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
Sermon: Diaper Power
In this short clip from Greg Boyd’s Sermon Diaper Power, he introduces the theme of the sermon where talks about how the poverty of the manger exemplified the power of God. In this sermon, Greg shows that God really is like the baby swaddled in clothes in the manger. The kind of power that God…
Changing Your Mind
Mark Moore is a man who has changed his mind about a lot of things which is somewhat extraordinary these days. Change can be costly and painful and this was certainly true for Mark. He previously pastored Providence Community Church in Plano, TX, where he pastored for eleven years based upon a set of theological assumptions…
Podcast: Why Did Jesus Need to Be Baptized?
Greg submerges himself in the topic of Jesus’ baptism. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0078.mp3
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
How Classical Theology Gets It Wrong
Classical theology has conceived of God as altogether necessary, simple, timeless, unchanging and unknowable. This view of God requires us to conclude that biblical images of God do not reflect the way God truly is insofar as they portray God moving in sequence with humans from the past into the future, for this obviously conflicts…
Justice and Biblical Clarity in Hindsight
Murky1 via Compfight Rachel Held Evans posted a challenging look at our history of using the Bible to uphold things like slavery and to condemn people like Galileo for his scientific findings. You really need to check out the specific quotes she cites to experience the full horror of the ways the Bible was used…