The Sacred Life

We often hear that the message of the Gospel and the reason that Christ dies on the Cross is the forgiveness of our sins. But is this really true? Or is there something more to Christianity, and to our lives as Christians, than just forgiveness? Could it be that Forgiveness is really the door to something greater, to healing and reconciliation with God?

Join us again as we, three simple Mennonites, continue our discussion on our interactions with the Orthodox Church. In this episode we go into more detail on the service of Forgiveness Vespers, how we were personally impacted by the service, and what we, as non Orthodox people, can take away and use to enrich our own lives and communities.

In this episode, we talk about our recent visit to the Forgiveness Vespers service in an Eastern Orthodox Church. We discuss our reasons for going, what we gained from the experience, and what lessons there may be in this for those outside of the Orthodox Church, and especially for us as Mennonites.

David Bahler continues a discussion on his own spiritual journey, looking at personal aspects of his faith and how experience has led him to where she who he is today, and what it means to have your Identity in Jesus Christ.

Sacred Life contributor David Bahler shares his own personal journey in the faith, what has led him to where he is today, what is vision and goal is, as well as what he along with the rest of the sacred life team are hoping to accomplish.

Is the pride flag an insult to God? Is it a mockery of a biblical symbol? Have people really taken something of God's and used it against His meaning? Or is there ore going on? Is there something we can learn about the world by observing the way this symbol is revealing the true nature of things?

What is hatred? Is hatred the opposite of love? Is hatred the absence of love? Or is it something else, maybe a twisting of love into something other than what it ought to be? 

In a pluralistic society, where ideas are given an equal chance, Christianity, and Christ's Church, will always win. Even when it looks like the Church is on the decline, we have every reason to be confident that the genuine and authentic Christian Faith will prevail. 

Continuing to read through the Theologia Germanica, a late medieval devotional work, we have a look at our desires, what we do with them, and how we should treat them.

Does it really work to not have a singular, unified identity? How does religion shape that identity and hold a culture together? Is our modern idea of tolerance and pluralism actually working?

Since I am sick and feverish, David and I talk about fever dreams, which are like prophetic or religious experiences in that we did see and feel them, but they cannot be expressed using words.  We may try, but what we say is not really what we dreamed.   We riff on dreams for a while in an effort to mine the topic for what else it may have to teach us about religious experience and Biblical interpretation.

This episode explores some challenges to the theory of Verbal Plenary Inspiration of scripture, which argues that God gave the words of the Bible directly to the people who wrote it.

This episode applies the notion of the sins of the right hand (excessive order, rationality, rigidity, control) to the way that we interpret the Bible. It is part 1 of 3 of a long conversation chiefly on Scripture.