Marginal Christianity

Old Testament scholar Stephen Chapman from Duke writes in the book Holy War and the Bible: “Warfare in the Old Testament, as indeed all killing in the Old Testament needs to be recognized within Christian theology as a strictly circumscribed divine concession to the brutal reality of human sin (Gen.9:3-6). However, someone still might ask, ‘Couldn’t God design a world in which war wasn’t necessary?’' The appropriate theological response is that God in fact did so (Gen.1-2), but human sinfulness spoiled it precisely by generating violence (Gen. 6:11-13). Someone might push further and say 'Even with the advent of human violence, couldn’t God have devised a strictly nonviolent method for dealing with it?" Here again the theological response is that God did just that in Jesus Christ, but in order for Christ to appear in the fullness of time (Gal.4:4) it was necessary for God to elect and preserve the people of Israel. And apparently - this is the hard part - God was not ab...

5 Therefore, since we have been made righteous through his faithfulness, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand through him, and we boast in the hope of God’s glory. 3 But not only that! We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, 4 endurance produces character, and character produces hope. 5 This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.   “We even take pride (“boast,” same Greek word as in v.2) in our problems” (better, “sufferings,” the difficulties we encounter for Christ’s sake).   “Boast is our distress for being faithful followers of Jesus” (see also James 1:2)?   Are we to be spiritual masochists?   Martyrdom seekers?   Here we get to a frequently misunderstood one of the deep roots of Christian existence. To make matters worse, in...

  September 29, 2014 by Tim Suttle Leave a Comment “One way or another, we are always remembering… there is no escaping it even if we want to, or at least no escaping it for long, though God knows there are times when we try to, don’t want to remember. In one sense the past is dead and gone, never to be repeated, over and done with, but in another sense, it is of course not done with at all or at least not done with us…” Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember. I confess that the past few days have led me to question one of the fundamental teachings of Richard Rohr. Rohr has often said that God is really only present in  the naked now. To experience God, we must stop reprocessing the past and dreaming about the future and be here and now, in the presence of God. He calls this prayer. While I most certainly agree that this is prayer, I think it more accurate to say this is one kind of prayer, one way that God meets us. It is important, but is not the full pic...

http://derekzrishmawy.com/2014/01/22/can-a-god-of-love-have-wrath/ One of the most common tropes in popular theology today is that a God of Love couldn’t be a God of Wrath. The two are completely and utterly opposed. The God of Jesus Christ , overflowing with love for the world in the Gospel, couldn’t possibly stand over against the world in wrath and judgement. Love affirms, while wrath condemns. Love embraces, while wrath rejects. Love is the unfathomable beauty of God, while wrath is everything dark about human hate projected onto God. Miroslav Volf used to think that the too–until the Bosnian War , that is: The apostle Paul ascribed to God actions and attitudes that stand in sharp contrast with how such a doting grandparent behaves. He spoke rather freely of God’s “judgment”, “condemnation”, even of God’s “wrath” (see Romans 1:18-3:20). Setting aside the litany of things that the Apostle believed merit God’s condemnation, let’s focus on the fact of it. In particular, let’s ...