The Irresistible Revolution, Updated and Expanded: Living as an Ordinary Radical

by Shane Claiborne

Ironically, when I was giving that talk titled “The Scandal of Grace,” I told the story of Bud Welch as I talked about how God’s love extends to all losers, whether Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Saul of Tarsus, Timothy McVeigh, or me. The program team showed a PowerPoint presentation using the “visual edition” of Philip Yancey’s work What’s So Amazing about Grace? In the PowerPoint, different images pop up behind the words “amazing grace that saved a wretch like me,” and different people’s faces are branded with the words “like me”—Mother Teresa, sports stars, celebrities—and one of them was Timothy McVeigh. It created such discomfort that the program team was told to remove the image of Timothy from the presentation before the second service. There is something scandalous about grace. It’s almost embarrassing that God loves losers so much. It flies in the face of the world’s myth of redemptive violence.