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A batch of the best highlights from what Todd's read, .
Welcome the disagreement. Remember the slogan, “When two partners always agree, one of them is not necessary.” If there is some point you haven’t thought about, be thankful if it is brought to your attention. Perhaps this disagreement is your opportunity to be corrected before you make a serious mistake.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Dale Carnegie
The revolutionary nature of the church was that it didn’t focus on specific locations of oppression. The church didn’t focus on chipping away at a Roman injustice here or a Roman injustice there. The church had a more radical approach—and I use that word intentionally. The word radical comes from the Latin word radix meaning “root.” The church was radical in that it was pulling up the roots of Roman society, calling into question the sacred foundations upon which imperial Rome was built. The church challenged the sacred and patriotic truths that justified Roman oppression and the belief that the empire was divinely ordained and, thus, beyond critique. Because, you know, god and country always go hand in hand. Once again, it’s the spiritual and the political, two sides of the same coin. Thus the revolutionary proclamation that Jesus of Nazareth was “Lord of all” (Acts 10:36), even over Caesar. And while Jesus did not consider his isa Theo “equal to god” status as something to be taken by force—choosing kenosis over harpagmon—the Lordship of Jesus did invalidate the spiritual legitimacy and authority of Caesar and imperial Rome. Ideologically speaking, Christianity made the empire subject to critique and dissent. Once Christ was confessed as Lord, blind obedience to empire was no longer automatic and assumed. Christianity had shrunk empire down to size. The emperor, the Christians pointed out, had no clothes. And standing naked and exposed before the eyes of their subjects, the empires of the world, then as now, lashed out. This is why the Romans coined a word to describe the early Christians. The Romans called the early Christians atheists—people who denied the gods of the empire, people who rejected the sacred foundations upon which their society had been built. And while the early church might have been nonviolent, this spiritual revolt and revolution made them dangerous.
Reviving Old Scratch
Richard Beck
When I say it’s hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it’s hard to believe in Jesus’s ideas—in his way of saving the world. For Christians it’s not hard to believe in Jesus as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity—all the Christological stuff the church hammered out in the first five centuries. That’s not hard for us. What’s hard is to believe in Jesus as a political theologian.
A Farewell to Mars
Brian Zahnd
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