Thursday, July 06, 2006

Zealotry part 2

Scot McKnight hits hard again. I'll quote the summary to whet your appetite:

Zealotry, however, is afraid of freedom. Freedom opens the windows, tosses up the doors, and lets the winds blow in and the people go outside.

Zealotry, at its bottom layer, is the unwillingness (1) to trust God to work in others, (2) to trust others to listen to God, and (3) to trust ourselves to do what God wants. The ambiguity created by freedom is fearful to many, so they make fences and laws — and in so doing, they create a bounded society of zealots who convince themselves that, even though the Bible does not say something, what they are saying is really what the Bible wanted after all.


<idle musing>
How dare he? Actually, how dare he not! It is about time someone with a wide listening audience attack the sacred cows of christianity in the U.S. Too often we allow our cultural lenses to influence our christian conduct.
</idle musing>

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