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
The Greatest Love Story Ever Told
This is the first week of Advent, the season where we anticipate the coming of Christ. It’s a time to hear and enter into the story of how Jesus came out of love to give his life for us. This grand love story of Christmas taps into a deep intuition we have about the centrality…
The Cruciform Center Part 1: How Matthew, Mark and Luke Reveal a Cruciform God
In the previous series of posts I’ve argued that a merely “Christocentric” approach to God is too general, as can be shown by the widely different conceptions of God people arrive at, despite their claim to be “Christocentric.” The confession that Jesus reveals what God is like is simply too abstract, for it leaves too…
Why Isn’t God More Clear?
Ever wonder why God isn’t more clear and obvious? Here’s Greg’s take on that question.
Participating in God’s Love
Greg took a slight detour from his reflections on free will in this video in order to talk about Jesus’ prayer in John 17. He discusses the idea that God desires the kind of unity among his children that the triune God enjoys. “He wants our love to participate in the triune God.” In order to…
What Does It Mean to Be Married to Christ?
The New Testament calls Christ the “bridegroom” and the church his “bride.” To understand what this means can change your life. We need to read this through the lens of first century Jewish marriage. In what follows we’ll highlight six aspects of first century Jewish marriages to see how each sheds light on the New…