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
Image courtesy of Theological Graffiti
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
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…
Does God Have a Dark Side?
In the previous post, I argued that we ought to allow the incarnate and crucified Christ to redefine God for us rather than assume we know God ahead of time and then attempt to superimpose this understanding of God onto Christ. When we do this, I’ve argued, we arrive at the understanding that the essence…
Who is Responsible for Job’s Suffering?
In the prologue of the Book of Job, the author seems to ascribe the responsibility for Job’s affliction to Yahweh. For instance, Satan challenges God to “stretch out [his] hand and strike everything he has,“ believing that this would incite Job to curse God to his face (1:11). The fact that the Lord responds by…
Who Curses the Earth?
After the “fall” of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their sin results in a five curses: on nature, on marriage, on human life, on the serpent, and on women during childbirth. Who is it exactly that afflicts the world with these curses? While the author speaks about the curses on nature (Gen…
When God Endorsed Polygamy
We often find God acting as if he supports things we know, by other means, that he does not. For example, though his ideal was monogamy, it’s clear in the biblical narrative that, once God decided to permit men to acquire multiple wives and concubines, he was not above bearing the sin of his people…
Is God Immutable? Part I
For a number of reasons, Plato believed that something changes only to become better or to become worse (Rep. II). Since a perfect being can’t be improved or diminished, he argued, God must be completely unchanging, As this idea was developed over time, Plato’s followers concluded that not only must God’s character be unchanging, but…