Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Mysticism and Fundamentalism

A brilliant letter to an atheist by Mark Van Steenwyk:

Anabaptist letter to Atheist

A brief section of it:

"A mystic is one who connects directly with ultimate reality… spiritual truth… God. Such a posture is necessary to believe and sacrifice what is for what can be. It takes faith to seek a better world. Fundamentalists (either theist or atheists) don’t have faith. They rigidly grip certainty until all life has been squeezed out.

"Ultimately, the reason I stubbornly embrace Jesus has little to do with a logical worldview. I don’t cling to propositions the way a fundamentalist does. My convictions evolve and change. My way of seeing the world shifts. But through it all, the beauty of this man who sacrificed his life for the Kingdom of God compels me. His vision of a new humanity caused him to not only die for a cause, but to die for a cause when he could have killed to force his vision upon the world. His vision has seeped into my imagination. I have experienced him – deeply and truly – in the presence of failure and brokenness."

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