Marginal Christianity

God is love. Love is . . . -committed to us. We’re stuck with God for good or ill, like it or not. -working for us. God wills and works for our good. God will make us like Christ no matter the cost (to us or to him). -always seeking to save us (and we always need to be saved). We’re loster than we can imagine, God is more resourceful than we’ll ever know. There’s little God won’t do, other than not be himself, to save us. This may seem to put a dent in his reputation, vex and perplex us, raise all kinds of doubts, even at times drive us away from him (really or ideas of him) so we might truly find him and be saved. -tough as nails (like the ones that bound his Son to the cross) on us and our world as needed. -accepting us, actually sitting next to us on any trash heap we end up on, like Job’s friends sans the lousy theology. -challenging us to be as good as we were made to be. -unfathomable as chess’s Grandest Master playing all of us at the same time and somehow allow...

The New Exodus Setting “ Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world He created according to his will. May he establish His kingdom during your life and during your days, and during the life of all the house of Israel, speedily and in the near future. And say Amen.” This is the Kaddish, a regular feature of Jewish prayer extolling praise and longing/mourning for the quick establishment of God's rule at the time of Jesus. The long exile begun in Babylon but extending even now to Rome's overlordship of the people in their own land was intolerable to the Jews and they passionately wanted it over. They looked forward to a long-promised New Exodus to remedy this terrible situation. Jesus offers his disciples his version of this prayer as a model prayer for those who join him in God's New Exodus movement. It is a New Exodus (NE) prayer (N.T. Wright, Brant Pitre). It grows out of and relates to the historical context which Jesus was born into and ministere...

God's Big Picture Three now widely accepted truths about the creation stories (Gen.1-2) 1 : -they narrate the divine construction of a temple in which God will dwell on earth with his creatures, -God intends the Holy of Holies (where God dwelt in the temple) to extend from its embryonic beginning in the mountain garden of Eden to finally cover the while earth, and -that God intends and commissions his human creatures to be agents of this extension of his creational temple and to serve in it as “royal priests.” This view of God's ultimate purpose in creating us and our world reorients the way we need to think about -what God wants, -what God has done for us, and -who we are and what we're supposed to do here. This “big picture” of God's purposes and intentions allows us a glimpse into God's mind before sin ever enters the picture. That doesn't happen till Gen.3. So what we see in the first two chapters is before and apart fro...