Can you really change a system from inside? I was wondering how inside the system Jesus was? Yes he was Jewish but choose mainly not to preach in the synagogue. There is no such thing as free lunch and if we try to work from inside there is an inevitable need for politics etc. In an age when many of our institutions are still strong although on the demise I wonder if the cultural layers built up can really be changed from the inside?
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no – at best the change that is created is surface change – Moving the deckcharis on the titanic. I think over the centuries real change in the church has come from the margins – not from within it.
Change created within the system tends to be more of the same with a new gloss on it !!
thanks james i know it really but it gets lonely on the edge and sometimes there is that pull back. So it is good to hear again
still, Jesus did keep on going to the synagogue and the Temple, didn’t he? and his disciples carried on with that after he dies, apparently. Maybe, like Wesley did later, Jesus really expected to see renewal within? I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure just what Jesus did or thought re. the system, but I think it’s a salutary thought that he didn’t just check out and start a new movement – his followers did that….
Seems that jesus spent a limited time in temples and synagogues and when he did he tended to stir up trouble. I think he was interested in challenging the injustice, deceit, power, hyprocrisy, dead law which was practised in the name of god. And kept the people trapped in fear, sin, false reglion, judgement, guilt, shame and essentially given no freedom. So i think he did spend a great deal of time attacking the system either explicity or implicity by the way he lived and the way he died. Jesus talked about new wineskins and brought spirit into a dead law and came to set us free from dead and false relgion. med, i think you are right that jesus didn’t start a new movement or system – he began a new realtionship and based everything on love.