This photo has been circulating in response to the Connecticut shooting. I don’t disagree that people should know how to use guns safely and read the Bible. Many American Christians think that the word “Biblical” is just a tribal category which refers to people who own guns, love America, and hate public schools. So it would be great for people like that to actually open their Bibles so they can get to know Jesus. This photo offends me because the... Read more
When we admit that mental illness has been a factor in many of the mass shootings that have happened, we are confronted with a moral crisis. As someone who takes pills every morning to make my mind work, I have often concluded that the world is divided between people who take mental health pills and those who don’t. People who don’t take these pills live in a world where a morality of individual responsibility works. Good choices get rewarded; bad... Read more
It’s always interesting when someone else says something that you’ve said exactly the way you said it and then you want to critique it for the same reasons that somebody else critiqued you. Greg Boyd preached a sermon about God’s wrath two Sundays ago called “The Judgment Boomerang” that helped me understand some inadequacies in my own reflections on it. I agree with Boyd in very essential ways, but I disagree with him in one very fundamental way. So I... Read more
Whoever made this t-shirt doesn’t fear God. Why? Because it blasphemes God’s name when we use tragedies opportunistically to build political power for ourselves and pretend that we’re doing it in defense of God. Until Christians stop taking their cues from the diaboloi of the outrage industrial complex, then we will look like just another ambulance-chasing special interest tribe focused on getting in our talking points. We are supposed to be the people who offer hope and peace, especially in... Read more
I just found out that a kid I love a lot who’s a very smart and beautiful person has been arrested for a shooting that sounds like it’s a pretty cut and dry case, which will effectively end his chances at having a future. This kid’s little brother shot and killed his sister a couple of months ago. I was their youth pastor. I helped them start a soccer team called Sangre de Cristo. We got the uniforms of the... Read more
This is going to be a short one. I just want to make an appeal for what I would call the pragmatic and aesthetic sides of the gospel. In classical Western discourse, there are three ultimate forms of value that we can assign to an idea: truth, goodness, and beauty. In our modern era of science and logic, truth has been privileged to the exclusion of goodness and beauty. This particularly takes place when we’re talking about the Christian gospel.... Read more
There are certain rhetorical moves that evangelicals make in their arguments to “out-pious” their interlocutors. For example, if you can find a way to say that the other person is talking about everything except Jesus while all that you’re saying is “It’s all about Jesus,” then you win the argument. The evangelical market never runs out of room for books by celebrity pastors whose thesis is “Nobody has done this before, but I’m going to share with you a gospel... Read more
Original sin. There are few Christian doctrines that cause more scandal for people living today. How could God be angry at humanity for something a guy named Adam did a long time ago? Is that what original sin is about? Does Adam have to be a historical figure for original sin to “work”? A certain kind of Christian seems to take pleasure in this scandal because it provides an opportunity to demonstrate a certain kind of piety that says, “Well,... Read more
Those of you who have been following my journey know that I keep on stumbling into Biblical passages that talk about the “fear of the Lord.” It actually started this summer with a sermon I preached in the Dominican Republic on the fear of the Lord in Isaiah 6, even though the phrase didn’t actually appear in the text. Then, in the fall, I came across Acts 9:31: “Living in the fear of the Lord and encouraged by the Holy... Read more
One of the theories Doug Campbell advances in The Deliverance of God is that the “Romans Road” account of salvation which has dominated American evangelical Christianity for the past half-century cannot really be blamed on Martin Luther or John Calvin. The Romans Road is paved through the reconfiguration of the Reformers’ theology to fulfill the “decision for Christ” salvation formula of Billy Graham, Bill Bright, and all the sidewalk pamphleteers of the Four Spiritual Laws, who are more indebted to... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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