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Living the Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Hope for Grace and Deliverance
In Living the Sermon on the Mount , theologian and award-winning author Glen H. Stassen helps us to see that the revolutionary ideas in the Sermon on the Mount about loving and caring for each other, living in peace, and acting justly are not unattainable ideals but a recipe for wholeness and healing in our human relationships and deliverance from the vicious cycles that we get stuck in.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2006
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About the author
Glen H. Stassen
17 books11 followersGlen Harold Stassen was a Southern Baptist theologian who helped define the social-justice wing of the evangelical movement in the 1980s and played a role in advancing nuclear disarmament talks toward the end of the Cold War.
Stassen studied nuclear physics at the University of Virginia and worked briefly in a naval laboratory after graduation before deciding that he could not contribute to the development of nuclear weapons. He quit to attend Union Theological Seminary in New York City and received his doctorate from the Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C., in 1967.
He taught at Kentucky Southern College (now part of the University of Louisville) and Berea College in Kentucky before joining Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. There, Dr. Stassen clashed with administrators who urged faculty members to place ideas like prohibiting abortion, the subordination of women in the family and the literal truth of biblical texts at the core of their teaching.
More than personal rectitude and obedience to rules of behavior, Dr. Stassen argued, Christian ethics demanded organized action to save the world from self-destruction.
“Christians need more than an ethic of ‘just say no,’ ” he wrote. “Jesus didn’t just say no to anger and revengeful resistance, but commanded transforming initiatives: ‘Go make peace with your brother or sister; go the second mile with the Roman soldier.’ ”
What Christians needed, he said, was “an ethic of constructive peacemaking.”
Dr. Stassen championed a pragmatic approach to social justice and world peace. In a series of books beginning in 1992, he outlined a program of grass-roots activism to reduce military spending, improve the lives of the disadvantaged and give citizens a voice in international conflict resolution.
Dr. Stassen’s version of political activism in the 1980s and ’90s put him at odds with leaders of the religious right, who were focusing on opposing abortion and gay rights.
Dr. Stassen was among the few prominent evangelical leaders to publicly challenge the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority, over his electioneering on behalf of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1984. And he was among the few to criticize Reagan over his domestic spending cuts, his military buildup and his use of the phrase “evil empire” in 1983 to describe the Soviet Union.
He went on to help mobilize the international disarmament movement that, by some accounts, played a role in removing intermediate range nuclear missiles from Western Europe in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
Theologians had long wrestled with the Christian response to war, and whether it was ever morally justified to kill. Two schools of thought had emerged: pacifism, which said it was never justified, and “just war” theory, which described circumstances in which killing in war was morally defensible. Dr. Stassen advocated what he called a third option: preventing wars from starting in the first place.
In Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives of Justice and Peace (1992) and a dozen other books on nonviolence and conflict resolution, Dr. Stassen described techniques for hard-nosed negotiating in which both parties admit culpability for past deeds, take a clearheaded measure of the interests of the other side and sometimes make calculated unilateral initiatives.
“Biblical realism,” as he described the mind-set for negotiations like these, “is about diagnosing sin realistically and seeking deliverance, not merely about affirming some high ideals.”
- summarised/edited from The New York Times Obituary
Stassen studied nuclear physics at the University of Virginia and worked briefly in a naval laboratory after graduation before deciding that he could not contribute to the development of nuclear weapons. He quit to attend Union Theological Seminary in New York City and received his doctorate from the Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C., in 1967.
He taught at Kentucky Southern College (now part of the University of Louisville) and Berea College in Kentucky before joining Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. There, Dr. Stassen clashed with administrators who urged faculty members to place ideas like prohibiting abortion, the subordination of women in the family and the literal truth of biblical texts at the core of their teaching.
More than personal rectitude and obedience to rules of behavior, Dr. Stassen argued, Christian ethics demanded organized action to save the world from self-destruction.
“Christians need more than an ethic of ‘just say no,’ ” he wrote. “Jesus didn’t just say no to anger and revengeful resistance, but commanded transforming initiatives: ‘Go make peace with your brother or sister; go the second mile with the Roman soldier.’ ”
What Christians needed, he said, was “an ethic of constructive peacemaking.”
