get the point. I would say it is not just religious groups but all groups that hate "outsiders." Think of aetheistic communism's carnage and North Korea.
ER