I don’t suppose that this needs much comment at all.

The ultimate weakness of violence
is that it is a descending spiral,
begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.
Through violence you may murder the liar,
but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.
Through violence you murder the hater,
but you do not murder hate.
In fact, violence merely increases hate….
Returning violence for violence multiples violence,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

–Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”
1967

Amen.

“While those who wielded the Constantinian sword throughout history undoubtedly convinced themselves they were wielding the sword in love–this is a common self-delusion among religious power brokers–lording over, torturing, and killing people does not communicate their unsurpassable worth to them; it is not loving….One wonders why no one in church history as ever been considered a heretic for being unloving. People were anathematized and often tortured and killed for disagreeing on matters of doctrine or on the authority of the church. But no one on record has ever been so much as rebuked for not loving as Christ loved. Yet if love is to be placed above all other considerations, if nothing has any value apart from love, and if the only thing that matters is faith working in love, how is it that possessing Christlike love has never been considered the central test of orthodoxy? How is it that those who tortured and burned heretics were not themselves considered heretics for doing so? Was this not heresy of the worst sort? How is it that those who perpetuated such things were not only deemed heretics but often were (and yet are) held up as heroes of the faith?”

Greg Boyd – The Myth of a Christian Nation

Here’s a super thought:

“We love men not because we like them, nor because their ways appeal to us, nor even because they possess some kind of divine spark. We love every man because God loves him. At this level, we love the person who does an evil deed, although we hate the deed that he does.”

–Martin Luther King, jr. (The first two sentences are quoted by Philip Yancey in Soul Survivor. The last sentence is from Strength to Love. The entire quote is from Strength to Love.)

Tags: grace, jr., Martin Luther King, Strength to Love

From here:

It seems massively ironic to me that a book about full life is often read out as if it’s a shopping list or a takeaway menu, and that the account of God doing every last thing possible so he can to reach people is delivered in such a form that it alienates most of the population. I’m serious.

Freaking wow!

Tags: bible, grace, quote

Short:

When it comes down to it, no matter how pious or like-minded [a person] might be, a Christian jerk is still a jerk.–Kevin Roose, The Unlikely Disciple, 277

Yep.

Tags: Kevin Roose, quote

I heard this quote in a sermon by Tim Keller [The Community of Jesus--you should listen to it.] and found it posted in a review here.

“Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion – without transposing the enemy from the sphere of monstrous inhumanity into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When one knows that the torturer will not eternally triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person’s humanity and imitate God’s love for him. And when one knows that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see onself in the light of God’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness.” (Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, p.124)

Wow!

Tags: Miroslav Volf, Tim Keller

In the wake of John Piper’s announcement that a certain natural disaster that hit a certain part of a certain city on a certain day at a certain time was the direct providence of a certain Deity, many have taken up the pen or key board to say one thing or another about Piper’s seeming omniscience into the mysteries of Trinitarian oeuvre.

David Sessions quoted Andy Crouch:

“All efforts to pin down the details of where and when we can say that God is working in history are fraught with the danger of self-deception, if not outright blasphemy. The commandment not to take the Lord’s name in vain seems especially to apply to human attempts to recruit God for one cultural movement or another. The warning that “history is written by the winners” should caution us that any attempt to discern God’s activity in particular historical events runs the risk of self-justification, claiming after the fact that God was on our side all along.”

HT/RT: imonk

Rather than post an entirely new thread on this subject, I’d like to direct your attention to, what one friend described as, an ‘extra-awesome’ take on the Piper post. I concur. It is super-awesome. Click this link and find out more: Did God Send a Tornado to Warn the ELCA?

I am especially fond of this awesomeness:

3. One has to wonder why God would single out the ELCA’s discussion of homosexuality as worthy of a tornado hit while by-passing so many other serious issues. To give one example, there are over 400 distinct passages encompassing over 3,000 verses in the Bible that address issues related to poverty. Compare this with homosexuality, a topic that is explicitly mentioned a total of two times in the Old Testament and three times in the New. On top of this, the most frequently mentioned reason God judged cities and nations in the Old Testament was because they failed to care for the needy. And, finally, if there’s any sin American churches fail to seriously confront, it’s this one.

In light of this, wouldn’t you assume that if God was going to send warnings and/or inflict punishment with tornados he’d strike some of the many American churches and denominations that condone, if not Christianize, greed and apathy toward the poor? Yet John would have us believe that God had his tornado skip past these churches (and a million other punishment-worthy locations, like child sex-slave houses) in order to damage the steeple of a church because the people inside were wrestling with issues related to homosexuality. If John is right, God’s priorities must have radically changed since biblical times.

This goes well with my post the other day concerning the Gospel and the Poor.

Tags: Andy Crouch, Greg Boyd, homosexuality, John Piper

I was introduced to Frederick Buechner by a friend of mine a while back and have found his writing to be amazing to say the least. This quoted was posted by a blog friend of mine:

‘Hate is as all-absorbing as love, as irrational, and in its own way as satisfying. As lovers thrive on the presence of the beloved, haters revel in encounters with the one they hate. They confirm him in all his darkest suspicions. They add fuel to all his most burning animosities. The anticipation of them makes the hating heart pound. The memory of them can be as sweet as young love. The major difference between hating and loving is perhaps that whereas to love somebody is to be fulfilled and enriched by the experience, to hate somebody is to be diminished and drained by it. Lovers, by losing themselves in their loving, find themselves, become themselves. Haters simply lose themselves. Theirs is the ultimately consuming passion’. – Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 57.

HT: Cruciality

Tags: Buechner, love

Roll it in to tomorrow’s day if you like, because this one’s coming to you late!

Since I’ve been on a ‘finding Truth wherever you find it and using it’ kick for a bit, and since I recently wrote about quoting from non-Christian sources if it’s relevant, I thought I’d give you this to think about:

“Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.” From Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Is there a point in being like those you seek to win (1 Cor. 9:19-23) that goes too far and ultimately corrupts you? If so, how would you know? Where’s the line?  How far would you go to relate and be relevant?

Someone once told me that the clean sock doesn’t make the dirty hamper clean by being thrown in to it, the clean sock just gets dirty.

What do you think?

I hope all of your days go awesomely tomorrow

Peace,

Joe C

I don’t normally post the one-liners I hear, or am given, but this one is still making me chuckle due to its incredibly high truth and irony quotient…

“Apprising Ministries is to Ministry what Planned Parenthood is to Parenthood…”

-uncredited (though I will give credit if he/she wants it )