Loving and Hating the World
Ambivalence and Discipleship
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2021
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Publisher's Description
What is it that makes discipleship authentic? Discipleship involves learning how to be in the world but not of the world. The first Christians were ambivalent about "the world": God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son but friendship with the world is enmity with God. So discipleship involves learning how to live with this ambivalence and an ancient tension between loving and hating the world. This book offers a deeper understanding of what discipleship means by tracing the history of this ambivalence from the New Testament to the present. It presents a revisionary account of this history as a continuing and nonnegotiable tension between loving and hating the world rather than a simple transition from medieval world-denial to modern world-affirmation. It argues that this tension helped produce our own secular age and it considers modern Jewish and Christian philosophical and theological responses to this history that suggest ways that Christians can negotiate this tension to be more authentic disciples today.
Endorsements (2)
“This is a really unusual book in its range of reference, its depth of analysis, and its careful nuance of argument. Discussing thinkers from Irenaeus to Thomas Merton and Charles Taylor, James Lawson shows how Christian integrity says both yes and no to the world as it is—and how it requires us to be discerning about what exactly is being affirmed or denied at any point. A model of clear and profound exploration.”
“In a work erudite in its scope and wise in its analyses, James Lawson shows that to follow Christ is at once to embrace the fallen world more fully than anyone else, and yet in its midst to have no part of it whatsoever. This double way of incarnation and cross is only united as a process of incomplete and not fully foreseeable transfiguration of the world which we must enter into and carry forwards.”
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