Healing the Gospel Quotes

“Of all sins, the sin of abusive authority is particularly dangerous because it masquerades as righteousness, claiming to speak for God.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“Christ has come to redeem us from the curse of the retributive principle.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“The incarnation is God’s shocking “Yes!” to fallen humanity. The resurrection is God’s defiant “No!” to sin and death, both in term of the hurt done to us and the hurt we do.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“We are confronted with our ugliness and hatefulness, and at the same time we see that God incarnate, rather than coming in wrath, is bearing that hurt for us.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“Many, if not most first-century Jews expected the messiah to be a man of war, and for the liberation to come through violent force. We see this reflected in the disciples’ own expectations for Jesus. Jesus, however, did not come to take life, but to give his own life. The gospel is indeed about the messiah’s “victory” over evil and injustice, but that messianic victory does not come through violent conquest and military force, but through restoration and healing.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“In other words, it is not the death of Jesus in itself, but rather the obedience of Jesus—his faithfulness to love—that acts to make us holy.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“sinners . . . I was angry with God . . . I drove myself mad with a desperate disturbed conscience.”4 It is not insignificant that Luther’s own father and mother were both harsh disciplinarians, but regardless of the cause, Luther had clearly internalized a crippling image of God as judge that tormented him until he discovered grace. This message of grace and forgiveness has been a life-changing one to many people over the ages since Luther rediscovered it, but it has often been tragically accompanied by a message of fear and condemnation itself. Luther, for example, preached that one must face the horrors of wrath before one could come to grace. In other words, he believed that everyone needed to be forced to go through the horrible struggle he did before they could hear about grace. Ever since then, there has been a long history of revival preachers who have proclaimed this “pre-gospel” of fear, threat, and condemnation—telling people the bad news so they could then receive the good news, wounding people first, so they could then heal those wounds. The philosophy behind this strategy is that people need to be shaken out of their complacency and made ready to respond to the gospel. This may indeed be true for some, but for others it amounts to little more than abuse, and has resulted in a hurtful image of God being hammered into their heads that has estranged them from God, and driven them away from faith. For a person struggling with moral failure, facing up to their brokenness and realizing that God loves them and died for them despite it is a crucial step towards life. But to tell a person whose sin is self-hatred that they need to face how bad and worthless they are is like making them swallow the wrong prescription medicine—what was healing to the first person,”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“People do not learn empathy by being shamed and dehumanized. On the contrary, developing empathy has a lot to do with a healthy sense of self-worth. So while we may feel an impulse to want to punish and hurt those who have hurt us, this does not mend the hurt, it simply perpetuates it. In other words, punishment and shame are not the solution, they are a part of the problem. Punitive justice does not make things better, it makes them worse. As”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“This does not mean that God condones evil and pain, but that God overcomes evil with good.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“This is the great reversal of the cross. God enters into our darkness and makes justice come about despite injustice.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“Christ enters into our doubt, abandonment, pain, lostness, and grief so that with, in, and through Christ we can rise to new life in the middle of a dark world.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“As a result, the suffering of the Servant not only acts to reveal our sin of religious violence, but also acts to unmask the very system of retributive justice itself.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“the purpose of the Servant’s vicarious suffering is to heal us (restorative justice), and this is done in the context of loving us despite our sin and injustice in falsely condemning and crushing the Servant (enemy love).”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“It is a message intended to bring us to our knees, and the very system of retribution along with it.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“and simultaneously we see that the Servant has endured our injustice in order to heal us.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“The mask of our self-righteousness is pulled away; the sin of the entire system of retributive justice is exposed;”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“We are called to repent of religiously justified hatred and violence.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“The song of the Suffering Servant is thus a call to repentance,”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“While penal substitution focuses almost exclusively on our individual salvation, Christus Victor understands our salvation within the larger picture of a cosmic victory over evil.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“God has come in Christ to ransom us from Satan’s dominion, not to affirm it.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“If we wish to understand sacrifice as the New Testament does, our starting point is to think of it in the context of healing and restoration, and as a demonstration of costly love.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“Jesus had not come only to forgive sin, but to liberate us from everything that could separate us from God and life, whether that meant crushing illness, dehumanizing poverty, or spirals of destructive behavior.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

“As Walter Wink writes, “Nothing is deadlier to the spirit of Jesus’ teaching on nonviolence than regarding it legalistically.”
― Derek Flood, Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross