In this deeply relational world, a world where quantum science is proving that everything is connected down to the smallest parts of an atom, we need to experience these shifts that move us from a mindset of fixed, fate, and futility, to dynamic, possibility and potentiality. This is the hidden invisible reality of the Kingdom of God. (The_new_sciences is a long article but sooooo worth reading I have uploaded the full pdf here for you.)
As I wake up to the kindgom of God me self story changes and my image of you changes. I learn to see you, the real you, not the you I have constructed from the images, feelings, betrayals, dislikes, envy and jealousy you evoke in me. I come, in this new larger envelop of reality. to understand what I see in you might say more about me than anything about you at all. I might be projecting my own hurts, insecurties, fragilities, and pain.
These awakenings are the fruit of bonefishing Clint style. Need an awakening? Need some bonefish time?
But the biggest learning for me to date, is without doubt the most life altering but the most difficult to continue to live into. Jesus invites us into the kingdom for one reason…. to bring the prevalence, reality and concrete demonstration of the kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven (yes that sounds like the Lord’s prayer intentionally)
The hard shift? The universe is unfolding through me. God’s new thing I am to be alert and present to sense? That is unfolding through me. The problem I have is patiently, alertly, presencingly (think I made up that word…wouldn’t be the first time though) doing it. I like control, manipulation, make it happen, force it postures. They come more naturally but the results are forced and ron-manufactured.
The idea that Jesus enlisted me to wake up because this envelop of a larger reality is at hand and to then let this new reality unfold through me, is simply winsome. At that stage I am co-creating, co-working, co-unfolding the universe with God. I know sounds crazy and heretical, but true nonetheless
We need some new metaphors. I think it is quite clear the two bucket theory is untenable, and the owners manual for life metaphor reduces the bible to a behavior manual. Both the theory and metaphor generate so many problems that it is time we start searching for an alternative approach to the text.
This is always how paradigm shifts occur. When a paradigm is initially adopted it answers a variety of questions very well. Those adopting the paradigm realize it doesn’t answer all questions and those unanswerables go on a shelf for further reflection and research. No paradigm is perfect, no model can answer all the questions.
Eventually the current paradigm, always historically and contextually rooted, answers fewer and fewer questions well and the shelf with the unanswerables becomes overloaded and near collapse. This is when a new paradigm begins to emerge. We are undoubtedly living in such a new paradigm time.
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What happens when we claim the text and the author have a very specific cultural location that 
makes some of what is in the text “no longer correct?” Ouch, I know. For some of us we have been taught and trained to hear those as fighting words and to remind the offender this is the inspired word of God they are talking about.
What if each culture being written to and each author writing is at a particular stage of development or stage of cultural progress and we HAVE to take THAT into consideration as we think about the bible? That was the suggestion at the end of our last post.
This is of course one of what might be several possible solutions. I think some in more traditional church contexts as well as seminaries and more technical hermeneutics texts have tried to make it sound that because the text is inspired there is a muting of the culture boundedness of the text. If we continue to maintain that position we have learned nothing from the most glaring example where we tried using that line of defense. (a “defense” we don’t need)
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We all knew it would come. We all have anticipated it for over a decade. We can no longer wait the time has come for a new way forward.
Every 500 years the church has to have a giant rummage sale to sell of the junk she has accumulated from the dying age she is exiting in preparation for the new age she has to engage. The sale is on.
Life is loud, busy, hectic and harried. People want a sense of wholeness, wellness, peace, joy, even dare I say a quiet interior space in the midst of it all.
We are all crying out for personal transformation, knowing it holds the key starting point for the larger issues we face of community development and global change. Where can you find this life? What are the practices and rhythms that lead to this sort of peace and joy?
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Biophila or belonging? These are very very different goals. Are we interested in conforming people to our doctrinal positions or lifestyle statements? Or 
are we in the transformation business ? I have written a couple posts on biophilia and transformation and the response I have gotten has been overwhelming and positive. Many of us have been schooled in the negative way of spiritual formation, stuck in the purgative and have rarely if ever tasted the illuminative or unitive. I think there is a reason though. The church doesn’t know how to transform lives.
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Biophila, a great point of departure on the Monday after Easter Sunday.
On his death bed the great author and psychologist Erich Fromm asked his friend Robert Fox, Bob why is it that the human race prefers necrophilia to biophilia?”
(Fromm → E.O. Wilson in his book of the same title, Biophilia: The Bond with Other Species, the mid 80’s popularized this term)
A fine memoir by one of America’s foremost evolutionary biologists. E. O. Wilson defines biophilia as ‘the innate tendency [in human beings] to focus on life and lifelike process. To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion, our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hopes rise on its currents.’
He broadly defined biophilia as, “The passionate love of life, aliveness, and all that is full of life”
I came across this term a few years ago for the first time and it has since informed some of my reflections on what I think Jesus is trying to bring to us. Shalom wholeness and wellness is the essence of the Gospel according to Isaiah 52. Shalom wholeness and wellness is biophilia.
Ironically our culture seems entertained by necrophilia (love of death). This not only seems true in terms of many movies, TV shows and without a doubt news coverage but also many churches. American Christianity and the places we have exported it, are often more lovers of the legal…which according to our Christian writers only brings death, instead of lovers of life.
For whatever reason, while we say Jesus is all about relationship not rules apparently what the general public hears from the church is we are all about rules not relationship. Rules and regulations as a dominant expression of religion in general and Christianity in particular is necrophilia. Relationship with Jesus that is all about bringing abundant life… or biophila.
Any thoughts?
