Dec. 30th
Perhaps it is just time that my heart behold the land I have left behind me, or perhaps I look back so as to scream in this present place “I am important! I am more than you think I am!” I am unpacking cardboard boxes behind Starbucks.

These past days my job has lost its power to define me. I am afraid that this will not last. None the less, I have apparently gone long enough shrugging off the things that most feed my soul and wasting all my energy on either necessity or entertainment. Entertainment, obviously, is something I have control over. There was a time that it was too absent from my days…but as of late it siphons away almost as much of my useful time and person as Starbucks does. I think that for at least a couple of months I began to believe that the normalcy of American survival was the reality I was doomed to – the rigorous prophetic life I crave was a distant dream or something that was my responsibility to create at best.

So, finally, I have been making priorities, saying “no” sometimes – and mostly not feeling bad about it, reading about the stuff that makes me most excited, praying the Advent collects throughout the day, meditating a bit, trusting my wife’s character more, and not obsessing over the life-cycles of mayflies in trout streams. It has occurred to me that many of us, disenfranchised with the church, have begun to trust our passion, intellect, experience, and ideas, while almost completely distrusting our need for God to accomplish in us and in the world all the stuff that we’re writing about in our savvy blogs. This has completely exhausted me and left me feeling essentially hopeless. Maybe I am the only one who thinks that I know better than the vast number of ministers who have come before me, but, assuming I am not, we must not merely trust the things that are new, flashy, intellectual, and – most importantly – nothing like the churchiness we’re all trying to disassociate from. Some of the least “emergent” people are so doing so much more in God’s kingdom than the rest of us.

In defense of the analytical and critical minds – it has been said that all of the prophets were cynical. I am not suggesting that we ought to snuggle up with the travesty that we see. If the canon of Scriptures attests to anything of humanity, it is that we are damnably prone to disloyalty to our Father and to self-obsession. We are not above this, but if we float completely free from Church Heritage and even current denominational conventions we are bound to misguided and probably somewhat godless destinations. We have great need of submission to God, and we ought not discount all that has come before us.

Here is a somewhat related chunk of something I read today that I agree with a lot.

It is true that, if one withdraws the unifying pattern of the creed, then the harmony of Scripture can be easily destroyed. Someone who is not attuned to the melody of the creed will soon find a cacophony of christologies in Scripture…

The creed is integral to scripture as a properly functioning nervous system is integral to the health of the human organism. Those who undercut a vital connection between scripture and the creed, usually end up discarding for a variety of historical philosophical, theological, political, and ideological reasons significant portions of scripture. Such a scholar is like a person who stumbles upon a beautiful garden of canonical heritage, tears out all the flowers but one – scripture – and then proceeds to peel off the petals of that flower until she is left with a bare stem or nothing at all in her hands. She then looks at the remains and marvels at the fact that they bear no resemblance to the garden in front of her!

Paul L. Gavrilyuk. “ Scripture and the Regula Fidei: Two interlocking components of the Canonical Heritage. Canonical Theism