Last week we looked at a few key quotes from Eugene Peterson’s influential book on spiritual theology Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. Here is a second look…
- Human beings are not gods; the moment we forget this, we violate the boundaries of our humanity and something is violated in reality itself. The universe suffers damage. Eugene Peterson (p42)
- But the fundamental inadequacy of codes of conduct for giving direction to the spiritual life is that they put us in charge (or, which is just as bad, put someone else in charge of us); God is moved off the field of action to the judge’s stand where he grades our performance. The moment that we take charge, “knowing good and evil,” we are in trouble and almost immediately start getting other people in trouble too. Eugene Peterson (p43)
- One of the seductions that bedevils Christian formation is the construction of utopias, ideal places we can live totally and without inhibition or interference the good and blessed and righteous life. The imagining and then attempted construction of such utopias is an old habit of our kind. Sometimes we attempt it politically in communities, sometimes socially in communes, sometimes religiously in churches. It never comes to anything but grief. Utopia is, literally, “no-place.” But we can live our lives only in actual place, not in an imagined or fantasized or artificially fashioned place. Eugene Peterson (p73)
- God works with us as we are and not as we should be or think we should be. God deals with us where we are and not where we would like to be. Eugene Peterson (p75)
As always, nice chatting…
