I recently finished reading a book that made me think a little bit…

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  Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology
  Author: Eugene H. Peterson
  Rating: 4

I bought it from Amazon about 2 years ago now, I have a collection of books waiting to be finished dating back better than 5 years now, and I am quite glad that I took my time with this one. I believe what recently spurred me on to finish was a series of interviews with the author, Eugene H. Peterson, through Mars Hill Audio. Peterson has a grandfatherly voice that comes through in his writing, but it is even thicker in his speech. I found myself suddenly trusting him, and looking for some grandfatherly advice.

Peterson is the author of The Message, a contemporary and somewhat controversial translation of the Bible (there are no verse numbers, after all). This tid bit of background information had covertly formed Peterson into a maverick Christian by my estimation. Coupled with my ignorance in never reading The Message, or any other of his books, I had assumed him a pragmatic revolutionary with post modern sympathies. He is nothing of the sort. The one thing he may share with the current bread of post modern Christian authors, i.e. Brian Mclaren, is a decidedly conversational tone and approach to theologically centered discourse. He routinely surrounds Spiritual discussions with the context of “ordinary” life: you know; eating, sleeping, working, and playing.

Peterson speaks with a careful yet firm voice seasoned with a pastor’s experience. When I finished reading, I realized that I had just taken in a thorough description of what it means to be a properly motivated and postured Christian community leader. If I aspire to this calling I will do well to listen to some advice from an old wise sage.

We live in a culture that has replaced soul with self. This reduction turns people into either problems or consumers. Insofar as we acquiesce in that replacement, we gradually but surely regress in our identity, for we end up thinking of ourselves and dealing with others in marketplace terms: everyone we meet is either a potential recruit to join our enterprise or a potential consumer for what we are selling: or we ourselves are the potential recruits and consumers. Neither we nor our friends have any dignity just as we are, only in terms of how we or they can be used.
pg 38

Idolatry, reducing God to a concept or object that we can use for our benefit, is endemic to the human condition.
Pg 29

…how easy it is to get interested in ideas of God and projects for God and gradually lose interest in God alive, deadening our lives with the ideas and the projects.
pg 31

…substituting our selves, our godlike egos, in the place originally occupied by God.
pg 31

Spirituality is not improved by fantasies. The Christian life is not a field in which to indulge pious dreams.
pg 31

When it comes to dealing with God, most of us spend considerable time trying our hand at either being or making gods.
pg 36

We live in a culture that has replaced soul with self. This reduction turns people into either problems or consumers. Insofar as we acquiesce in that replacement, we gradually but surely regress in our identity, for we end up thinking of ourselves and dealing with others in marketplace terms: everyone we meet is either a potential recruit to join our enterprise or a potential consumer for what we are selling: or we ourselves are the potential recruits and consumers. Neither we nor our friends have any dignity just as we are, only in terms of how we or they can be used.
pg 38

And so we attempt to domesticate the mystery, explain it, probe it, name and use it. “Blaspheym” is the term we use for these verbal transpressions of the sacred, these violations of the holy: taking God’s name in vain, dishonoring sacred time and plae, reducing God to gossip and chatter. Uncomfortable with the mystery, we try to banish it with cliches.
pg 42

The Christian life is in perpetual danger of dissolving into wonderful ideas or sublime feelings or ambitious projects.
pg 86

It is not uncommon among people like us to suppose that if we lived in another place or a better neighborhood with more congenial living conditions, voted in a better government, built finer schools, then we would most certainly live a more spiritual life. St. John’s Gospel says, forget it.

It is also common among people like us to look for ways to free ourselves from the humdrum, escape as often as possible into ecstasy, devise ways to live seperated from the clamor of traffic and family, associate so far as possible with people of like mind and engage in disciplines and ways of dress and speech that seperate us from the others. John’s Gospel says, Forget it.
pg 86

With Jesus, “Believe” and “love” are the characteristic verbs; neither can be accomplished in a hurry.
pg 91

“An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign”
(Matt. 12:39)
pg 92

Salvation is always in danger of self-absorption. When I become intrigued with matters of my soul there is the ever-present danger that I begin to treat God as a mere accessory to my experience.
pg 199

It means that we who want to get in on what God does in the way god does it in all matters of communiyt, will have to give up the pretensions of shaping an organization that the world will think is wonderful as we parade our accomplishments to the tune of “worship” or “evangelism.”
pg 266

After the three great refusals to use power to do good things in the wrong way, Luke tells us this: “Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee…. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone” (4:14-15). We observe in detail as the narrative continues that as Jesus teaches, whether in word or act, he is always personal and relationsal. Jesus, employing the “power of the Spirit,” is set in explicit contrast to the three depersonalize, decontextualized uses of power in the wilderness: power to help the hungry, power to do justice, power to evangelize by miracle. The moment the community exercises power apart from the story of Jesus, tries to manipulate people or events in ways that short-circuit personal relationships and intimacies, we can be sure it is not the power of the Holy Spirit; it is the devil’s work. The holy Spirit, no matter how loudly or frequently or piously invoked in such settings, is a stranger to such religious blasphemies.
pg 272

The Herods were minor figures, almost insignificant in the story that Luke tells of Jesus and the Jesus community. But they and their ilk continue into our times to loom large in the imaginations of people, not excluding people in the Jesus community, people who want to make their mark in the world — “for Jesus.”

These were people who know how to get things done. For those who want to do great things for God, the Herodians obviously offer great promise.
pg 296

Learning how to live as the community of Christ is largely a matter of becoming familiar with and disciplined to the means by which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit work formationally among us: namely, by the Holy Spirit from God’s side and prayerful obedience from ours, by hospitably including the unwanted outsiders of the world into the community, and by cultivating a detachment from the world’s insiders and their ways, especially as theys ways are exemplified in the leaders and celebrities.

The community of Jesus betrays its Master far more often and damagingly by the way it speaks and acts than by anything it ever says or does. Anger and arrogance, violence and manipulation rank far higher than theological error or moral lapses in desecrating the holy, resurrection community.
pg 299

Instead of participating in what god is already doing, we end up bypassing, avoiding, or interferin with it.

we recruit motivated and talented leaders who can catch a vision and execute it with dispatch. We develop job descriptions for discipleship, uninformed by Scripture and look for candidates.

We interfere with this Spirit-created community when we try to take over. We discover this wonderful gift of new life in Christ — purpose and meaning and gratitude are moving through our arteries; we can hardly help ourselves — and we move in and start giving orders to the spirit on how we think the community should manage its affairs. We are , after all reasonably accomplished in getting things done, doing good works, and motivating others. We know the truth and goals of the gospel. But we haven’t taken the time to apprentice ourselves to the way of Jesus, the way he did it. And so we end up doing the right think in the wrong way and gum up the works.
pg 300

Trinity warns us against supposing that we can lock ourslevs in a room free of all people and distractions and just read study, and meditate and then expect to know God. Trinity is our defense against every soul-destroying venture into the Christian life that depersonalizes the gospel or God or other people.
pg 304

When we bring these managerial and technologiezed habits into our dealigns with God, we soon end up dealing with an idol, a thing-god on which we can project our plans and proejcts, programs and piety.
pg 305

Pressure develops sometimes form within sometiems from without , to be “relevant” to the society, to reduce God to fit people’s needs, congregational expectations, or our own ambition.
pg 307

…the devil is using every strategy he can come up with to make us small and mean.
pg 308

And we can be trained to recognize the antichrists as the men and women who tell us that Jesus wasn’t human the way we are — “how could he be? He is God!” — and to recognize that for all their fancy talk about Christ, for all their superspiritualities, such people are just that, antichrists,. When they tell us that mere people, ordinary people, aren’t all that important — it’s big ideas and urgent causes and stirring visions that real Christians are concerned with, not these dull and obnoxious people who pull us down — we can re-immerse ourselves in the story of Jesus.\
pg 324

Categories: Bible Study, Books, Criticisms