The Realty of Being Friends with the Diety

Finished Stricklin's "A Genealogy of Dissent," last night. Good stuff. Should be required reading for Baptists. We've lost our memory of history and this will help recover that. Stricklin wrote this book in 2000 and I would love to see a 2nd edition that discovers what has happened since the Baptist Faith & Message 2000. The plot definitely thickened after that.

Greg Horton, at The Parish, is continuing his theme of "problems with be-friending Jesus/God." You can read about it here, if you're so inclined. Here's a teaser...

The problem as I see it is that there is no way for anyone to differentiate "the Spirit" from intuition, whim, impression, thought, hallucination, or projected desire. Talking to God at this point becomes a game of deciding which impressions are the Holy Ghost and which ones are random thoughts that flit through my head. This was especially treacherous in my charismatic days when everyone thought they had a "word from God." If there are no criteria by which to judge the Ghost's activity, then any inclination or desire can be read as "the Ghost." Borat made this painfully obvious in the scene where Cohen gets "saved and filled with the Spirit" at a charismatic church. No one knew they were being played, so everyone agrees to play along: Borat is therefore momentarily a charismatic Christian.