PEOPLE OF GOD?
“Over time the Crypto-Christians [in Japan] confused their Christian beliefs and their Japanese [cultural] disguises. The result was the emergence of a hybrid religion no longer adhering to the doctrines of orthodox Christianity. When Europeans regained entrance to Japan in the nineteenth century, they were astonished to see communities of hidden Christians living in the hills around Nagasaki. This amazement waned, however, when they discovered the faith of these forgotten Christians was hardly Christianity.
“In our cultural quest for survival, driven by our fear of irrelevance, have evangelicals become Crypto-Christians? Have we clothed our faith with the forms of our American culture to the point that our Christianity has morphed into something entirely different — a folk religion altogether consumerist in spirit and content? By yielding its imagination to the forms around it, has the church, like ancient Israel, lost the ability to be an alternative people of God? Is Walter Brueggemann correct: ‘The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act’?”
- From The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity by Skye Jethani
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar