To Think God as Love

The following is from the apologist Origen‘s (185-254 c.e.) response to the philosopher Celsus, who excoriated Christianity as a disgusting, illogical, and worthless faith. What Origen said regarding Christian responsibility to king and country remains true for us, now no less than then. In the next place, Celsus urges us “to help the king with all our might, [...]

24After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?”  25″Yes, he does,” he replied.        When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings [...]

Stanley Hauerwas loves to quote John Howard Yoder as saying, “People who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe.” Agreed. And yet. People who bear crosses certainly are working with the grain insofar as they are acting with Christ, who is – in that very act of bearing his cross –  revealing [...]

Given Christ’s eucatastrophic death at the hands of the powers, what are we to do? As Christians, we have to speak the truth to the powers, to remind the world – both the suprapersonal structures of worldly existence and the human figures and institutions ordered by these structures – that they have a right to be [...]

I argued before that public condemnation, scourging, and crucifixion at the hands of the Jewish and Roman religio-political powers was the only possible – though not the fated – end for Jesus’ career. Given what it was he was attempting to do, no other death would have been fitting. Given that, I want to attempt to [...]

In his work on the Incarnation, St Athanasius asks why it was necessary for Jesus to suffer such a horrific and ghastly and humiliating death by public crucifixion? “Surely,” he speculates, “it would have been more suitable for Him to have laid aside His body with honour than to endure so shameful a death.” Why did Jesus [...]

Behind the powers of the world, the religio-political institutions that dominated life in the ancient world, some of the Hebrew prophets (the apocalyptics) discerned the influence of invisible, heavenly powers. For example, Isaiah (24.21) prophecies that in the “day of the Lord” YHWY will punish the powers in the heavens above and the kings on [...]

The same Spirit that rested upon Jesus, rests upon the church, as Christ’s body. The church therefore bears responsibility in the struggle against evil. Yet our battle differs from Jesus’ in this regard: he overcame evil in his death and being resurrected; we witness to this victory. We have only to remind the “principalities and powers” (more [...]

Any talk about spiritual warfare must begin with talk about Jesus. In him, we discover the enemy whom we’re fighting and God’s tactics for defeating that enemy. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” (Lk 4.16-21). In this claim, Jesus evokes a traditional way of speaking about Israel’s religious/political leaders -  judges, prophets, and [...]