545 results for tag: blog

Jesus as Scapegoat – Richard Rohr

Christianity Without the Religion All the great religions of the world talk a lot about death, so there must be an essential lesson to be learned here. But throughout much of religious history our emphasis has been on killing the wrong thing and avoiding the truth: it’s you who has to die, or rather, who you think you are—your false self. It's never someone else! Historically we moved from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to various modes of seeming self-sacrifice, usually involving the body. For many religions, including immature Christianity, God was distant and scary, an angry deity who must be placated. God ...

How Does “Dying For Our Sins” Work? – Brian Zahnd

How Does “Dying For Our Sins” Work? Brian Zahnd When we say “Jesus died for our sins,” what does that mean? It’s undeniably an essential confession of Christian faith, but how does it work? This much I’m sure of, it’s not reducible to just one thing. I’ve just finished preaching eight sermons on “The Crucified God” and I know I’ve barely scratched the surface of what the cross means. To try to reduce the death of Jesus to a single meaning is an impoverished approach to the mystery of the cross. I’m especially talking about those tidy explanations of the cross known as “atonement theories.” I find most of them ...

What does God without retribution look like? Ask Jesus — by Michael Hardin

Nothing irks some folks more than losing a God who is wrathful, angry, retributive and punishing. This is only because we want so much to believe that God takes sides, and that side is inevitably our side.  So much of Jesus’s teaching subverts this sacrificial way of thinking. One example is the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector found in Luke 18:9-14, where what counts as righteousness is completely and totally turned on its head! If, in fact, as I argued in my last post, that Jesus begins his ministry by asking what God without retribution looks like (Luke 4), and if he acts this way in his ministry, and if he interprets his ...

A More Christlike God – Brad Jersak & Roger Mitchell (Sparks 2016 Workshop)

"A More Christ-like God" - Brad Jersak's Workshop at SPARKS Brad Jersak is an author and teacher based in Abbotsford, BC. He is on faculty at Westminster Theological Centre (Cheltenham, UK), and is also the editor in chief of CWR (Christianity Without the Religion) Magazine. Brad’s most recent book, "A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel," seeks to detoxify our images of God to present the Incarnation of Christ as our clearest vision of the nature of God as love. “SPARKS” 2016 was a weekend of conversation and discovery at Ashburnham Place to explore the following theme: “How to remain present, faith-filled, and resilient in the ...

The Wrath of God – Nuanced as Divine Consent – Brad Jersak

A pastor-friend of mine from America was telling me about how one of his pristine elderly congregants was lamenting news of the latest death of their troops in the Middle East. This precious Christian lady said, “Our boys are over there getting killed by the people they are trying to help. Maybe we need another Hiroshima.” Why do we go there? My best answer: the language of wrath is an expression of our felt-need for God to straighten out the ‘bent-ness’ of injustice in our world. Even those who don’t profess faith find themselves looking over their shoulder when tragedy strikes. “What did I do to deserve this?” We find oursel...