I know what the cynics will say. I know how the scoffers will sneer. I know the non-dreamers believing only in the brutal ways of force will laugh me off as impossibly naive. But I don’t care. I’ve gr...
Jesus overturned money-changing tables in the temple, but set up banqueting tables in his Father’s house.
The Beatitudes are deliberately designed to shock us. If we’re not shocked by the Beatitudes, it’s only because we have tamed them with a patronizing sentimentality—and being sentimental about Jesus i...
The beauty of the image of God marred in man through the Fall is what the Incarnation redeems.
It’s true that the gospel of Luke records Jesus as saying, Blessed are you who are poor—period. (Luke 6:20) In Luke’s Beatitudes, Jesus simply blesses the poor, and the further categorization of in sp...
Jesus was trying to lead humanity into the deep truth that there is no them; there is only us.
We eventually have to ask ourselves what did Jesus intend and when do we need to turn the other cheek? If our default response to this portion of the Sermon on the Mount is to craft exemptions, we mig...
Jesus said his disciples would be known for their love, not for their placards of protest and angry letters to the editor.
If what we mean by Jesus saves the world gets reduced to saved people go to heaven when they die, then Jesus is simply the one who saves us from the world, not the Savior of the world. But this is not...
One of the problems with understanding what is meant by hell is that this tiny word has been forced to carry so much freight. Over the centuries it has picked up meanings often far removed from what w...
The problem is this: when we separate Jesus from his ideas for an alternative social structure, we inevitably succumb to the temptation to harness Jesus to our ideas—thus conferring upon our human pol...
American Christians especially should keep in mind that we as the modern Romans—the privileged citizens of the world’s lone superpower—have more in common with Pontius Pilate than we do with Galilean...
The resurrection is not only God’s vindication of his Son; it is the vindication of all Jesus taught. Easter Sunday is nothing less than the triumph of the peaceable kingdom of Christ. Easter changes...
Fundamentalism is to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.
Not long ago I was in Istanbul, Turkey. While there I toured the Topkapi Palace—the former royal palace of the Ottoman sultans and center of the Ottoman Empire. Among the many artifacts collected thro...
The resurrection of Jesus is not just a happy ending to the gospel story; it is the dawn of a new creation. No one captures this idea better than G. K. Chesterton in the close of part one of his class...
Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else. And that is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from violenc...
What sinners need (shall we say deserve?) is love and healing, not torture and death. We are worthy of God’s love and healing not on the basis of personal merit but because of the image we bear: the v...
When I say it’s hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it’s hard to believe in Jesus’s ideas—in his way of saving the world. For Christians it’s not hard to believe in Jesus as the Son of God, the Second Pe...
Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus’s ideas makes Christianity truly radical.
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