Quotes

This one is Rich Mullins (one of my all-time bad influences) speaking at a chapel service at Wheton College in Illinios: "You guys are all into that born again thing, which is great. We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy too..... But I guess that's why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest."

True, the cross is not always seeker sensitive. It is not comfortable. But it is the cornerstone of our faith, and I fear that when we remove the cross, we remove the central symbol of the nonviolence and grace of our Lover. If we remove the cross, we are in danger of promoting a very cheap grace. Perhaps it should make us uncomfortable. After all, it wasn't so comfy to get nailed there - Shane Claiborne, Irresistible Revolution (Dietrich Bonhoeffer would approve of this quote)

We can admire and worship Jesus without doign what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor. - Shane Claiborne, Irresistable Revolution.....

Jesus came not just to prepare us to die but to teach us how to live. - Shane Claiborne, Irresistable Revolution

Thoughts On Baptism

Although I was not officially raised any religion, I went to Catholic School through 10th grade. Going to Catholic School was the only consistent religious instruction I received right up until I was 12. As a matter of fact, I didn't know we weren't Catholic until my class went to First Communion. I was informed two days before the Big Day that I would not be going with my class because I wasn't Catholic. It was very traumatizing. Then, when I was 12, my mother got involved with a Church of God. She dragged me kicking and screaming (almost literally) with her. Someday I will blog about all the spiritual damage this church did to me, but not today.

I got baptized in the YMCA swimming pool when I was 12. At that time, I regarded it as more as a correction of something that *should* have happened when I was an infant than a public profession of faith. Also, I didn’t need my parents’ permission to do it. If I’d wanted to be baptized in the Catholic Church at the age of 12, I would have needed my parents’ permission. I think it goes without saying, that my mother would have never given THAT permission.

Now, as an adult, I reject the idea of infant baptism as contrary to scripture. If someone was baptized as an infant, I would say they need to be baptized again. I would never allow my own infant to be baptized. However, although I do not believe that I was mature enough to realize the implications of what I was doing when I was baptized, I have never been rebaptized - eventhough some have suggested it to me. I still have too much Catholic in me for that.

I have come to believe, and have encouraged my own son in this direction, that nobody under the age of 18 should be baptized. My understanding of baptism, based on my study of the Bible, is that it is like getting married. You are publically proclaiming that you’re going to live for Jesus Christ for the rest of your life. I don’t believe a child is capable of making that sort of committment anymore than a child is capable of making the committment required of marriage. It is also a formal joining of the Body of Christ. I don’t know of any church that confers full church membership on any person under 18 years old. But, they’ll baptize a five or six year old? Quakers (who don’t practice water baptism at all) don’t confer full membership before the age of 25. I think this rush to baptize children in many Protestant churches are no better than the Catholic practice of baptizing infants, and I think a lot of kids do it for the wrong reasons. They think they're supposed to get baptized at that age. They want to make their parents happy. It has little or nothing to do with faith. I remember when my cousin was going through Confirmation. He showed me his catechism book. He said he didn't think he believed a lot of the stuff in the book. Now, since I had to go through confirmation classes with my peers, I seem to remember that Confirmation is supposed to be an affirmation of faith. I encouraged him not to go through with the confirmation until he was sure because God hates a liar. The Catholic branch of my family wanted to murder me. My cousin went ahead with his Confirmation because that was what he was supposed to do at that particular age, it was expected of him, and he had the good sense to fear Grandma more than God. God might forgive him. Grandma would not. That I know of, my cousin is not actually a believer. I think there is a lot of that happening with young people in Protestant churches. Some of them are pressuring five year olds to profess faith and get baptized. Others might wait until more like 12 - 16, but still - it's not so much a public profession of faith as something that they think is supposed to happen at that age.