With two new births the last few weeks and two more coming, the whole “image” of pregnancy is just too glaring for me not to ignore. Thanks Christ Erdman for a great follow up post A Pregnancy Cannot Be Hid | From Acceptance to Martyrdom? Here’s the second paragraph to wet your appetite:
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I want to meditate on all this more deeply. We are only sent to preach Christ–to serve as evangelists, witnesses, those who testify–and to do it all as Jesus himself did it all (John 20.21). Jesus prayed for us, “Father . . . As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17.18). What might it mean if we took Jesus’ “as” and “so” more seriously? Theology is important, but so is ethics, and theological ethics, according to Jesus is naturally evangelistic. The Enlightenment colonized the church into highly rational and abstract modes of theological discourse. But if the collapse of Modernity offers the church a gift, I wonder if it offers us the gift of the recovery, rediscovery, and reimagining of the gospel ethically–that is, bodily. I think this is what the incarnation urges upon us, and what Jesus’ prayer over us does in us. I think this is what Jesus urges on us in his “as” and “so”. Newbigin taught that the congregation is the one true hermeneutic of the gospel. We are an embodied testimony, the “as” and “so” of Jesus’ sending in the Spirit.
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