The Christian blogosphere is inviting us to return to a doxological view of Christian authority—not one that forsakes traditional structures and the importance of accountability, but one that reminds us that all authority comes from Christ, and sometimes voices of truth are speaking from different sorts of pulpits.
So, essentially, there is the church, where you go to sit with all your children, trying to keep them from wiggling and running away, listening to a man exposit the Scriptures—however competently depends on so many variables—and then, when you wander out, there is not only the blogosphere, but now also the conferences and books and tribal pull of women gathering together to make their way through life.
They knew that the life of discipleship was hard and that it took faith, and they were willing to do what needed to be done. But, they didn’t want to get wet.
This is a call to unpack important dimensions of who we are and to appreciate the impact that the stories embedded in our imagination can have, both on what we believe and how we live that out.
If the Bible is the guiding rule of faith for God’s people, then narrative metaphors for discipleship should be those which have some substantial root in Scripture and the story of God’s people.
In today’s piece, I will describe how these two “selves” function from a cognitive perspective, including the crucial role our imaginations play in tying the two systems together.