I really enjoyed reading McKnight’s review of ANKOC and your response. I think its the kind of debate that we see so little of in Christianity today; opposite viewpoints which are nonetheless capable of engaging each other with civility. What struck me about McKnight’s review is he goes back to orthodoxy as the focal point for evangelicalism. Fair enough, but there’s something I’ve always found strange about the evangelical emphasis on orthodoxy as a fixed truth throughout the ages. Obviously, evangelicalism is itself an offshoot of the Protestant Reformation of the 1500’s. The Reformation wasn’t just about problems with the Catholic Church, but about a new way of understanding our relationship with God. Luther’s true radicalism wasn’t his break with the Catholic Church but his revolutionary teachings about grace and our relationship with God. When evangelicals talk about “a personal relationship with Jesus” they owe this to the spirit of revolution and upheaval of the Reformation. The Reformation shook the orthodoxy of the previous 1400 years in the same kind of way the “emerging” church is currently doing. So it strikes me that evangelicals can’t talk about a consistent orthodoxy, because what Christians consider “orthodox” is always changing and evolving, and they themselves are a part of that. Responses: A New Kind of Christianity … on revolutionary Evangelicalism ☀
If we are serious about our desire to share space, share life together, and participate in God’s new creation, then we must seriously reconsider our understanding of and relationship to private property. Indeed, the more I study the Bible and economics, the more I am convinced that private property is at the core of many of the problems we face and is, itself, a fundamentally anti-Christian belief and practice. the Jesus Manifesto ☀
That Jesus didn’t speak about electing a government is beside the point; he didn’t have that option. He did live in a world governed by a Torah that let the government have laws that mandated care for the poor. He lived in a world that didn’t just leave it up to individuals. Sure, there was lots of private charity. That too, on top of laws. And we ought not to construct our Christian principles on what Jesus didn’t say. Hey, Mr. Falwell, Read Your Bible ☀
The problem is that the gospel message in the first century for Jesus and Paul is deeply rooted in the stories and traditions of Israel, so that you can’t tell the story in the New Testament of who Jesus is and what he’s doing – Jesus can’t tell the story of the kingdom of God – without talking about the ancient promises of God to his people; without plugging into the sense that God is at last doing the thing for Israel – and for the world – that he promised. If you take that out, you have to create an alternative context, which is me and my happiness, or me and my hope of heaven, or me and my this or that or the other. Me and my relationship with God. All of which are kind of important, but they are not the importance the New Testament assigns to it. N.T. Wright ☀
When Martin Luther made the priesthood of believers one of the foundation stones in his work of reforming the church, he didn’t, as many other reformers have tried to do, intend to eliminate priesthood as such. He was democratizing a priesthood that had been debased into a religious bureaucracy. He was designating every one of us to responsibilities of being priests to one another: guiding, praying for, encouraging – but not taking over, not interfering. Stubborn and rampant consumerist individualism – everyone for himself, herself, and the devil take the hindmost – is alien to the Christian life. We need our brothers and sisters; our brothers and sisters need us, and they need us as men and women of God. That is the context in which Peter told his congregation that they were a “holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5,9). Jesus is our high priest. Jesus makes the sacrifice that establishes our intimate relationship with God but also in community with relationships with one another. No merely human priest is permitted to interfere with that intimacy (the magisterial letter to the Hebrews makes that clear). But neither are we permitted to assume that we can go it alone in the way of Jesus. Eugene Peterson ☀
The number one predictor of a child’s academic success is parental involvement. It doesn’t even matter if your kid goes to private or public school. So save the twenty grand a year and treat yourself to a nice vacation away from the little bastards. It’s also been proven that just having books in the house makes a huge difference in a child’s development. If your home is adorned with nothing but Hummel dolls, DVD’s, and bleeding Jesuses, congratulations, you’ve just given your children the gift of Duh. Sarah Palin said recently she wrote on her hand because her father used to do it. I rest my case. When there are no books in the house, and there are no parents in the house, you know who raises the kids? That’s right, the television. Kids aren’t keeping up with their studies; they’re keeping up with the Kardashians. We’re allowing the television, as babysitter, to turn us into a nation of slutty idiots. By the way, one sign your 9-year-old may be watching too much One Tree Hill: if she has an imaginary friend with benefits. Bill Maher ☀
Given the usual assumption that Jesus and ‘Judaism’ belong in the category of religion and not politics and economics, Christian interpreters tend to downplay, depoliticize, or explain away his dramatic confrontation in Jerusalem. Jesus is thus usually seen as (only) a religious reformer, attempting to purify the Jewish religion centered in the Jerusalem Temple. But the Temple, along with its high-priesthood, stood at the political-economic as well as the religious head of Judean society in general and was an integral institution of the imperial order, from the Temple’s origins under the Persians until its destruction by the Romans in 70 C.E. Thus we can hardly continue to pretend that Jesus’ demonstration against the Temple was only a religious ‘cleansing’ or merely an attack on the cultic/ritual religion of bloody sacrifice to prepare the way for the more ’spiritual’ worship of Gentile Christianity. Richard Horsley ☀
