Reconciliation Christian Quotes

I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask.

The question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible...The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it ask for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world

Christianity has from its beginning portrayed itself as a gospel of peace, a way of reconciliation (with God, with other creatures), and a new model of human community, offering the 'peace which passes understanding' to a world enmeshed in sin and violence. (1)

The work of reconciliation will flow when we turn our hearts to humbly listen to each other and open our eyes to see God’s image in one another.

But the modern-day church doesn’t like to wander or wait. The modern-day church likes results. Convinced the gospel is a product we’ve got to sell to an increasingly shrinking market, we like our people to function as walking advertisements: happy, put-together, finished—proof that this Jesus stuff WORKS! At its best, such a culture generates pews of Stepford Wife–style robots with painted smiles and programmed moves. At its worst, it creates environments where abuse and corruption get covered up to protect reputations and preserve image. “The world is watching,” Christians like to say, “so let’s be on our best behavior and quickly hide the mess. Let’s throw up some before-and-after shots and roll that flashy footage of our miracle product blanching out every sign of dirt, hiding every sign of disease.” But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace. Anything else we try to peddle is snake oil. It’s not the real thing.

My gut feeling says he needs a second chance. Like we all do." WINTER'S PAST

God wills our liberation, our exodus from Egypt. God wills our reconciliation, our return from exile. God wills our enlightenment, our seeing. God wills our forgiveness, our release from sin and guilt. God wills that we see ourselves as God’s beloved. God wills our resurrection, our passage from death to life. God wills for us food and drink that satisfy our hunger and thirst. God wills, comprehensively, our well-being—not just my well-being as an individual but the well-being of all of us and of the whole of creation. In short, God wills our salvation, our healing, here on earth. The Christian life is about participating in the salvation of God.

As far as I am concerned, anyone who hopes for the universal reconciliation of all creatures with God must already believe that this would be the best possible ending to the Christian story; and such a person has then no excuse for imagining that God could bring any but the best possible ending to pass without thereby being in some sense a failed creator.

We are approaching again the Great Lent—the time of repentance, the time of our reconciliation with God. Repentance is the beginning and also the condition of a truly Christian life.

Reconciliation for the powerful and privileged means trusting those who have lived under oppression and even following their lead in becoming one new humanity.

Reconciliation: Our Greatest Challenge--Our Only Hope.

Thus the vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in this truth of the resurrection. It does not really matter exactly what a Christian does from day to day. What matters is that whatever one does is done in honor of one’s own life, given to one by God and restored to one in Christ, and in honor of the life into which all humans and all things are called. The only thing that really matters to live in Christ instead of death

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

Stop telling people to reconcile, when you have no idea what it took for them to break free.

Genuine forgiveness and reconciliation are two-person transactions that are enabled by apologies. Some, particularly within the Christian worldview, have taught forgiveness without an apology. They often quote the words of Jesus, “If you do not forgive men their trespasses neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Thus, they say to the wife whose husband has been unfaithful and continues in his adulterous affair, “You must forgive him, or God will not forgive you.” Such an interpretation of Jesus’ teachings fails to reckon with the rest of the scriptural teachings on forgiveness. The Christian is instructed to forgive others in the same manner that God forgives us. How does God forgive us? The Scriptures say that if we confess our sins, God will forgive our sins. Nothing in the Old or New Testaments indicates that God forgives the sins of people who do not confess and repent of their sins. While a pastor encourages a wife to forgive her erring husband while he still continues in his wrongdoing, the minister is requiring of the wife something that God Himself does not do. Jesus’ teaching is that we are to be always willing to forgive, as God is always willing to forgive, those who repent… While a pastor encourages a wife to forgive her erring husband while he still continues in his wrongdoing, the minister is requiring of the wife something that God Himself does not do. Jesus’ teaching is that we are to be always willing to forgive, as God is always willing to forgive, those who repent…

There will be no future unless there is peace. There can be no peace unless there is reconciliation. But there can be no reconciliation before there is forgiveness. And there can be no forgiveness unless people repent.

But in the gospel, man is not just reconciled to God by faith. Man is also reconciled to man by faith. (See 2 Cor. 5:18). God has given to us the ministry of reconciliation. He doesn’t give us the luxury of refusing to be reconciled.

In the end, I've come to see that hell is not only necessary, it is ultimately loving and just. If someone desires sin and corruption now, what would make me think he would desire to be separated from sin and corruption for eternity? If someone continually chooses to hate God and reject his gift of reconciliation in this life, what would make me think she will desire to be in his Kingdom forever in the next? And here's something to ponder: If someone wants to bring their self-serving sin into heaven, what would it say about God if he allowed it in?

brings to mind this insight from C. S. Lewis: “We must picture hell as a state where everyone . . . has a grievance, and where everyone lives in the deadly serious passions of envy . . . and resentment.”20 This pretty well describes ideological social justice. It has no basis for love, forgiveness, or reconciliation. It destroys relationships and tears apart the social fabric. Christians, whose job is to love our neighbors and bless the nations, must recognize and reject this destructive worldview as we attempt, in God’s strength, to live out a “more excellent way.

The concept of reconciliation is not irretrievable, but I am convinced that before we theologians can interpret the depths of the divine action of reconciliation we must first articulate the profound deformities of Christian intimacy and identity in modernity. Until we do, all theological discussions of reconciliation will be exactly what they tend to be: (a) ideological tools for facilitating negotiations of power; or (b) socially exhausted idealist claims masquerading as serious theological accounts. In truth, it is not at all clear that most Christians are ready to imagine reconciliation.

The Samaritan woman is the first person to whom Jesus revealed that he is the Messiah. She is also one of the first missionaries of the gospel. What is a Samaritan? A Samaritan is a Jew and a Gentile in one body. What is the church? Jews and Gentiles (Whites, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and others) in one body:

This book is a call for reconciliation in society that is radical, that goes to the roots.

The Reformation thus does not call for celebration. It calls for sorrow, repentance, and reconciliation.

The time had come, King said, to “move from protest to reconciliation.

Reconciliation is getting to the heart of the gospel and getting on with the gospel.

It is about joining God in the mission of reconciliation by building bridges and bringing down the dividing walls of hostility between individuals and groups.

To mourn means to be heartbroken over the things that break God’s heart.

the opposite of a sinful condition is a state of reconciliation.[23]

Of all the people Jesus could have revealed his identity to, he chose a Samaritan woman during a seven-hundred-year-old racial feud.

reconciliation is radical because it is biblical.

One of the greatest gifts you can give your brothers and sisters in Christ as we heal the racial divide is to listen to their stories with compassion. Compassion means “to suffer with.

The real goal, however, was not to defeat the white man, but “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority.… The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community” where all men would treat each other as brothers and equals. “There are great resources of goodwill in the southern white man that we must somehow tap,

At Abraham's burial, his two most prominent sons, rivals since before they were born, estranged since childhood, scions of rival nations, come together for the first time since they were rent apart nearly three-quarters of a century earlier. The text reports their union nearly without comment. "His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre, in the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites." But the meaning of this moment cannot be diminished. Abraham achieves in death what he could never achieve in life: a moment of reconciliation between his two sons, a peaceful, communal, side-by-side flicker of possibility in which they are not rivals, scions, warriors, adversaries, children, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. They are brothers. They are mourners. In a sense they are us, forever weeping for the loss of our common father, shuffling through our bitter memories, reclaiming our childlike expectations, laughing, sobbing, furious and full of dreams, wondering about our orphaned future, and demanding the answers we all crave to hear: What did you want from me, Father? What did you leave me with, Father? And what do I do now?

To my White brothers and sisters, one of the most precious gifts you can give your siblings of color are these words: “I believe you. I am sorry that happened to you. I am for you. We are in this together.

There’s a tendency to want to gloss over injustices for the sake of unity. However, any authentic attempt to pursue unity and reconciliation must start with truth. The journey toward healing begins with an awakening.

In the final analysis, the only available options are either to reject the cross and with it the core of the Christian faith or to take up one's cross, follow the Crucified-and be scandalized ever anew by the challenge.

To put it bluntly, much of what passes for racial reconciliation among Christians is merely an exercise in making sure Black men and other men of color have the same access to male privilege as their White counterparts do.

But the modern-day church doesn't like to wander or wait. The modern-day church likes results. Convinced the gospel is a product we've got to sell to an increasingly shrinking market, we like our people to function as walking advertisements: happy, put-together, finished—proof that this Jesus stuff WORKS! At its best, such a culture generates pews of Stepford Wife-style robots with painted smiles and programmed moves. At its worst, it creates environments where abuse and corruption get covered up to protect reputations and preserve image. 'The world is watching,' Christians like to say, 'so let's be on our best behavior and quickly hide the mess. Let's throw up some before-and-after shots and roll that flashy footage of our miracle product blanching out every sign of dirt, hiding every sign of disease.' But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn't offer a cure. It doesn't off a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace.

I have found that many believers filter the “hot topics” of race and injustice through Democratic or Republican filters instead of theological filters. People will leave their churches over politics before they leave politics for a church.

I have often thought that the most important issue of our time is not racial prejudice or color prejudice or anything else. It is this question of how we overcome evil without becoming another form of evil in the process. —Laurens van der Post1

As long as there is one single child on the cross of pain, and indignity, of suffering, and futurelessness, I will stand up and I will fight for that child—a crucified child is my child. That is what solidarity means: every child on a cross is my child.

