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.

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

Did Jesus Have Two Minds?
As I laid out in the previous post, I believe Jesus is fully God and fully human. The question is: How is this possible? How do we talk about the way that Jesus was fully God and fully man? The Creed of Chalcedon (451) tries to answer the question this way: We, then, following the…

Christ the Center
The center of the Christian faith is not anything we believe; it’s the person of Jesus Christ. The foundation of my faith is a person, not a book and a set of beliefs about that book. Rather than believing in Jesus because I believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God, I came…

Jesus Feminist
http://youtu.be/FBYELPZmdL4 Sarah Bessey’s book Jesus Feminist releases today. We’re so excited for her and for anyone who gets to read this book. She is first, and foremost a disciple of Jesus, and her embrace of feminism is inextricably wrapped in her identity as a disciple. Here’s a little snippet of something she’s written that beautifully…

Thinking Theologically
In a previous post, I challenged the common notion that the Scripture is the foundation or the center of our faith. Instead, it’s my conviction that the only place to begin is Jesus Christ. Paul says that Jesus Christ is the foundation” (1 Cor 3:11). And Peter proclaimed that Jesus is the “cornerstone” that “the…

Is the Jesus of Revelation Wrathful?
In the second coming of Jesus, will he turn with wrath? Will he come as a roaring lion, ready to put on his display all of his anger, power, and might? What does the Jesus revealed in Revelation look like? This is a short clip that addresses these questions. If you want to watch the…

Podcast: Is Cruciform Hermeneutics Simply Midrash?
Greg considers whether Cruciform Hermeneutics is just a complicated way of seeing what I want to see in the text, and offers nuanced thought for our more complicated hermeneutical challenges. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0307.mp3