That trailblazers of wingnuttery like Glenn Beck would explicitly condemn justice itself shouldn’t be surprising. You’ll recall that just a few months ago, Beck and his allies (including most of the Republican caucus in Congress) were loudly railing against a related prerequisite virtue, empathy. Yes, that’s right, they said empathy was bad. Once they decided that, then it was only a matter of time before they were bound to come out against justice as well, because empathy is the foundation of justice. (See if you can arrive at some conception of justice that does not rely upon empathy. No philosopher, ethicist or religious genius ever yet has managed to do so.) Let me be clear: When Glenn Beck asserts that justice is incompatible with the Gospel and with the teachings of Christ, he is not following the Pauline/Augustinian argument that perfect love transcends justice (“Justice that is only justice is less than justice,” in Reinhold Niebuhr’s phrase). He is, rather, saying that justice itself is a bad thing. Glenn Beck is anti-justice. And he’s telling his radio audience that Jesus Christ was anti-justice. It’s hard to see how that doesn’t make Glenn Beck anti-Christ. (The word there is an adjective, but the noun would also seem to fit.) slacktivist ☀
Justice is bonded with love. I would say that a church that does not speak about Justice is one where the gospel of Jesus is foreign. All Justice manifests itself in the greater society. If the poor are treated badly in the society, then Justice is the kingdom of God is hidden. Yet the kingdom of God always bursts forward. Justice goes beyond the individual, beyond our culture to the very heart of God. When, in Gen. 1, God pronounces creation good, God performs an act of Justice. Justice is the act of validating existence. To practice justice is to ” encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” (Isaiah 1.17) By drawing the word into a partisan debate, Glenn Beck reveals that he has no understanding of the word or the kingdom of God. Justice is beyond both Democrats and Republicans. Ernesto Tinajero ☀
Glenn Beck said last week on his eponymous radio and television shows that Christians should leave churches that preach “social justice.” Mr. Beck equated the desire for a just society with—wait for it—Nazism and Communism.
I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them … are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes.
Of course this means that you would have to leave the Catholic Church, which has long championed that particular aspect of the Gospel. The term “social justice” originated way back in the 1800s (and probably predates even that) and has been continually underlined by the Magisterium (the teaching authority of the church) and popes since Leo XIII, who began the modern tradition of Catholic social teaching with his encyclical on capital and labor, Rerum Novarum in 1891. Subsequent popes have built on Leo’s work, continuing the church’s meditation on a variety of social justice issues, in such landmark documents as Pope Pius XI’s encyclical on “the reconstruction of the social order,” Quadregismo Anno (1931), Paul VI’s encyclical “on the development of peoples,” Populorum Progressio (1967), and John Paul II’s encyclical “on the social concerns of the church” Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987). Social justice also undergirds much of Catholic social teaching on peace. “If you want peace,” said Pope Paul VI, “work for justice.”
Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man … A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised … who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female … Nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything [inferior] about woman’s nature. Dorothy L. Sayers ☀
The picture I get of God’s kingdom is of people—tax collectors, prostitutes, fishermen—following Jesus. If we understood that our one job is to replicate the outrageous humility of Calvary, I think we’d begin to see the world in a different way. Instead of other people being our enemies, we would see them as the very people we are called to serve …. You have to put down the Cross to pick up the Sword. Greg Boyd ☀
But let me say it very bluntly: if by liberal, someone means naturalistic, rejecting the possibility of the mystical or miraculous, denying the authority of the Scriptures, denying the resurrection, blah, blah, blah - I’m not a liberal. If by liberal, someone means free to think, free to ask questions, free to seek truth and God, then I would hope all of us could be liberals. If by conservative, someone means unwilling to think or ask questions because one already has the truth nailed down in a pristine form, then I’m not a conservative. But if a conservative is someone who wants to learn from the past, someone who loves the Scriptures and respects the creeds and most importantly loves Jesus, then I would hope everyone could be conservative. But this is where I think “a new kind of Christianity” comes into play, because a lot of us don’t want to have to stay in the old dualism. Brian McLaren ☀
Dear God, give me the courage to live and work for a new heaven and a new earth as Jesus did. Give me the freedom to be critical where I see evil and to offer praises where I see good. Most of all, make me faithful to the vision you have given me, so that wherever I go and whomever I meet, I can be a sign of your all-renewing love. Amen. Henri Nouwen ☀
At the heart of the rule of God is the concept of justice. The Bible speaks unrelentingly of the importance of caring for the poor, the widows, and orphans, and of welcoming the foreigner in our land. Jesus himself taught us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, to show compassion for the poor and hungry, and to expose acts of injustice to public scrutiny. There is simply no way that one can live in the way of Jesus without becoming involved in politics – the systems by which the State determines how wealth and resources are acquired and allocated. Even the failure to act is itself a political act. “[T]he social inaction of the church implies – whether consciously or not – a political stance,” writes Jorge Tasin in The Justice Project, a recent compilation of essays on the subject of justice, “By remaining silent and uninvolved, the church tacitly supports the status quo and the powers of the moment.” If Tasin is right, then even the “wall of separation” must be seen as an impediment to God’s rule, and bringing down the wall won’t be easy. Some, for example, fed by a steady diet of radio talk shows and cable news punditry that promote a self-interested worldview, no doubt find much comfort in a faith that is safely compartmentalized from the political. Yet I believe it is important to begin to engage the imaginations of our faith communities with new visions – ideas that are not motivated by the politics of Left or Right – but by a prophetic vision of what our communities, our nation and our world might look like as it is transformed by the in-breaking of Heaven. The Myth of Christian Political Neutrality ☀
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