Dr. Stassen championed a pragmatic approach to social justice and world peace. In a series of books beginning in 1992, he outlined a program of grass-roots activism to reduce military spending, improve the lives of the disadvantaged and give citizens a voice in international conflict resolution.
Dr. Stassen’s version of political activism in the 1980s and ’90s put him at odds with leaders of the religious right, who were focusing on opposing abortion and gay rights.
Dr. Stassen was among the few prominent evangelical leaders to publicly challenge the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority, over his electioneering on behalf of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1984. And he was among the few to criticize Reagan over his domestic spending cuts, his military buildup and his use of the phrase “evil empire” in 1983 to describe the Soviet Union.
He went on to help mobilize the international disarmament movement that, by some accounts, played a role in removing intermediate range nuclear missiles from Western Europe in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
Theologians had long wrestled with the Christian response to war, and whether it was ever morally justified to kill. Two schools of thought had emerged: pacifism, which said it was never justified, and “just war” theory, which described circumstances in which killing in war was morally defensible. Dr. Stassen advocated what he called a third option: preventing wars from starting in the first place.
In Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives of Justice and Peace (1992) and a dozen other books on nonviolence and conflict resolution, Dr. Stassen described techniques for hard-nosed negotiating in which both parties admit culpability for past deeds, take a clearheaded measure of the interests of the other side and sometimes make calculated unilateral initiatives.
“Biblical realism,” as he described the mind-set for negotiations like these, “is about diagnosing sin realistically and seeking deliverance, not merely about affirming some high ideals.”
- summarised/edited from The New York Times Obituary
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 28, 2023
I appreciate the way Stassen uses scripture, but it made it hard to read at times. If this wasn’t an assigned reading, I think I’d be as critical. Regardless, I think I’m better off now understanding the importance of the Sermon on the Mount. Our calling as Christians is simple: Love others the way the Lord loves us. If we can walk in step with how Jesus did, our path will be rich with his provisions.
September 29, 2024
Ratings on this one far too low. Excellent book on the sermon on the mount and needed contribution and corrective to many of our understandings of the Christian ethic. Worth reading even just for his structural and literary analysis of the sermon on the mount and its connections to Isaiah.
January 28, 2023
“Instead, [Jesus] teaches us to do something at our own initiative, under our own power, something that we are not forced to do, something surprising that is in itself a form of resistance.”
***
My 5 stars come from knowing this is a book that will continue talking to me. I love a book that makes me think: “Yeah, I’ll need to read this again, and again after that.”
Fourteen times, the book of Revelation says the followers of the Lamb will be known because they DO the deeds Jesus taught. There’s a lot in Revelation I don’t understand. But I can grasp that. The Sermon on the Mount teaches those deeds if I pay attention and see prayer, forgiveness, humility, repentance, restorative justice, togetherness, and God’s presence as incarnational - and not as high ideals or “gee wouldn’t this be nice” romanticism.
Stassen writes of needing a “thicker Jesus” to speak to us concretely on the narrow way. This is a thick 200 page book.
***
My 5 stars come from knowing this is a book that will continue talking to me. I love a book that makes me think: “Yeah, I’ll need to read this again, and again after that.”
Fourteen times, the book of Revelation says the followers of the Lamb will be known because they DO the deeds Jesus taught. There’s a lot in Revelation I don’t understand. But I can grasp that. The Sermon on the Mount teaches those deeds if I pay attention and see prayer, forgiveness, humility, repentance, restorative justice, togetherness, and God’s presence as incarnational - and not as high ideals or “gee wouldn’t this be nice” romanticism.
Stassen writes of needing a “thicker Jesus” to speak to us concretely on the narrow way. This is a thick 200 page book.
December 30, 2020
I read this book in conjunction with Watershed's study of the Sermon on the Mount, and it did not disappoint. Practical, down-to-earth, readable, deep - all the qualities of a good book to open the heart and mind to Jesus' life and teaching.
February 2, 2021
Stassens understanding of the sermon on the mounts structure is extremely helpful. Otherwise this commentary was an extremely mixed bag.
April 9, 2009
Frames the sermon on mount not as Jesus giving an idealistic pie-in-the-sky ethic that we can't live up to, but as a concrete and merciful way of living that releases us from cycles of dead-end violence.
December 31, 2017
A very practical guide to Jesus' most significant teaching.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews