Greg Boyd
How To Fix The Church: The Kingdom of God (Part 4)
Category: General
Tags: Church, Jesus, Kingdom, Kingdom Living
Topics: Following Jesus
God has leveraged everything on the Church loving like Jesus loved, as outlined in our previous posts in this series. “By this the world will know you are my disciples,” Jesus said, “by your love”…
The Only Thing That Matters Is Love: The Kingdom of God (Part 3)
Category: General
Tags: Jesus, Kingdom, Kingdom Living, Living in Love, Love
Topics: Following Jesus
To say that living in Calvary-quality love is the most important thing in our life is to grossly understate its importance. This stands in distinction from how we typically define the Kingdom of God. But…
The Kingdom of God (Part 2)
Category: General
Tags: Action, Enemy Love, Jesus, Kingdom Living, Self-Sacrificial Love
Topics: Following Jesus
The Church is called to be nothing less than “the body of Christ,” a sort of corporate extension of Jesus’ incarnate body. We are called to replicate who Jesus was by manifesting who Jesus is….
What is the Kingdom of God (Part 1)
Category: General
Tags: Holiness, Jesus, Kingdom, Kingdom Living, National Idolatry, Upside-Down Kingdom, War
Topics: Following Jesus
We all know what the Kingdom of God is, right? But this is precisely the problem. Since we are all to a large extent products of our culture, what seems obviously true and right to…
Rethinking Transcendence
Category: General
Tags: Classical Theism, Cruciform Theology, Philosophy, Transcendence
Topics: Interpreting Violent Pictures and Troubling Behaviors
Going back to pre-Socratic philosophers and running through the major strands of the church’s theological tradition, the conception of how God (or, in ancient Greece, “the One”) was arrived at primarily by negating the contingent…
The Call to a Cruciform Life
Category: General
Tags: Cruciform Theology, Enemy Love, Kingdom Living
Topics: Following Jesus
Jesus repeatedly taught that following him meant that one had to be willing to “pick up their cross daily and follow [him]” (Lk 9:23; 14:27). Picking up our cross is the centerpiece of following Jesus…
Love and Violence
Category: General
Tags: Augustine, Cruciform Theology, God is Love, Violence
What does it mean to confess that “God is love” and that we are called to “live in love” (Eph. 5:2)? One of the more common ways of understanding God’s love has its roots in…
A Dialogue with Derek Flood Part 2: Is ALL of the Bible Inspired?
Category: General
Tags: Bible, Biblical Authority, Book Reviews, Cruciform Theology, Derek Flood, Disarming Scripture, Inspiration, Jesus
Topics: Interpreting Violent Pictures and Troubling Behaviors
Image by TheRevSteve via Flickr Yesterday, I offered the first part of my response to Flood’s comments regarding my review of his book. Today I’ll finish up my thoughts. Scripture and Its Interpretation Flood confesses that he is…
A Dialogue with Derek Flood: Is the Bible Infallible?
Category: General
Tags: Bible, Biblical Authority, Book Reviews, Cruciform Theology, Derek Flood, Disarming Scripture, Infallibility, Inspiration, Non-Violence
Topics: Interpreting Violent Pictures and Troubling Behaviors
I’m happy to see that Derek Flood has responded to my four part review of his book, Disarming Scripture. His response—and, I trust, this reply to his response—models how kingdom people can strongly disagree on…
4 Reasons to Wake Up to the Warfare Worldview
Category: General
Tags: Culture, Demons, Evil, Satan, Spiritual Warfare, Warfare Worldview, Western Assumptions
Topics: Spiritual Warfare, Cosmic Conflict
Image by postbear via Flickr A view of the world that grounds the problem of evil in spiritual warfare is not one that many modern people find easy to accept. To many contemporaries, the notion is…
Part 4: An Alternative Cross-Centered Approach
Category: General
Tags: Bible, Book Reviews, Cruciform Theology, Derek Flood, Disarming Scripture, Jesus, Magic Eye, OT Violence
Topics: Interpreting Violent Pictures and Troubling Behaviors
Image by Karl Pang via Flickr As I mentioned in Part II of this review, I am deeply appreciative of the fact that Flood grasps the centrality of enemy-loving non-violence in Jesus’ revelation of God. And…
Part 3: Disarming Flood’s Inadequate Conception of Biblical Authority
Category: General
Tags: Bible, Biblical Authority, Biblical Criticism, Book Reviews, Derek Flood, Disarming Scripture, Jesus, OT Violence
Image by Ex-InTransit via Flickr In this third part of my review of Derek Flood’s Disarming Scripture I will offer a critique of his redefined conception of biblical inspiration and authority. I will begin by having…
Part 2: Disarming Flood’s Case Against Biblical Infallibility
Category: General
Tags: Bible, Biblical Authority, Book Reviews, Derek Flood, Disarming Scripture, Jesus, OT Violence, Paul
Image by humancarbine via Flickr In this second part of my review of Disarming Scripture I will begin to address its strengths and weakness. [Click here for Part 1] There is a great deal in Disarming…
Must We Deny Biblical Infallibility to “Disarm” Scripture? A Review of Derek Flood’s Disarming Scripture: Part 1
Category: General
Tags: Bible, Biblical Authority, Book Reviews, Derek Flood, Disarming Scripture
Image by e³°°° via Flickr Since I’ve been working on my own book dealing with the violent portraits of God in the Old Testament for the last eight and a half years, I was keenly interested…
Is Islam Inherently Violent?
Category: Q&A
Tags: Christianity, Islam, Religion, Religious Violence, Violence
An increasing number of people, especially in conservative Christian circles, are claiming that Islam is an inherently violent religion. They point to all the violence in the history of Islam and all of the violence…
Goodbye Beloved “Friend at First Sight”
Category: General
Tags: Death, Europe, Friends, Gaby Hitipeuw, Love
I don’t believe in “love at first sight,” but I do believe that once in a great while, some fortunate people encounter “friends at first sight.” Maybe you know what I’m talking about. There are…
“Natural” Evil? 7 Arguments Implicating Satan
Category: General
Tags: Creation, God at War, Natural Evil, Problem of Evil, Satan, Theodicy, Warfare Worldview
Topics: Creation Care, Spiritual Warfare, Cosmic Conflict
Image by Jmos® via Flickr We believe that God is the Creator of nature, but nature simply does not seem to point to a God of love. Parasites, viruses, bacteria, diseases and cancer kill millions and torment…
A Book That Won’t Leave You Unchanged
Category: General
Tags: Books, Frank Viola, Imagination, Jesus, Mary DeMuth, The Day I Met Jesus
St. Ignatius of Loyola, the 16th century founder of the Jesuits, taught that to experience the transforming power of Scripture, we need to read it “with all five senses,” using our imagination to get on…
Our Real Battle is NOT with ISIS or any Other “Enemy”
Category: General
Tags: Evil, Spiritual Warfare, The Real Enemy, Warfare Worldview
Topics: Spiritual Warfare, Cosmic Conflict
There’s an old African proverb that says, “When Elephants fight, the grass suffers.” It expresses the important truth that when agents who have a domain of authority go awry, everything under their authority suffers. The…
What Unfulfilled Prophesies Say About the Open View
Category: General
Tags: Free Will, Future, Goldingay, Open Theism, Prophesy
Topics: Open Theism
Image by Lori Greig via Flickr Yesterday, we posted about how Messianic prophesies are understood in the open view of the future. Today, this post will look at prophesies that are not fulfilled in the way predicted…