Following on from Willard on Grace...
My current bus read is The Spirit of the Disciplines. I am loving this book. Here's a quote that follows up on my comment to Tim
Our modern religious context assures us that such drastic action as we see in Jesus' and Paul is not necessary for our Christianity-may not even be useful, may even be harmful. In any case, it certainly will be upsetting to those around us and especially to our religious associates, who often have no intention of changing their lives in such a radical way. So we pass off Paul's intensely practical directions and example as being only about attitude. Or possibly we see in them some fine theological point regarding God's attitude toward us. In some cultural contexts Paul's writings are read as telling us not to enjoy secular entertainments or bodily pleasures--or as commanding us to embrace whatever the current prudishness is. We take something out of our contemporary grab bag of ideas and assume that that is what he is saying. However, no sane, practical course of action that results in progress toward pervasive Christlikeness ever seems to emerge from such thinking.
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Both the secular and the religious setting in which we live today is almost irresistibly biased toward an interpretation of these passages that condones a life more like that of decent people around us than like the life of Paul and his Lord. We talk about leading a different kind of life, but we also have ready explanations for not being really different. And with those explanations we have talked our way out of the very practices that alone would enable us to be citizens of another world.
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