Bob

“For every high-profile would-be ‘Christian’ leader who has led all-too-willing followers into a battle based on lies, arrogance, greed and the lust for power, there are (thank God) countless unsung heroines and heroes who have heeded the words of Jesus about those who want to be leaders needing to be the servant of all. Between”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

“Before the United States entered World War I, forty-six million Protestants and sixty-two million Catholics were trying to kill forty-five million Protestants and sixty-three million Catholics on the other side. In that war, Christians succeeded in killing millions of other Christians. Reflecting back on the war in 1925, one Christian said, “Christian nations engaged in the most frightful carnage of history. No human device of cruelty and murder was too terrible to use. No human ingenuity was inappropriate for the purpose of destroying life. Nominal and real Christians fought other nominal and real Christians. Pulpits behind both trenches preached the crusade, held the cross before armed regiments and called down upon the carnage the blessing of God.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“Christian nationalism is impoverished as it seeks a kingdom without a cross. It pursues a victory without mercy. It acclaims God’s love of power rather than the power of God’s love. We must remember that Jesus refused those who wanted to ‘make him king’ by force just as much as he refused to become king by calling upon ‘twelve legions of angels’.39 Jesus needs no army, arms or armoured cavalry to bring about the kingdom of God. As such, we should resist Christian nationalism as giving a Christian facade to nakedly political, ethnocentric and impious ventures.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

“McKnight is right: the “atonement is all about creating a society in which God’s will is actualized—on planet earth, in the here and now.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence