Sacred Roots Workshop

Ses s i on 2: Go i ng Back to the Future

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6. Silent or muted prophetic voice : viewing faith as vehicle to preserve civil religion and the status quo

a. Loss of prophetic voice against evil in the midst of society (i.e., apathy towards abuses of God’s gift of life, all forms of cruelty, greed, and injustice)

b. Failure to articulate biblical alternatives to cultural evils, e.g., racism, greed, civil religion, exploitation of the poor, acceptance of violence and its culture of death.

c. Lack of tangible display of the Kingdom’s ethic of freedom, wholeness, and justice, first within the ranks of the believing, and then to those who do not know the Lord

C. Need to return to Sacred Roots: retrieval of the Great Tradition for postmodern evangelicalism

II. General Facts about the Great Tradition of the Church

Lord, Give Us Shoes That Fit Our Feet Shoes was the worstest trouble. We weared rough russets when it got cold, and it seem powerful strange they’d never git them to fit . . . We prays for the end of tribulation and the end of beatings and for shoes that fit our feet. [Mary Reynolds, ex-slave]. ~ Dwight Hopkins. Shoes That Fit Our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology . Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993, p. viii.

A. What the Great Tradition is not

1. Not nostalgia: We do not assert that everything the early Church believed and practiced ought to be reproduced today, regardless of what they asserted or did.