OrganicJesus.org

[This is a continuation and conclusion to my last entry, "Toward Missional Ethics". You might want to breeze over that before going through this one. -- BDR]

As stated in my last post, missional ethics is a hybrid of several competing systems of ethics, but which insists that each system is a mixed bag of good and bad, and each needs correction from the others. Missional ethics is therefore teleologically oriented, deontologically honed, narratively embodied, and birthed out of renewed hearts.

More of this heady nonsense under the fold...

As Christianity became coopted by the Roman Empire, it got stuck in the tragically hegemonic ruts of institutionalization and establishment with imperial power, and so became more domesticated. The kind of Christianity that emerged has been called "Christendom." As it took the throne, it took many vital parts of the Way hostage. Among them: radical discipleship to Jesus Christ, nonviolence, wariness of worldly power, the doctrine of grace, and the church's sense of mission.

Martin Luther, himself a part of Christendom, sought to free grace from its 1000+ captivity. In doing so, he nailed the need for true grace so firmly to the church doors that it nailed the door shut to the ability for his contemporaries or future Christians to free any of the above hostages of Christendom. Reformed theology's death grip on grace has been so exclusive that it has held back the way of any future reform. Mission, nonviolence, radical discipleship, the whole lot -- they're still held bound and gagged, and the freed hostage of grace seems to be guarding the door.

Just as Luther was fed up with a millennium of a Christianity strangled by imperial Christendom, the time has come for another God-seeking revolt: this time, against Luther and the Reformers themselves.