A Baptist preacher told this story to his congregation one Sunday: When God walked into heaven and found everyone there, he decided it was too crowded. He owed it to justice, did he not, to reward those who were faithful? So, he had one of his angels read the ten...
When the average American hears the word "justice," I think very often--unless they have been taught otherwise--the first idea they have is punishment, and that's unfortunate. Biblical justice is always restorative. The point is never simply punitive; the point is to...
The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
Discipline is helping a child solve a problem. Punishment is making a child suffer for having a problem. To raise problem solvers, focus on solutions.
The absolute religious genius of Jesus is that he utterly refuses all debt codes, purity codes, religious quarantines, and the searching for sinners. He refuses the very starting point of historic religions. He refuses to divide the world into the pure and the impure,...
Often hell is portrayed as a place of punishment and heaven as a place of reward. But this concept easily leads us to think about God as either a policeman, who tries to catch us when we make a mistake and send us to prison when our mistakes become too big, or a Santa...
Anger is an organic, living thing, and so is love. If we know how to handle our anger it can turn into love, just as when we know how to take care of our compost, we can transform it into a beautiful rose. Is garbage negative or positive? It can be positive, if we...
The Quaker writer Richard Foster was the first to alert me, I believe, to the important distinction between power and authority. Power is claimed; authority is earned. Power is based on being in charge and having the leverage to impose punishment on others who might...