Thoughts from those way more scholarly than I

This morning I was surfing the web attempting to be more sophisticated than I really am. I ran into some pretty interesting stuff.

In his book, "The Irresistible Revolution", Shane Claiborne discuses a fully devoted "Christian" in response to his friend telling him that he has given up Christianity in order to follow Jesus. Claiborne writes, "I wondered what it would look like if we decided to really follow Jesus. In fact, I wasn't exactly sure what a fully devoted Christian looked like, or if the world had even seen one in the last few centuries. From my desk at college, it looked like some time back we had stopped living Christianity and just started studying it. The hilarious words of nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard resonated in my thirsty soul:"

"The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand it, we must act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God."

Mhmm... I couldn't have said it better. Thanks Mr. Kierkegaard.