Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Christianity for bobble heads

This month the theology reading group is discussing Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Culture Formation by  James K.A. Smith.

Hopefully I will write more later when I have finished it.
In the meantime, I thought the following was appropriate and amusing!
"this rationalist picture was absorbed particularly by Protestant Christianity (whether liberal or conservative), which tends to operate with an overly cognitivist picture of the human person and thus tends to foster an overly intellectualist account of what it means to be or become a Christian.
It is just this adoption of a rationalist, congnitivist anthropology that accounts for the shape of so much Protestant worship as a heady affair fixated on "messages" that disseminate Christian ideas and abstract values (easily summarised on PowerPoint slides). The result is a talking head version of Christianity that is fixated on doctrines and ideas, even if it is also paradoxically allied with a certain kind of anti-intellectualism. 
We could describe this as 'bobble head' Christianity, so fixated on the cognitive that it assumes a picture of human beings that look like bobble heads: mammoth heads that dwarf an almost nonexistent body." (pgs. 41-42)

1 comment:

  1. Pastors in the Lutheran church were encouraged to see sermons as answering a series of questions before they could be properly framed by the audience I can't watch Q&A and as you say many classic PP because not enough thought is given to the real difficulty of answering even one question . side2side upfront up and down yes sir in the audinece ; not me so often . Don't you just love "the dumb questioner "

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