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God of law versus the God of grace.
God as the lawgiver and judge is the God of “works” that Paul and Luther and the Protestant Reformation in general rejected. Instead, they affirmed radical grace: God’s acceptance of us is unconditional, not dependent upon something we believe or do.
unconditional grace is not about the afterlife, but the basis for our relationship with God in this life.
God loves us already—and then beginning to live in this relationship.
This is the central meaning of incarnation: Jesus is what can be seen of God embodied in a human life. He is the revelation, the incarnation, of God’s character and passion—of what God is like and of what God is most passionate about. He shows us the heart of God. And because Christians find the ultimate disclosure of God in a person and not in a book, Jesus is more central than the Bible. Jesus trumps the Bible; when they disagree, Jesus wins.
Jesus continued to be experienced by his followers after his death as a divine reality of the present, and that such experiences continue to happen today;
no matter how much he may look like us. Moreover, whenever we emphasize the divinity of Jesus at the expense of his humanity, we lose track of the utterly remarkable human being that he was.
In the decades between Easter and the writing of the gospels, the traditions about Jesus developed; that is, they grew.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.6
CS Lewis
he probably did not speak of himself as the Messiah, the Son of God, the Light of the World, and so forth. Rather, this is the voice of the community in the years and decades after Easter. It is not the language of self-proclamation, but the community’s testimony to Jesus’ significance in their lives.
“I believe Jesus is the Lamb of God, the Light of the World, the Bread of Life, the Word of God, and the Son of God.” To state the obvious, Jesus is not a lamb or a sheep, not a flame or a candle, not a loaf, not a word (not a sound or writing on a page). These are all metaphors.
In the Hebrew Bible, Israel is called son of God, as are the kings of Israel and Judah.
a son could represent a father and speak with the authority of the father.
Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive revelation of what a life full of God looks like. Radically centered in God and filled with the Spirit, he is the decisive disclosure and epiphany of what can be seen of God embodied in a human life. As the Word and Wisdom and Spirit of God become flesh, his life incarnates the character of God, indeed, the passion of God. In him we see God’s passion.
To paraphrase William Sloane Coffin, a contemporary author and activist: for us as Christians, God is defined by Jesus, but not confined to Jesus.
Its most visible public activity was its inclusive meal practice, often targeted by Jesus’ critics. He ate with the marginalized and outcasts. It was eating together as a simultaneously religious and political act done in the name of the Kingdom of God.
“Why was he killed?” the historical answer is because he was a social prophet and movement initiator, a passionate advocate of God’s justice, and radical critic of the domination system who had attracted a following. If Jesus had been only a mystic, healer, and wisdom teacher, he almost certainly would not have been executed. Rather, he was killed because of his politics—because of his passion for God’s justice.
“atonement theology.” Its most familiar form is the statement, “Jesus died for your sins.”
We do not think that Jesus thought that the purpose of his life, his vocation, was his death. His purpose was what he was doing as a healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement initiator. His death was the consequence of what he was doing, but not his purpose.
the domination system, understood as something much larger than the Roman governor and the temple aristocracy, is responsible for the death of Jesus.
dying to an old way of being and being raised into a new way of being.
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”18 Paul refers to himself as having undergone an internal crucifixion so that the old Paul is dead and a new Paul, now one with Christ, lives. The cross reveals “the way,” indeed is “the way.”
Our sins can be forgiven only if an adequate sacrifice is made.
to affirm “Jesus is the sacrifice for sin” was to deny the temple’s claim to have a monopoly on forgiveness and access to God. It was an antitemple statement. Using the metaphor of sacrifice, it subverted the sacrificial system. It meant: God in Jesus has already provided the sacrifice and has thus taken care of whatever you think separates you from God;
“Jesus died for our sins” was originally a subversive metaphor, not a literal description of either God’s purpose or Jesus’ vocation.
Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.
Barbara Ehrenreich
I don’t think that Jesus literally died for our sins. I don’t think he thought of his life and purpose that way;
Jesus is a metaphor of God.
As metaphor of God, Jesus discloses what God is like. We see God through Jesus.
I think Jesus would have said, “It’s not about me.” During his lifetime, he deflected attention from himself. In an illuminating passage in our earliest gospel, when a man addressed him as “Good Teacher,” Jesus responded with, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”
When being born again leads to a rigid kind of righteousness, judgmentalism, and sharp boundaries between an in-group and an out-group, it’s either not a genuine born-again experience or it has a lot of static in it.
To follow Jesus meant to follow him on the path of death.
When Paul resolved to “preach nothing but Christ and Christ crucified,” this is most centrally what he meant: the cross as symbol of the process of personal transformation at the heart of the Christian life.
What is “the way” that Jesus incarnates? What is “the way” that Jesus is? For John, as for the New Testament generally, “the way” embodied in Jesus is the path of death and resurrection. Dying and rising is the only way to God.
the early Christian movement saw the cross as a symbol of “the way.” It embodies “the way”: the path of transformation, the way to be born again. The cross, the central symbol of Christianity, points to the process at the heart of the Christian life: dying and rising with Christ, being raised to newness of life, being born again in Christ, in the Spirit.
Oppressed people, in society and in the family, have often been told to put their own selves last out of obedience to God. When thus understood, the message of the cross become an instrument of oppressive authority and self-abdication.
The way of the cross involves dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, dying to an old way of being and being raised to a new way of being, one centered in God.
Thomas Keating calls “the false self,” the self created and conferred by culture.
Dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, dying to an old way of being and living into a new way of being, is a process that continues through a lifetime.
Lao Tzu said: “If you want to become full, let yourself be empty; if you want to be reborn, let yourself die.”
when Jesus is seen as the incarnation of a path universally spoken about elsewhere, the path we see in him has great credibility.
Spirituality combines awareness, intention, and practice. I define it as becoming conscious of and intentional about a deepening relationship with God.
Paul’s most famous description of the new life is found in 1 Corinthians 13, often called Paul’s “hymn to love.”
If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
1 Cor 13
“And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” For Paul, love is the primary gift of the Spirit, indeed the definitive gift.
You cannot be a born again Christian wjithout love
For Jesus, the primary quality of a life centered in God is compassion. When Jesus sums up theology and ethics in a few words, he says: “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.”
You cannot be a born again Christian without compassion
The Bible is political as well as personal. It combines sharp political criticism and passionate political advocacy: radical criticism of systems of domination and impassioned advocacy of an alternative social vision.
So long as the wedding of Christianity and dominant culture continued, Christians seldom engaged in radical criticism of the social order.
seeing the opposite of justice as mercy distorts what the Bible means by justice. Most often in the Bible, the opposite of God’s justice is not God’s mercy, but human injustice.
Human injustice is the opposite of God's mercy
In the United States in particular, there is yet another reason why we often miss the Bible’s passion for justice. Our culture is dominated by an ethos of individualism. It is our core cultural value: we are probably the most individualistic culture in human history.
