Jesus said his disciples would be known for their love, not for their placards of protest and angry letters to the editor.
It’s not the task of the church to change the world by legislative force. It’s the task of the church to be the world changed by Christ. This is revolutionary in a way that conventional politics never...
I pledge no allegiance to elephants or donkeys, only to the Lamb.
Fundamentalism is to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.
Jesus overturned money-changing tables in the temple, but set up banqueting tables in his Father’s house.
It was Jesus’s ideas about truth and freedom that made him dangerous to the principalities and powers. But today our gospel isn’t very dangerous. It’s been tamed and domesticated. If Jesus of Nazareth...
Jesus was trying to lead humanity into the deep truth that there is no them; there is only us.
The beauty of the image of God marred in man through the Fall is what the Incarnation redeems.
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...
Jesus didn’t seem very interested in exposing symptomatic sinners—tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, etc. Instead Jesus challenged the guardians of systemic sin—the power brokers of religion and...
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...
So when Jesus comes along and says to us, Love your enemy, we instinctively feel how radical it is. He’s not just giving individuals a personal ethic; he is striking at the very foundation of the worl...
Feeling intimidated by the Scientific Revolution, fundamentalism takes a scientific approach to the Bible—which is perhaps the worst of all ways to approach Scripture. The Bible is not interested in g...
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...
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...
Christianity is a confession, not an explanation. We will attempt to explain what we legitimately can, but we will always confess more than we can explain.
Christianity as the ongoing expression of the Jesus story lived out in the lives of individuals and in the heart of society is a beauty that can redeem the world.
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...
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...
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...
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