The world, so filled with fear, hate, and brutality, so dead-set against neighboring, groans in labor pains, awaiting healing. The church has no gift to give the world when it is so like the world in its fears, its hates, its long-term brutality. The church has gifts to give when it acts out of its own peculiarity, out of its “new self,” when it comes to “the other” out of its own being loved and forgiven. Bishop John Shelby Spong has rightly said that the church will die if it does not change. Surely so. But the Second Reformation is not, in my judgment, about demything and remything. It is about the power of transformation carried well enough by old “myths”; the Reformation concerns an ethics of forgiveness for which the world yearns but for which it lacks evidence.
Walter Brueggemann, The Word that Redescribes the World
Amen.
