Marginal Christianity

“This . . . reconciliation encounters me telling me that I am already reconciled to God in Christ, already died for, redeemed and forgiven. It tells me that already the great positive decision of God’s reconciling love in my favour has been taken, and it can no more be undone than Jesus Christ can be undone, than the incarnation can be reversed or obliterated, or the cross made as if it had never taken place. . . . I am already included in the finished work and already part of Christ, for it was my nature, my humanity, my flesh of sin, that he assumed and made one with himself in his one person.” T. F. Torrance, Atonement , 167. This is the great evangelical truth and one thing we can sure we know about any other person we meet: they too are all that Torrance affirms in the above statement. Before, beyond, and above anything else we may think we know or feel about another, this is true about them. This the message of Lent Jesus tries to press home to u...

8/18/17 in Missiology Conversations   “Racial reconciliation” is all the rage. Increasingly, younger white Christians are professing their desire for unity across ethnic lines. Christianity Today recently ran a piece noting the growing tendency of white evangelicals to recognize the systemic nature of racism and to desire to do something about it. However, for white folks, racial reconciliation is often treated as one more “add-on” to self-identity, a means to “presenting” a favorable public persona. Being “for” racial reconciliation becomes one more proverbial “feather in the cap.” White folks often don’t engage in the hard, humbling work required to pursue a just reconciliation, but instead we engage with others on our own terms, which is not reconciliation at all. When we recognize the need for the decentering of white identity, we grow uncomfortable and revert to familiar patterns that reinforce mechanisms of social control and white privilege. Pursuing reconciliatio...

Is Paul, then, condoning slavery as an acceptable societal institution? Of course not! But raising the question does give the opportunity to look at a basic principle of biblical interpretation. Briefly stated, this principle is that the cultural context which the gospel encounters is descriptive not prescriptive. The gospel makes a home for itself in all cultures but is captive to none. What we have in the New Testament are descriptions of how it made a home for itself in the various cultures it encountered in the Greco-Roman world of the first century. Our task is not to replicate the way the gospel took shape then and there but to carefully observe the intention and direction the gospel reshaped those relationships and discern how it can reshape ours in the same direction and with the same intention in the changed and changing situations we find ourselves in. Far, then, from accepting or condoning slavery, Paul objects vigorously to the way it forms relationships betwee...

Talk about “limited” atonement (LA) seems to have resurfaced in certain reformed circles these days. Did Christ die for everyone? Or just for the elect (those God chose from eternity to be saved)? Let's call this LA1. That's an important issue to be sure (and I'm on the Christ died for everyone side) but there's another form of LA that is less apparent and less talked about yet at least as important as the version I mentioned above. Let's call this LA2. Actually, I think it is more important because it answers LA1 for us. What is this other version of LA, LA2? A question will help us get at it. Would Christ have come incarnate among us if humanity had never sinned? In other words, was there another purpose to his incarnation than dying for our sins (let's call this reclamation)? A purpose God had in mind apart from reclaiming us sinners (or at some of us depending on how we answer LA1) from perdition and hell? In yet other words, is Jesus' incarnati...

If you can imagine the defeat of overwhelming forces and the long-hoped for freedom it brings, you understand the Christus Victor view of atonement. If you can imagine a slave market and being sold into slavery to the highest bidder, yet discovering that your buyer has paid for you only to set you free, you understand the redemption Jesus' death accomplished. If you can imagine a courtroom where you are standing trial for charges of which you are guilty, but the judge astonishingly rules you innocent because he has born the burden of your guilt and penalty himself and that you are free to go, you understand the penal substitutionary view of atonement. If you can imagine one who lived a life in such a charismatic and winsome way, even to the point of surrendering his life for yours, that the power of that way of life enables you to imagine and live a similar life, you understand the moral influence view of the atonement. If you can imagine someone willingly to die...

6  While we were still weak, at the right moment, Christ died for ungodly people. 7  It isn’t often that someone will die for a righteous person, though maybe someone might dare to die for a good person. 8  But God shows his love for us, because while we were still sinners Christ died for us. 9  So, now that we have been made righteous by his blood, we can be even more certain that we will be saved from God’s wrath through him. 10  If we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son while we were still enemies, now that we have been reconciled, how much more certain is it that we will be saved by his life? 11  And not only that: we even take pride in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, the one through whom we now have a restored relationship with God.   Weak, ungodly – that’s how we were in our autonomy, our “damned” independence from God.   Yet even then Christ died for us.   We weren’t righteous, and far from good (the...

“Thus it is through the weakness of the Man on the Cross and on the ground of reconciliation wrought out there that God meets, suffers, and triumphs over the enmity entrenched in human existence and history and over its distortion of the socio-political patterns of human life.” ( The Mediation of Christ , 41)

http://www.christenacleveland.com/2013/06/why-reconciliation-needs-justice/ By christena on June 10, 2013   This past weekend, I attended a fascinating and excellent talk that Andy Crouch gave on art, faith and culture at Art House North . At the start of his presentation, Andy showed two very similar Thomas Kinkade paintings. Even though both paintings depict the water tower in Chicago, they differ in important ways. When Andy asked the audience to comment on the differences, one man responded, “In the painting on the left, it looks like good is obviously winning.”   Indeed, the painting on the left is triumphant in a happy-go-lucky sort of way. It’s clearer, cheerier, brighter – Andy the Art Critic says it’s unrealistically bright – and all in all not very sophisticated. However, the painting on the right shows the contrast of light and dark in a murky, but realistic and dynamic way. While the painting on the right is less happy-g...