Marginal Christianity

Ch.4: Reading the Bible Redemptively READING THE BIBLE REDEMPTIVELY: ENGAGING TWO HORIZONS Reading the Bible redemptively works from the premise that “movement is meaning.” Even as we read a text as it is on the page to determine its meaning within its lterary context, we must pay attention to its social, historical, and canonical contexts to get a the movement of its meaning that represents the underlying spirit” (103) of the biblical material as a whole. CONCLUSION We must read the Bible both looking backwards and looking forward. If we only read it looking backward from our vantage point in the present we will see only much that seems foreign, primitive, retrograde, and even repulsive to us. And it is! But we also look forward from the text toward its eventual fulfilment in Christ, we may see “ a redemptive side, which often contains partial or incremental movement toward the betterment of human beings.” (103). That these redemptive movements, ...

Part 1 Ch.1: Slaughtering Children, Grabbing Virgins W/O posit that we have four stacks of pictures in our minds when it comes to war: Stack one: Modern-day war pictures   Stack two: ANE war pictures   Stack three: Biblical war pictures, group one —what Israel actually practiced in war  Stack four: Biblical war pictures, group two— what Yahweh wanted Israel to do in war We must take pains to separate Stack one images (which we all have plenty of) from the three stacks of ancient war pictures with which they have little in common. A distinction not observed by some prominent defenders of traditional answers to the questions of the Bible, genocide, and rape. Part 2 Traditional Answers: Good for Big-Picture, Story-Line Questions Ch.2: Where Traditional Answers Don’t Work Traditional answers to our questions (first two positions on the chart given earlier) include: (1) God as source of the holy war commands, (2) the loft...

Faith Improvised August 23, 2012 By timgombis Rep. Todd Akin’s comments about rape last week ignited a firestorm. His ignorance of female anatomy and human reproduction, and his insensitivity to rape victims caused great offense. There is much I’d like to say about many aspects of this discussion, but I’ll make just this one point: If I were a policy-maker in power who claimed to be Christian, I would tread very carefully on issues like this so as to avoid God’s judgment. I say this because those who are violated and treated with extreme injustice have a place near and dear to the heart of the one true God. Christians confess that in Jesus God himself became a victim of abuse and injustice, his body being violated. The New Testament is explicit that in being so treated, Jesus was the ultimate and clearest possible revelation of the God of all creation (Mark 15:39; John 17; Phil. 2:5-11). If, then, God intentionally became a victim and one of the violated, and Scripture...