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.
The Only Starting Point
![a celebrity [water] drop](https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2555/4212675120_414aca9094.jpg "a celebrity [water] drop")
Our friend Roger Olson wrote a great article on placing Jesus first when constructing a statement of faith. It might seem like a small thing, but it deeply matters what we place as primary in matters of faith. Let’s always begin with Jesus.
From Roger’s blog post:
What are we first and foremost—God-people, Bible-people, or Jesus-people?
Of course, someone will say “All of the above.” True enough. But when we say we are “God-people” or “Bible-people,” what do we mean? These are more vague and potentially misleading than “Jesus-people” which, although of course subject to misunderstanding, is clearer.
I believe our primary focus of faith as Christians, that which conditions all else, is Jesus. If he is God incarnate, as all orthodox Christians believe (or at least say they believe), or even the “human face of God,” as liberal Christians believe (or at least say they believe), then we cannot begin with a generic or even pre-Jesus “God,” what theologian Robert Jenson calls “unbaptized God,” and project that onto Jesus.
Category: General
Tags: Faith, Jesus, Roger Olson
Related Reading
What Type of Faith Do You Have?
Genesis 32 tells the story of Jacob, wrestling through the night with a nameless man, revealed to be none other than God Himself. We read that when this man “saw that he could not overpower” Jacob, he “touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man”…
What Does Spiritual Warfare Have To Do with the Cross?
Last week, we covered a few posts on the nature of the Atonement and the Christus Victor view. The following continues this theme, specifically looking the motif of spiritual warfare and how it relates to Christ’s work on the cross. This is an adaptation from Greg’s article in The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views. …
In the Wilderness of Religion
Eric Bryan via Compfight There are an awful lot of us in the Church today who are no longer feeling at home in Evangelicalism. Regardless of how you feel about World Vision’s hiring policy decisions, the spectacle of thousands of people discontinuing their child sponsorships (relationships with flesh and blood children in need) because of…
Trusting God for the Wrong Things
Chloe was a smart, personable, and devoted Christian student from South America whom I had the pleasure of teaching in several theology classes. In one meeting, Chloe confessed that, despite the confident appearance that she projected, she actually lived with a sense of guilt and had never felt like a good Christian. In fact, Chloe…
That Weird Episode with the Pigs
In my opinion, the single strangest episode recounted in the Gospels is the account of Jesus’ encounter with a demonized man that ended with two thousand pigs drowning themselves in the Sea of Galilee (Mk 5:1-10//Mt 8:28-34; Lk 8:26-39). Some find it morally objectionable that this mass suicide was the result of Jesus allowing the…
Did Jesus Believe in Satan?
Jesus’ teaching, his exorcisms, his healings and other miracles, as well as his work on the cross, all remain somewhat incoherent and unrelated to one another until we interpret them as acts of war. As in apocalyptic thought of the time of Jesus, the assumption that undergirds Jesus’ entire ministry is that Satan has illegitimately…