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Jesus Creed

Let me suggest at this point that there are five elements in moral decisions, and each interacts with one another rather than being a simplistic conveyor belt series of elements. Some will give more emphasis to one than another; some will seek to reduce it all to “what the Bible says” but we are learning…

Rock-bottom motivations for moral decisions tend to revolve around these views. First, altruism: I help my neighbor, regardless of what I think of the person, because helping others is a good. Second, the alternative to altruism is ethical egoism: I help my neighbor because it makes me feel good or somehow will help me down…

Failure is an element of Jesus’ moral logic: when it comes to discussing what Jesus has to say and what he taught about following him, what he said about loving God and loving others, then failure looms large in the Gospels. The simple fact is this: Jesus’ followers failed, and they failed sometimes quite miserably,…

The question we asked recently, and to which so many responded, is an important one: What to do about the Lord’s Supper? To answer a question like this involves decisions on a variety of issues, including whether or not one has no known sins in his or her life, whether or not the table is…

If those who are summoned to the table of transformation by Jesus are to love God, they are also to love others, and this has significant implications for the issues that swirl around homosexuality and the Church. It works in two directions, and not just one:

At the deepest level, Jesus summoned his followers to love God and to love others. The God they were summoned to love was the God of Israel, and the God of Israel spoke in Scripture and Jesus’ followers were therefore summoned to let that story of Israel be their story, which involves (as I concluded…

“What would Jesus say?,” or “What would Jesus do?,” are the questions we are asking. We know “what Jesus would say” would be embodied in “how he lived” and how he treated those who were same-sex in practice. So, the place to begin is at the table with Jesus, and there we learn that he’d…

A second theme in the ethical teaching of Jesus that sheds some light on this debated controversy about homosexuality is that of conversion, which is the transformation of cracked Eikons by grace into living out that grace. I rely here on what I have said in A New Vision for Israel and, to a lesser…

This, our second post on Jesus and homosexuality, begins our survey of the central themes of Jesus’ ethical/moral teachings, and asks how such a theme might shed light on our discussion. I think we can agree that there is no need for, to use the words of Charles Dickens when he surveyed London churches in…

Life is not law. For Jesus at least. The place to begin a constructive understanding of how Christians should relate to persons with same-sex orientation and think about homosexuality is with Jesus’ practice of table fellowship. Why? Because it represents how life is encountered, of how a first century person would have come to understand…
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