The Boar’s Head Tavern

“The Church must be free to be poor in order to minister among the poor. The Church must trust the Gospel enough to come among the poor with nothing to offer the poor except the Gospel, except the power to discern and the courage to expose the Gospel as it is already mediated in the life of the poor…When the Church has the freedom itself to be poor among the poor, it will know how to use what riches it has. When the Church has that freedom, it will know also how to minister among the rich and powerful. When the Church has that freedom, it will be a missionary people again in all the world. When the Church has the freedom to go out into the world with merely the Gospel to offer the world, then it will know how to use whatever else it has–money and talent and buildings and tapestries and power in politics–as sacraments of its gift of its own life to the world, as tokens of the ministry of Christ.” -William Stringfellow (HT to Nate Spencer)

November 24, 2003

Josh/Jim: I agree, Josh, I think Jim misrepresented Calvinism on point one, and would instead phrase it just as you did. In fact, I suspect the Arminian (add it to your spell-check dictionary, Jim! (JN)) would object to how his is phrased, too. Maybe these:

Calvinism: God wants everyone to be saved, and is capable of saving everyone, but saves only some for reasons unclear to us.
Arminianism: God wants everyone to be saved, and we are all capable of being saved, but only some respond to God’s call for reasons unclear to us.
Universalism: God wants everyone to be saved, therefore everyone is eventually saved, via methods unclear to us.

More or less? And I think that given this wording, Lutherans would sign up with definition #1, if you removed the “Calvinism” label.

On a personal note, I’m on vacation this week, so posting will be light indeed as I travel. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

Posted by: Phillip Winn @ 10:25 am | Trackback | Permalink

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On February 7th, 2002, a diverse group of Christians started a wide-ranging weblog conversation. Today, that conversation continues and you're invited to pull up a chair. Welcome to the Boar's Head Tavern.

“It is better to think of church in the ale-house than to think of the ale-house in church.” - Martin Luther

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"The things I thought were so important - because of the effort I put into them - have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered." --Thomas Merton
"Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works." --Robert Farrar Capon

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C S Lewis
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November 24, 2003

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