William A. Walker III

Pastor, Professor, Theologian, Spiritual Director

Tag: Christology

What is the Gospel?

As in the previous post about salvation, no matter how familiar it is or how much we think we know it, I always find it worthwhile to ask the question again and again, What is the Gospel?  My friends over at interlocutors: a theological dialogue are doing just this.  Here is link to a recent post by Yi Shen Ma, a very bright guy who really helped me learn during my time in graduate school at Claremont.

Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics

“Global realities of human inequality, poverty, violence and ecological destruction call for a 21st-century Christian response that can link the power of the gospel to cross-cultural and interreligious cooperation for change.”

“[R]eligious experience of God carries a moral way of life as its equally original counterpart.  This is because inclusive community with other human beings is a constitutive dimension of community with God.  “Love the Lord your God with your whole heart, mind, and soul; and your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:28-34).  Love God and neighbor — not God then neighbor.”

“To experience salvation is to have one’s life completely reoriented In relation to God and simultaneously integrally In relation to other human beings.  Authentic religious experience — salvation — Is inherently transformative and political.  Reconciled human relations are lenses through which we glimpse the goodness and power of God.”

“The term salvation connotes an actual healing of sin as idolatry, selfishness and violence.”

“If God’s full incarnation in human existence is a fact, and resurrection life a present reality, then Christian politics must be, can be, and is transformative of its social world.”

“To proclaim that God is truly present in Jesus Christ, [then,] and that in Christ humans reconciled to God, is to commit oneself to personal and political ways of life coherent with the reign of God that Jesus inaugurates.”

Lisa Sowle Cahill, from chapter one of Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics

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