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.
God in Our Image
We came across this piece written by Jonathan Storment earlier this month and we had to share it here. The title of the piece is Everyday Idolatry: My God. He does a great job of outlining the ways that we twist God into whatever we need him to be to prop up our own agendas. Very insightful.
From the article:
I like the way N.T. Wright talks about how to deal with letting Jesus stand on his own:
“My proposal is not that we know what the word ‘god’ means, and manage to somehow to fit Jesus into that. Instead, I suggest, that we think historically about a young Jew possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross–and we somehow allow our meaning for the word “god” to be re-centered around that point.”
In other words, the scandal is not that Jesus is like God. The scandal is that God is like Jesus. He’s a God who picked a certain place and time, and entered into it. He came to show us who he really was…and who he really wasn’t.
Category: General
Tags: Bible, God, Jesus, Jonathan Storment, Religious Idolatry, Religious Violence
Related Reading
Podcast: Could Jesus Have Sinned? (part one)
Greg considers the nature of temptation and the temptability of God. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0114.mp3
For the Bible Tells Me So?
Oh, those pesky fundamentalists are at it again. Should it be legal for parents to execute their rebellious children based upon Deut 21:18-21? This guy thinks so. And he’s a Bible-believing Christian who is a candidate for his state’s legislature, so it must be true, right? Of course, under this proposed legislation, parents would need to…
Is there Archeological Support for the Reliability of the Gospels?
One of the many tests historians typically submit documents to in accessing their historical reliability concerns the extent to which archeology supports or undermines the historic claims the document makes. So we need to investigate the extent to which archeology confirms, or refutes, aspects of the Gospels. Before we address this question, however, a preliminary…
The REAL Problem with Divine Violence in the OT
As I mentioned in my previous blog, while I will continue to offer video-blogs responding to questions that come in, I’m also planning on sprinkling in reflections based on my forthcoming book, Crucifixion of the Warrior God, over the next couple months. Today, I just want to state what I consider to be the real…
A Book That Won’t Leave You Unchanged
St. Ignatius of Loyola, the 16th century founder of the Jesuits, taught that to experience the transforming power of Scripture, we need to read it “with all five senses,” using our imagination to get on the inside of the characters and story we’re reading about. A just-released book by Frank Viola and MaryDeMuth entitled “The…
