A Community Called Atonement: Living Theology

by Scot McKnight

we “belong” before we “believe”

Wherever you go in the Bible, it is the same: the work of God is to form a community in which the will of God is done and through which one finds both union with God and communion with others for the good of others and the world.

We might have rights for happiness, but what makes humans happy is not determined necessarily by having those rights.

define justice as behavior that conforms to the teachings of Jesus and, at the same time, as behavior that emerges from the Spirit's direction.

Love of God, self, others, and the world is what is right.

Justice in the Bible is not just deconstruction and construction, but creative, regenerating grace.

The great debate of Acts 15, when the leading lights of the day weighed in on who should count in the church, cannot be reduced to the conditions upon which one is acceptable to God.

Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Is not this to know me? says the LORD.

the sense of justice in the Bible is altogether and unabashedly relational.

Justice, then, cannot be reduced (though it often is) to revenge or retribution. Instead, it is the redemptive grace of God at work in God's community of faith that preemptively strikes with grace, love, peace, and forgiveness to restore others to selves, and to restore selves to others.6

“But if we see human beings as children of the one God, created by God to belong all together as a community of love, then there will be good reasons to let embrace—love—define what justice is.”7

missio Dei: God is a missionary God, the church is mission, and the church has no mission but the “mission of God.”

The church is the church only when it exists for others. To make a start, it should give away all its property to those in need. The clergy must live solely on the free-will offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling. The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live in Christ, to exist for others. In particular, our own church will have to take the field against the vices of hubris, power-worship, envy, and humbug, as the roots of all evil It must not under-estimate the importance of human example (which has its origin in the humanity of Jesus and is so important in Paul's teaching); it is not abstract argument, but example, that gives its word emphasis and power.6

Instead of simply summoning folks to the church once or twice a week, the God of the New Testament sends the (previously gathered) church into the world to witness to God's saving presence with the summons to invite others into that saving presence.

One of the first things we need to see about the faith of Christians is that they had their Christian faith before they had the Bible.

While the Bible is basic to Christianity, it is also marginal—in that God alone occupies the center of the faith, and that both belief in God and the believing community predate and will succeed Scripture's present form and roles.4

knowing more Bible doesn’t necessarily make me a better Christian.