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

From Boston, With Love
We posted some of T. C. Moore’s reflections on the Open 2013 conference earlier this week. T. C. lives in Boston and was deeply moved by the violence and terror that came to his city. Now we want to share his most recent blog post Oz and the Cross: Reflections on God’s Love and the Boston Marathon Bombings. In our rage and grief it’s all too easy to frame this tragedy as the “evil other” attacking the “righteous us.” But this is not the way of Jesus. We challenge you to sit with T. C.’s piece and view the recent bombings and the victims and perpetrators through a lens that moves us to prayer and peacemaking rather than revenge and self-righteousness. Can we view these events and confess, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”?
From T. C.’s blog:
Contrasting ourselves with an evil other does not produce the wholeness of God’s loving reign (shalom). Setting ourselves up against those who are trapped in sin, have succumb to a spirit of violence and death, does not magically make us the peculiar people who reflect God’s love. Instead, the only way for us to become the embodiment of God’s loving reign, is to model our love after the love of God demonstrated on Jesus’s cross: a love that prays for its murderer’s forgiveness. In Jesus’s death and life, he modeled a love that identified with those who were wounded, as well as those who were stigmatized—even with violent Zealots. The Apostle Paul, himself a violent murderer, was transformed by God’s love and called to herald the glorious Gospel of God’s Kingdom among the Gentiles. That’s the power of God’s love that is at work in this Jesus movement we call the Church!
Category: General
Tags: Boston Bombings, Cruciform Theology, Forgiveness, Jesus, Mercy, Peacemaking, T.C. Moore
Related Reading

The Bible is Infallible NOT Inerrant
While the cruciform understanding (explained here) of the “God-breathed” nature of Scripture is in tension with the way most talk about inerrancy (See previous post on inerrancy), I do not believe it is at all incompatible with what the Church has always sought to express by affirming the “infallibility” the Scripture. The core conviction is that Scripture will…

God is Like a Trojan Horse
Yesterday, I introduced a basic understanding of the Christus Victor view of Christ’s work on the cross. [Click here to read it.] Today, I want to expand on this briefly. Because God is a God of love who gives genuine “say-so” to both angels and humans, God rarely accomplishes his providential plans through coercion. God…

God’s Non-Violent Ideal in the OT
While God condescended to working within the violent-prone, fallen framework of his people in the Old Testament—as I argue in Crucifixion of the Warrior God—the OT is also full of references to how God worked to preserve his non-violent ideal as much as possible. He did this by continually reminding his people not to place…

Podcast: How Do You Teach a Cruciform Hermeneutic from the Pulpit?
Greg talks about infallibility and inerrancy. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0281.mp3

Crucifying Transcendence
The classical view of God’s transcendence in theology is in large borrowed from a major strand within Hellenistic philosophy. In sharp contrast to ancient Israelites, whose conception of God was entirely based on their experience of God acting dynamically and in self-revelatory ways in history, the concept of God at work in ancient Greek philosophy…

The Cross Reveals God’s Love
The central way Christ functions as the perfect image and exact representation of God is by dying on the cross. While Christ’s entire life manifests the true God, Christ came primarily to die. It was his death that defeated the devil and freed us from bondage. The one who does what is sinful is of…