Tag: Gospel
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Our Story is Revolutionary
(What marks us as Christians) is unreserved love for our enemies, for the unloving and the unloved, love for our religious, political and personal adversaries. In every case it is the love which was fulfilled in the cross of Christ. –Bonhoeffer There cannot be anything more revolutionary than a lifestyle of love for our enemies. […]
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A Reflection for Holy Week: Is Theology Reading, Living or Dying?
We theologians are famous for missing the point. Oh, we love to be embroiled in a controversy of whether or not God selects us before we select him, but we oftentimes run right past the starting point and forget to remember our basic problem: our hearts are dark. The fact that we miss that point […]
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Evil, Narcissism, Laziness and a Call to Action
Last week, I heard about a book, now nearly thirty years old, written by a psychiatrist named M. Scott Peck called People of the Lie (Schriebner and Sons 1983). Over his years as a therapist and analyst, Dr. Peck began to realize that there was something missing in his tool-box. He knew all about multiple […]
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Simple Words
Words hold a unique power to give life and to take it away. It is no minor detail that the Christian story begins with a God who speaks. In the beginning, God spoke the earth into existence, piece by piece. First, he formed the stuff of life, in the old theologian’s terms, ex nihilo, that […]
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The Power of Another
Lately I’ve been hitting something of a wall in my writing. I kind of feel like Steve Martin in The Jerk, telling his family about his odd jobs. One way he had found to make money was to give blood, which worked out just fine until “I cut myself shaving and nothing came out but […]
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Seeking Justice For Our Own Injustices
The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer Well, it happened again. The police swooped in and arrested a professor at one of the top Christian universities and he now awaits his trial on charges of the possession of child pornography. As many times as these […]
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Finally, the End has Come! Jonah Meets the Fish
Finally. I bet that is just the word Jonah said, as his breath bubbled up to the surface. Finally, the end has come. There are a couple of ways to picture the prophet Jonah in the little vignettes of his life. The story can be read as sort-of a sandwich of rebellion, obedience and rebellion- […]
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Jonah, the Hoarding Prophet
It was a dark and stormy night and I was all alone in front of the television. All of a sudden, my life changed in the blink of an eye. Before I knew it, I found myself curled up into a ball of crawling skin and terror. Years ago, you would have to pay admission […]
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Joe Paterno: A Legacy to Learn From
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. –Edmund Burke Last night we learned of the death of a truly great man. What can you say about a man who was married for half a century (to the same woman!) and worked at the same job, training […]
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Reflections on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Freedom and the Gospel
Are you truly free? This question has been with me all weekend, as I have kept coming back to the very nature of slavery, freedom and covenant. Did Jesus come to live this life for me, die my death for me, raise to new life for me, mediate for me in the presence of God […]
Casey Hobbs 