Marginal Christianity

God thinks of you as the royal priest he created you to be serving in his temple-palace of creation. God has never thought of you as anything else. Even in rebellion against him, denying or ignoring your royal priesthood, he has never accepted or thought of you in terms of what you have become, sinners, but always in terms of who he made you to be. Of course he knows you have gone wrong and that this has to dealt with. And God has done that in Christ – once for all time! And having done it, he never thinks of us in terms of sin and failure again. Only as his beloved children, children of the Great King, royal siblings, those to whom he has entrusted and equipped for the protection and care of his creation. When you next look in the mirror, behold there this you – not whatever other you you may believe yourself to be! For this is the true you, the real you, the you God created you to be. And if you don’t believe me, maybe these wise words of the great theologian Karl Barth wil...

  June 9, 2015 J. R. Daniel Kirk Certain kinds of people simply cannot be part of the people of God. Making such a judgment is not based on bigotry. It is simply based on the story of God in which the people of God are defined in particular ways. These definitions demand that some are out while others are in. Canaanite Transformation Take Canaanites. This is a blanket term for the people living in the land that God gave to the people of Israel through the wars of Joshua. They are excluded from participation in the people of God. One way they are so excluded is in multiple warnings not to allow daughters and sons to intermarry with these indigenous peoples. Such liaisons might lead the Israelites astray to worship gods other than Yhwh. But there is only one way to make sure that no such commingling occurs: kill them all. “You must devote them to complete destruction,” says Deuteronomy 7:2. Make no covenant. Show no mercy. So when a Canaanite woman from the hi...

  April 20, 2015 J. R. Daniel Kirk When City Church in San Francisco announced that it was altering its policies with regard to the inclusion of LGBTQ folks, they indicated that an important voice guiding them forward was that of Ken Wilson, founding pastor of the Ann Arbor Vineyard Church. Yesterday Wilson preached at City Church, part of an ongoing conversation about what “inclusion” might look like ( sermon audio here ). There were two parts of his sermon that resonate with some themes I have been working out here on the blog over the past several years. The one I want to engage today is this: Knowing what you believe about something does not tell you what you should do about it–especially with respect to people who do not share your conviction. I have talked about this before as we have had some discussions about what it means to hold a traditional position in a society that does not identify as Christian. The imperative to love our neighbor as ourse...