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Lighten Up: Meet Jesus
Not what you were expecting?
Category: General, Lighten Up
Tags: Foot Washing, Jesus, Lighten Up, Power, Servant
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Was Jesus Really Human Like the Rest of Us?
Did Jesus really live as a human like you and I do? Or did he walk around with special divine powers that we don’t have? In the previous post, I introduced the question: How was God both fully God and fully man? I explained the classical model of the Incarnation which views the incarnate Jesus…

What Does a Perfect God Look Like?
The “classical view of God” refers to the view of God that has dominated Christian theology since the earliest Church fathers. According to this theology, God is completely “immutable.” This means that God’s being and experience never changes in any respect. God is therefore pure actuality (actus purus), having no potentiality whatsoever, for potentiality is…

Voluntary Suffering and the Kingdom
In a post from two days ago, I wrote about the call to voluntary suffering for others as it is laid out in the New Testament. For the first three centuries of the church, Christians understood this call as they sought to follow Jesus’ example of forgoing the use of violence and expressing God’s self-sacrificial…

God is Not What You Expect
Jesus came, in part, to finally reveal the absolute truth about God. He is the way and the truth (alethia) and the life (Jn 14:6). The word “truth” means “uncovered.” And what we find once God is uncovered is that he’s completely different than what we fallen humans generally expect God to be. As we…

What do you think of the “Penal Substitution” view of the atonement?
If asked what Jesus came to do and how he did it, most contemporary western Christians would automatically say something like, “Jesus took the punishment from God that I deserved.” This is what’s usually called “Penal Substitution” view of the atonement, for it emphasizes that Jesus was punished by God in our place. His sacrifice…

Eye for Eye: That Time Jesus Refuted An Old Testament Teaching
One of the most surprising aspects of Jesus’ teaching is that, while he clearly shared his contemporaries’ view of the Old Testament as inspired by God, he was nevertheless not afraid of repudiating it when he felt led by his Father to do so (Jn. 8:28; 12:49-50; 14:31). For example, while the OT commands people…