A Year of Blogs

Well, today is the 365th day since I wrote the first words of this blog. I hope you have enjoyed the ride as much as I have. You never know how something is going to turn out until it happens, though in some ways the blogging experience has been as enriching for me as I had hoped. Some other parts of the experience have not been what I expected. For one thing, I had hoped to generate more comment and dialogue from you. I may possess an interesting perspective on life, but it is only one limited perspective. Your perspectives are just as necessary to help us move toward a more comprehensive understanding of the truth.

Perhaps you, my readers, are too polite to get into the kind of nasty discussions that are found on so many online blogs and forums. David Bohm has made the point that discussion and dialogue are not the same at all. “Discussion” comes from the same root word as “percussion” – so it might be thought of as the “banging of ideas against each other.” He goes on to define dialogue as something like “thinking together.” In dialogue, the point is not simply to make your point. The point is articulating one among many perspectives and listening carefully and respectfully to other’s points of view, all of which add a depth and breadth of understanding to the topic at hand.

This blog invites dialogue. In our second year together, I invite you to think with me and with one another about life’s challenging issues, so that we can identify and articulate a healthy variety of responses to them. I am interested to discover ways that the church can determine its healthy role in public discourse and how it can continue to challenge and nurture the growth and development of individuals and communities. I am interested to discover how Jesus’ image of the Realm of God can have validity in the 21st Century. And I am interested in providing a way for people to grow into a mature and useful faith.

I find that weekly preaching and blogging is healthy for me. Both activities help me to create some space for reflection on life’s most confusing and compelling issues. I believe that Healthy Liberal Christianity continues to be relevant, but only if it encourages people to move beyond the beliefs that were appropriate for the minds and lives that we had as children. We need to grow into a robust and mature faith – one that requires us to use all our adult faculties and that doesn’t require us to check our brains at the door. Still, there is one important qualifier about human intelligence – it is always limited.

Since the Enlightenment, people growing up in Western civilization have believed that everything, even matters about God and the realm of the spirit, could at least potentially be understood given enough time. Western thought lost the prior perspective that God is always beyond all explanations, models, and symbols. While we cannot know the truth absolutely, we can always learn and deepen our understanding. We must not relegate our images of God to what we can figure out with human intellect.

I have every intention to keep thinking and writing about these matters. I hope you will continue in the process as well. Let’s hear from you.

Wayne Gustafson
“Our faith is 2000 years old, our thinking isn’t.”
The United Church__of Christ