We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Myth of a Christian Nation

Quotes to Chew on: Racial Reconciliation

Jesus perfectly embodied God’s heart for racial reconciliation. For example, most Jews of Jesus’ day despised Samaritans as racially impure and as heretics. They avoided physical or social contact with them if at all possible. Yet Jesus went out of his way to have contact with them, even touching some who were lepers. Moreover, he consistently treated them with respect, even making them the heroes in some of his stories.

Similarly, most Jews of Jesus’ day looked down on Gentiles and had a particular distain for the Romans, the group who ruled Palestine. Yet Jesus treated them as equals. Most remarkably, Jesus was willing to interact with and serve Roman centurions. These were high-ranking officials in the oppressive Roman military and were thus despised by Jews. Jesus went so far as to praise the faith of a Roman centurion as being greater than the faith of any Jew (Matthew 8:5-11)!

This sort of behavior was absolutely scandalous and revolutionary. It reveals that where God reigns, the Powers that fuel racism will be confronted and racial walls will be torn down. Where God reigns, God’s vision for a united human race will be in the process of being reconciled.

Boyd, Gregory A., The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church (pp. 114-115). Zondervan.

 

Related Reading

Christena Cleveland on Practices for Sociological Imagination

Christena Cleveland recently sat down with Tod Bolsinger (Vice President for Formation and Vocation at Fuller Theological Seminary) to discuss the intersection of privilege and leadership. You can find a series of short videos capturing different aspects of this conversation here. Today we wanted to share one of these videos with you. We hope you’ll take the time to…

Podcast: How Much Hope Should We Have that We Can Find Unity Amid So Much Diversity?

Greg looks at Galatians 3:26-29.  http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0370.mp3

Quotes to Chew On: The Church vs. Religion

“It’s time for the Church to free itself from the religious holiness of the Pharisees and begin to manifest the holiness of the Kingdom. It’s time for us to realize that our calling is to serve people sacrificially–including prostitutes, tax collectors, and enemies–rather than judging them. It’s time we ceased getting Life from the rightness…

Why Racial Reconciliation Matters

Rachel Held Evans invited Grace Biskie to reflect on racial reconciliation on her blog this week. Grace’s perspective is an important one to hear. Check out Church Stories: A Plea to Engage in Racial Reconciliation. From the article: The problem with disengaging is that it’s not what God intended for us. I believe God expressly…

Something Further on Ferguson: I Raise My Hands

Osheta Moore is a friend of ReKnew with a unique Kingdom vision. She is a voice you will want to be listening to. She wrote this sensitive and prophetic piece on her personal response to the death of Michael Brown and the subsequent events in Ferguson called I Raise My Hands: A Prayerful Response to…

Quotes to Chew On: Desires

Marcos de Madariaga via Compfight Here’s a quote that comes to us via Andrew Sullivan’s blog: “We are rarely presented with an authentically fulfilling trajectory for our desires… If we are created for infinite satisfaction, we really only have three choices about what to do with our desire in this life: We will become either…