The faith Christ taught us is what we see in Saint Joseph. He did not look for shortcuts, but confronted reality with open eyes and accepted personal responsibility for it. Joseph’s attitude encourages us to accept and welcome others as they are, without exception, and to show special concern for the weak, for God chooses what is weak.
I Can’t Breathe
Rev. Dr. Charlie E. Dates
“This theology embraces only one beam of the cross: the vertical beam. It fails miserably to embrace the horizontal beam. This theology thinks you can love God and rob your neighbor of the very breath that God put in his body… This theology that tells them how to get to heaven but does not show them how to live with their brother and sister on earth is inadequate and thoroughly unbiblical.”
Towards a Theology of Race, Part 2
Stuart McAlpine
“The root of racial irreconciliation is the disconnect of the image of God in us with a relationship with God himself.”
Engaging the State: Towards Political Peace Witness
Elisabeth Toews Harder
In this selection from Elisabeth Toews Harder’s essay, she outlines what it means for contemporary Anabaptists to relate to the state as they seek political peace.
Love the Ones Who Don’t Love You
Father Maxym Lysack
“What is the Lord asking us to do? He’s asking us to love those who don’t love us at all. This is not the natural level. This is Christianity.”
“And lo, I am with you always…”
Pope John Paul II
“We know how history flows on earth, how far we can go [in understanding that history] with the help of our cognitive methods. …We know a lot. We know ever more. At times even that which we know can hinder us in perceiving that which is most important. We know too how history has flowed in our fatherland within the limits of one millennium of history, already after Christ. Already within the limits of what St. Paul called “the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4). We know that in our century resistance and opposition against Him who “so loved the world” has risen—opposition and resistance that extends to a negation of God. To programmatic atheism. But none of this can change the fact of Christ. The fact of the Eucharist. No matter how much God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is rejected by people. No matter if people and societies govern their lives by ignoring God, as if God did not exist. No matter how far negation and sin goes. None of this changes the basic fact: there was and there continues to be in the history of mankind—and in the history of the universe—a Man, a true Son of Man, who “loved to the end.” He loved God with a love that is worthy of God, like a Son for a Father. Love above everything, with all His heart and all His soul, with all His strength, all the way to its ultimate depletion in the agony of Golgotha. . . . That man, Jesus Christ, is a “sign of opposition.” But no matter how far that opposition towers over human heart in history, in the history of societies and world-views, His love “to the end” remains human. And that is the love of redemption. That is the love of salvation. . . .”
Toward a Theology of Race, Part 1
Stuart McAlpine
How does one do good biblical exegesis on race? Pastor Stuart McAlpine of Christ Our Shepherd Church in Washington, DC has recently begun a three-part series called “Towards a Theology of Race,” the entirety which we will be publishing here. Here is Part I. An excerpt: “We must have an understanding of the roots of present bad cultural fruit. The self-professing church has a responsibility to take the untruthful consequences of Scripture being manipulated. It was not by cultural norms that the church justified racism, but by the very scriptures that our authors say that our understanding of sin is based upon. …We will not deal effectively and redemptively with social and racial personal inequalities if there is no conviction about spiritual equality in creation, equality in our sin, and equality in our salvation and deliverance. The manipulation of Christian faith by Christless religion had a long history before a year like 1619, and before the next stage of our national, theological conspiracy.”
The Living Word
Ulrich Stadler
“Whoever therefore would use the Scripture according to its true worth, whoever does not want to give more to it than belongs to it and is due to it, must sharply distinguish Scripture, as well as the spoken word, from the inward Word of the heart.”
When He Came to Himself
Dr. Gardner C. Taylor
A brother demanding his possession he had not worked for but felt he was due because of his Father’s work. After spending all his inheritance, he came to himself.
On Forgiveness
Fr. Cristino Bouvette
The hardest and most painful of our Lord’s teachings is his demand that we forgive. A demand that leads to freedom.