“He is living in the dream castle of Christianity, which is so far up in the clouds that it does not even need a security system . . . Boyd describes these horrendous situations in such a way that never makes me wish that the Cherokee had had a couple thousand pacifists standing on the …
Lessons After Baptism
“What happens when the king is converted and submits to baptism? What’s next in the Commission? We teach him obedience to every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. We teach obedience to all things that Christ commanded. When we lead a stable hand to Christ, we baptize him and then teach him obedience. …
The Dull Kind of Cutting Edge
“If your whole schtick is that of being a prophetic voice, then you have to figure out what to do about the off-chance of real repentance. If that happened, then not only would the inhabitants of Nineveh repent in dust and ashes, but your whole political theology would have to repent in dust and ashes, …
Not Exactly a Mennonite Potluck
“For Jesus to associate with tax collectors was not an association with the oppressed. It was an association with the despised, all right, but with despised oppressors. The tax collectors were the guys who could send a SWAT team to your house, for Pete’s sake. The people who despised the tax collectors were actually the …
All You Need Is . . . No, Not that Kind
“Yes, what matters fundamentally is love. But in the Bible love sometimes knocks heads together, fights serpents and dragons, silences the foe and the avenger, and casts the godless into Hell” (Empires of Dirt, p. 86).
So Smoothly
“But [Greg] Boyd simply appeals to an NPR ethic, the kind of ethic that goes down smoothly with a five dollar latte” (Empires of Dirt, p. 85).
No Spirit Left
“So this means that Christians who labor now for the eradication of civil vice, folly, corruption, and tyranny—may their tribe increase—are working to shed a Zion light that the nations might enjoy. But when they have succeeded, they will not have achieved a Marxian ‘withering away’ of the state, or some kind of anarchist paradise. …
The New Jerusalem
“The New Jerusalem is not a figure of Heaven, the final eternal state, but is rather a glorious image of the Christian Church. This is explicit in a number of places. The Jerusalem above, Paul says, is the mother of us all (Gal. 4:26). When we come to worship God on the Lord’s Day, we …
Most Calvinists are Only Halfway There
“If you are Calvinist in your soteriology and historically Reformed in your ecclesiology, then you need to think Christendom is a good thing . . . If anabaptist assumptions had not carried the day, affecting virtually everybody who looks at Church-state issues, we would recognize this move [denying Christendom] as being as anachronistic as a …
Preferably Made out of Titanium
“Someone really does need to tell secularist America that her gods are genuinely pathetic. And currently, the Muslims are doing this because the Christians won’t. And the Christians who won’t do this are not so much in need of a different kind of theology as they are in need of a different kind of spine” …