Christianity With Power Essay, Research Paper
Book Review: Christianity with Power
Christianity With Power helps us recognize that our cultural inhibits us from experiencing and living the wholeness of our faith. Dr. Kraft helps the reader to comprehend our Western worldview and how it affects our view of the bible.
It is interesting (and discouraging) to note that even though we are Christians, our basic assumptions are usually more like those of the non-Christian Westerners around us than we like to admit. We have, as Christians, made certain modifications. But even though there is often a wide discrepancy between the teachings of Scripture and the common Western assumptions we often find ourselves more Western than scriptural (p 26)
Dr. Kraft gives us many examples of our Western worldview, which is important to understand and be aware of so we can change if need be. One-example talks about how westerners have left out the supernatural world. There are many other cultures around the world that hold on to the supernatural world very closely, like in Africa.
Indeed, unlike most of the peoples of the world, we divide the world into what we call natural and what we call supernatural. And then we largely disregard the supernatural. Our focus is squarely on the natural world, with little or no attention paid to the supernatural world (p 27).
We live in a world where people are starving for power. In spite of biblical teaching, even church members look for supernatural power from crystals, channeling, Physic networking and other New Age beliefs because they are not finding it in the churches.
Christians need to change their religious ideas, but it is hard for Western society to accept change when traditional value is held high. In other areas of the Western world, the scientific world, change is happening constantly. Dr. Kraft explains this further,
Yet Westerns tend to be much more hesitant when it comes to change in religious ideas or allegiances. The feeling seems to be that since so much change is going on in nearly every other area of life, we should keep change in religious traditions to a minimum We need to commit ourselves to God and his purpose. But an unthinking, culturally inculcated commitment to mere religious traditions is shown over and over again in the Bible to keep people form God s best (p 34).
Instead of fearing change we should step out of our comfort zone and embrace it.
In Christianity with Power, Dr.Kraft does a remarkable job of defining and explaining terminology that can be difficult to comprehend. He covers terms in chapter two, which is explaining reality and how we analysis what we perceive. An illustration of one of the significant terms Dr. Kraft explains is The two-realities Position.
It is technically referred to as critical realism. It holds that there are two realities. There is a REALITY out there. The world outside ourselves exist both materially and nonmaterial. It is REAL. But there is also a perceptual reality inside our minds. That, too, is real, but it is different in nature form REALITY as God knows it to be (p 14).
This is just one example out of many difficult terms Dr. Kraft covers that helps us to have accurate view of ourselves.