Mar/Apr 1998

ARTICLE TOOLS

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I found Doug Frank's ["Straitened & Narrowed," November/December 1997] clarification of the constituents of authentic Christian faith interesting. If I understood him aright, his principles were that

• the proper wellspring of our creativity lies deep within the mess that is the center of our being, a center which is, as a first principle, broken, painful, and dark;
• we thus should embrace the anxiety, betrayal, hurt, and anger at our very core, and allow them to define us—this is the lived truth of human subjectivity;
• it is best to let loose of all doctrinal certainties and other sources of cheap equanimity, for in doing so we can find our authentic humanness;
• it is not "Truth" outside ourselves that will allow us to see the world better, but "ourselves" themselves;
• in contrast to the deception of thinking that we can know truth in any meaningful way and thus be "right," the best state of the mind is unending openness and fluidity;
• God's commands are really divine permissions which spontaneously generate a full flowering of being (and thus it turns out that God is not really that demanding or absolutistic after all);
• forget the arid abstractions and distillations of Paul and the early church fathers—the real Jesus was the rustic flesh-and-blood itinerant the "historical Jesus" scholars found decades ago; and
• this real Jesus drives us toward nothingness and beckons us to follow him off into the dark.

There's just one thing I don't understand. Why was it again that we call ourselves evangelical Christians?

The secular media often portray the Promise Keeper movement as disproportionately composed of white males. I was surprised to see this myth perpetuated in Mary ...