The Bible as "Story", part 3: "Waiting for the Messiah..."

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The Protestant Reformation - good news?

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  The study of Reformation Europe makes many Christians wish that they had lived in the 16th century. Name 1) Some good reasons for not living in the sixteenth century and 2) Some ways in which we can live more deliberately as Christians today because of the events of that century. How should it and how should it not make a difference?    Some good reasons for not living in the 16th century include the climate of religious intolerance and violence.   Religious affiliation and observance were compulsory and imposed on the people by the state, especially it seems, in Protestant countries.   There was no freedom of conscience, except perhaps in England during the reign of Elizabeth, where the windows to people’s souls remained shut to the state, so long as they publicly conformed to the monarch’s religion (as enforced by parliament).   One may have thought that Luther’s appeal to conscience at the Diet of Worms would have inspired a broader and more sensit...
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GOD'S NEW WORLD, DAY 30 (the God who suffers the wrath of man)

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       What is a good God to do?   Revelation chapter 5 presents us with two elements which are important for our understanding of divine judgment – the agent of this judgment as well as the response it elicits.   It’s important to note that, in the book of Revelation, “the One seated on the throne” doesn’t do much.   Rather, the divine will is enacted by “agents” of the Creator, whether they be angels, elders, “living creatures” or…a slaughtered Lamb.   In Revelation chapter 4, John is ushered into the heavenly throne room and in chapter 5, he sees that the One seated on the throne is holding a scroll in his right hand.   As we will soon discover, this seven-times-sealed scroll contains the 7-fold judgment of God which will be brought to bear on the earth three times over (chapters 6—16). [1]      No one in all creation is found who is “worthy to open the scroll”, i.e. to set in motion God’s judgment of the world – no o...
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Re-imagining Christianity, part 2

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       We have forgotten who we are.   Westerners find themselves, to take a first analogy, in the situation of G.K. Chesterton’s (hypothetical) boy whose home is built upon the image of one of the White Horses of Wessex and doesn’t realize it because he lives too close to the horse, indeed, within it.   Only by distancing himself from his hill-side cottage can this boy turn around and realize where his entire life has been spent.   “I think”, says Chesterton, “that is a true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today; and that is the point of [ The Everlasting Man ]”. [1]   A second comparison would be to liken ourselves to those denizens of the community from which Jonas must escape in Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel [2] The Giver .   This community has managed to insulate itself against all forms of pain, even the pain of history.   However, by engaging in an effort of “collective amnesia”, they have lost the best p...
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