The Elemental Life is a thought provoking concept. It forces us to reevaluate and ask tough questions. Below you will find a list of questions asked by people just like you. Have a question on the eLife for author Joe Burnham? Just Ask!
As I read the book, it's obvious that you love theology. Why is "getting theology right" so important to you? Can't we just major in the majors and minor in the minors?
For me, there are two kinds of people who are concerned about getting theology right. For the first kind, getting it right is really about getting it right. They want to be better, smarter, more schooled, and, perhaps most importantly to them, not wrong. I'd also say this is the group that most people think about first when they think about "right theology". They imagine people who are hypercritical and aggressive in their attempts to get everyone else in line. I'm not one of these people.
Rather, I'd say that my reason for being concerned about theology stems from time I've spent with people who are trying to figure out how faith and life connect. For many of these people, they'd picked up thoughts or ideas about God or Jesus that, over time, had torn them up inside. In other words, bad theology had become poison to their soul. It's in moments like these where sound theology is so important to me because it's an opportunity to bring healing. It's not about being right, it's about people clearly hearing the loving and gracious words that God wants to share with them.
In the water section of the book, you only connect God's saving work to baptism. Why just baptism?
Before answering this question, I think it's important to identify what I'm talking about when I speak of baptism, after all, if baptism is just some water splashing on someone's head or encasing their body as they are submerged, then pointing to baptism wouldn't make much sense. However, there's something else involved in baptism, the Word of God. Baptism isn't just about getting wet, it's the name of God being spoken over and into the life of a person. It's a promise from God that the story we hear in the ancient creeds is for them.
With this understanding of baptism, where the focus isn't so much in the water but in the word of God, we can understand why I point to baptism. You see, while there are many ways that we can hear God's promise to us, being it the reading of Scripture, talking with others in Christian community, or listening to a sermon, all too often, our natural response to these means is to somehow move ourselves to the center of the story. However, with baptism, especially infant baptism, we are in a place where we are far too passive to move ourselves to the leading role. Rather, salvation is about God's work and God's action in our lives. He's the one who gets the glory and, when we have moments where our faith is week, we can remember to look outside of ourselves to him, and hear the promise he made in baptism once again.
