Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality.
Christianity entered history as a new world order, or rather a new social dimension. From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a "doctrine," but exactly a "community." There was not only a "Message" to be proclaimed and delivered, and "Good News" to be declared. There was precisely a New Community,distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited. Indeed, "fellowship" (koinonia) was the basic category of Christian existence.
We can no more learn what it means to be a Christian simply by attending to Scripture than we can learn to be Texan by reading about the history of Texas. Rather, we learn that story, like the way we learn the story of Texas, by caring for the tombstones of the saints. It is from them, as we see what the story of Jesus has done to their own stories, that we begin to understand what that story requires and means. For the truth of the story we find in the gospels is finally known only through the kind of lives it produces. If such lives are absent than no amount of hermeneutical theory or manipulation can make those texts meaningful.
Order of Worship, January 16 2011
