{"id":2758,"date":"2007-10-24T00:20:39","date_gmt":"2007-10-24T00:20:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/jesuscreed\/2007\/10\/red-letter-christians.html"},"modified":"2007-10-24T00:20:39","modified_gmt":"2007-10-24T00:20:39","slug":"red-letter-christians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2007\/10\/red-letter-christians.html","title":{"rendered":"Red Letter Christians"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve avoided this issue, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/ct\/2007\/october\/33.100.html\">Tony Campolo and Stan Guthrie<\/a> of CT are in a bit of a tiff on the Red Letter Christian issue. <!--more|inline--><br \/>\nHave you encountered this movement?<br \/>\nI have no problem with someone who wants to begin with the red letters of Jesus; I have lots of problems with Christians who don&#8217;t follow what they say. Anyone who thinks they are the only words in the Bible are not being fair to the Christian tradition. But, what is a Red-Letter Christian?<br \/>\nHere&#8217;s how Campolo <a href=\"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/story\/185\/story_18562_2.html\">once defined<\/a> a Red-Letter Christian:<br \/>\n&#8220;By calling ourselves Red-Letter Christians, we are alluding to the fact that in several versions of the New Testament, the words of Jesus are printed in red. In adopting this name, we are saying that we are committed to living out the things that He said. Of course, the message in those red-lettered verses is radical, to say the least. If you don?t believe me, read Jesus? Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).<br \/>\nIn those red letters, He calls us away from the consumerist values that dominate contemporary American consciousness. He calls us to be merciful, which has strong implications for how we think about capital punishment. When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, he probably means we shouldn?t kill them. Most important, if we take Jesus seriously, we will realize that meeting the needs of the poor is a primary responsibility for His followers.<br \/>\nFiguring out just how to relate those radical red letters in the Bible to the complex issues in the modern world will be difficult, but that?s what we?ll try to do.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve avoided this issue, but Tony Campolo and Stan Guthrie of CT are in a bit of a tiff on the Red Letter Christian issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":298,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Red Letter Christians - Jesus Creed<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2007\/10\/red-letter-christians.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Red Letter Christians - Jesus Creed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"We&#8217;ve avoided this issue, but Tony Campolo and Stan Guthrie of CT are in a bit of a tiff on the Red Letter Christian issue.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2007\/10\/red-letter-christians.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Jesus Creed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-10-24T00:20:39+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"xscot mcknight\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Red Letter Christians - Jesus Creed","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2007\/10\/red-letter-christians.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Red Letter Christians - Jesus Creed","og_description":"We&#8217;ve avoided this issue, but Tony Campolo and Stan Guthrie of CT are in a bit of a tiff on the Red Letter Christian issue.","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2007\/10\/red-letter-christians.html","og_site_name":"Jesus Creed","article_published_time":"2007-10-24T00:20:39+00:00","author":"xscot mcknight","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2007\/10\/red-letter-christians.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2007\/10\/red-letter-christians.html","name":"Red Letter Christians - Jesus Creed","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/#website"},"datePublished":"2007-10-24T00:20:39+00:00","dateModified":"2007-10-24T00:20:39+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/#\/schema\/person\/9c0db2eaf4d047d76276f907b62843f0"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2007\/10\/red-letter-christians.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2007\/10\/red-letter-christians.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2007\/10\/red-letter-christians.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Red Letter Christians"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/","name":"Jesus Creed","description":"Scot McKnight on Jesus and orthodox faith for today","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/#\/schema\/person\/9c0db2eaf4d047d76276f907b62843f0","name":"xscot mcknight","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/1f0\/1f0cb0f88d1f99f6e05597a2de7f1949x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/1f0\/1f0cb0f88d1f99f6e05597a2de7f1949x96.jpg","caption":"xscot mcknight"},"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/author\/xscot-mcknight"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/298"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}