Give Me Messy Fidelity Over Ideological Certitude…Anyday!

Paul writes – Great quote from Walter Brueggemann. It resonates at so many levels for me…

“We all have a hunger for certitude, and the problem is that the Gospel is not about certitude, it’s about fidelity. So what we all want to do if we can is immediately transpose fidelity into certitude, because fidelity is a relational category and certitude is flat, mechanical category. So we have to acknowledge our thirst for certitude and then recognize that if you had all the certitudes in the world it would not make the quality of your life any better because what we must have is fidelity.” Quoted at the Emergent Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, September 16, 2004.

Source, this post from the ever thoughtful Len Hjalmarson

And the following quote still resonates from a blog post I wrote on June 18^th, 2002. The quote is from New Zealander Mike Riddell.  It still remains my struggle. It is my continuing hope for ancient/future ways of being church – different ways of being church that will exhibit this kind of faithfulness; that will be willing to live in the creative and oftentimes uncomfortable tension between the richness of the tradition (what is received) and ongoing missional possibilities:

"Faithfulness demands more than the recounting of received orthodoxy; it requires the encounter of a living tradition with a continually changing culture."

And this from Maggi Dawn as she reflects on one of her “all-time favorite [gospel] stories" – John 4:1-42.

“…You can see how Jesus is both faithful to, and yet not bound by, his own religious tradition; how he keeps his focus on the life-affirming, grand scale vision of God to make people fully human, and doesn't allow faith to become a reduction of religious rules that fence people in…”

Comments

[len]

And remember Merton..

"We must affirm and deny at the same time. One cannot go without the other. If we go on affirming, without denying, we end up affirming that we have delimited the Being of God in our concepts. If we go on denying without affirming, we end up denying that our concepts can tell the truth about Him in any sense whatever. (The Ascent to Truth, 94)

[Timothy Wright]

Hi,

I want to see things the way that you are t alking about, but I feel that it is impossible to have faith in someone if I don't know who they are. So I am more inclined to Certitude over Fidelity. Any more insights to help me to trust someone without being certain who they are.

Thanks

Tim