"Everyone knows this is where history is headed." That sentence has a soothing tone... It’s the drowsy lullaby that nothing we do matters except keeping our heads down and our hands clean. But empires love that sentence. So do strongmen, party bosses, and anyone who...
The Christian who is misinformed; who is subject to the demagoguery of extremists in the press or radio, or on TV, and who is perhaps to some extent temperamentally inclined to associate himself with fanatical groups in politics, can do an enormous amount of harm to...
And what I'm willing to do, which the mainstream church is not, is to denounce the Christian right as Christian heretics. You don't have to, as I did, spend three years at Harvard Divinity School to realize that Jesus didn't come to make us rich. And he certainly...
Churches who teach the only gospel is salvation while ignoring or denying the Gospel that Jesus claimed as His mission--to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth--are teaching an incomplete gospel and not the complete Gospel of Jesus, the Christ.
People are all about using the Bible to make laws until they get to the words of Jesus... "Love your enemies.""The first shall be last.""Lay down your sword.""Set the oppressed free.""You cannot serve God and money.""Sell all your possessions and give the money to the...
There’s nothing quite as disturbing as watching those who claim to follow Jesus mock and dehumanize the very people Jesus loved and even the kind of people exhibiting the same characteristics he did, like being a man who freely expressed emotions and cried. Jesus said...
If your Christianity causes you to mock people with disabilities... If your Christianity causes you to mock the genuine expressions of emotion and love... If your Christianity causes you to mock men who cry... Your Christianity has nothing to do with Jesus.
It is not the task of the church to "Make America Great Again." The contemporary task of the church is to make Christianity countercultural again. And once we untether Jesus from the interests of empire, we begin to see just how countercultural and radical Jesus'...
The Church is not to be found at the "center" of a left/right political world. The Church is to be a species of its own kind, confounding left, right, and center, and finding its identity from the "center" of God's life in Christ.
Jesus doesn't save us from a monstrous God who damns people to hell for coloring outside the lines. Jesus saves us from being monsters who draw normative lines that make life hell for others. The lines that matter are the boundaries required by human dignity. Those...