Deep conflicts are stressful and painful. At worst, they are violent and destructive. Yet at the same time, they create some of the most intense spiritual encounters we experience. Conflict opens a path, a holy path, toward revelation and reconciliation.

Let us create the social space that brings Truth, Mercy, Justice, and Peace together within a conflicted group or setting. Then energies are crystallized that create deeper understanding and unexpected new paths, leading toward restoration and reconciliation.

The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow. The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression. History and Scripture teaches us that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. And there can be no confession without truth.

Reconciliation is not to quickly forgive and forget, as if it never happened or we somehow are gifted with a form of amnesia. Reconciliation requires that we remember and change, but with honesty about our experience and curiosity about the humanness of the other whom we fear.

Without understanding the truth of racial injustice, both majority-culture and non-White-culture Christians will find themselves mired in dissonant relationships. If we avoid hard truths to preserve personal comfort or to fashion a facade of peace, our division will only widen.

Stepping back and connecting reconciliation to God’s story also helps us move away from dramatic visions of fixing the world, as if our job were to provide solutions to problems outside us. If Christians believe anything, it is that no one—including ourselves and the church—is separate from the brokenness as an untainted solution to the problems of our world. The new creation contends with the old. The dividing line between good and evil runs straight through each one of us. So the journey of reconciliation begins with a transformation of the human person.

Yet rather than confessing our sins, and rather than dismantling the systems that perpetuate them, many Christians shrug it off as part of an irrelevant past or spin out religious-sounding rhetoric about peace and reconciliation without engaging in the hard work of repentance and restitution.

Political conservatives want me to wrap Jesus in an American flag, and political progressives want me to strip Jesus of ethics that do not fit their worldview. We leaders must address controversial topics through the redeeming work of Jesus so God’s people can think and live in light of God’s Kingdom.

I want to remind pastors and leaders that we do not own the church—God does. We aren't called to serve the church from a place of fear with our primary focus on protecting our boundaries. We are called to fling wide the doors, to invite to the banquet those on the margins, those who will challenge our comfort and our aversion to getting our hands dirty. Announcing the kingdom is risky business. When our experience of church becomes so predictable and so controlled, one has to wonder how far we've strayed from the calling to be ambassadors of reconciliation to those far beyond the walls of the church.

It is not possible to pursue reconciliation except through people who risk the journey to relate across the social divides. In this way they help make present the reconciling love of God. In other words, through people who reach across the lines of hostility, a new relationship between enemies becomes possible.

And it requires that we make some uncomfortable confessions. G.K. Chesterton said, "It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." I believe this statement can be applied to the lack of reconciliation within the Church today. We've not been able to arrive at the solution because we haven't seen or acknowledged the problem. The problem is that there is a gaping hole in our gospel. We have preached a gospel that leaves us believing that we can be reconciled to God but not reconciled to our Christian brothers and sisters who don't look like us - brothers and sisters with whom we are, in fact, one blood.

When the church first began, it was a pacifistic movement known for its outspoken criticism of any form of bloodshed or violence. After Constantine legalized Christianity, ‘just war’ theory emerged, which meant that Christians could participate in wars if certain criteria were satisfied. By the year 1100, Christians were launching Crusades and telling the faithful that killing Muslims would secure them a spot in heaven! What happened? Somewhere along the way we forgot that Jesus intended the Sermon on the Mount to be an actual, concrete program for living. He wanted us to actually live it, not just admire it as a nice but unrealistic ideal. I mean, what would happen if Christians dedicated themselves to peacemaking with the same discipline and focus that armies do for war? What difference could it make? We have to revisit the early church’s teachings about reconciliation, peacemaking, and the Sermon on the Mount and ask ourselves if we’re living them out or tiptoeing around them.

Indeed, a consequence of color-blind racial ideology is that, because it implies that race is a bad thing, it also implies that those who identify as raced—that is, people of color—are thus morally inferior to those who do not—that is, White people. Thus it reinforces the supremacy of whiteness even as it renders whiteness invisible.

Any Christian individual or group who advocates, engages in, or justifies violence directly rejects Jesus’s unglamorous, deeply unsexy teachings of non-retaliation and love. Jesus blessed the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9) and taught reconciliation (Matthew 5:23–24). His true followers are instructed to live in peace with everyone (Romans 12:18).

This last point is only beginning to dawn on us white Christian Americans, who still believe too easily that racial reconciliation is the goal and that it may be achieved through a straightforward transaction: white confession in exchange for black forgiveness. But mostly this transactional concept is a strategy for making peace with the status quo—which is a very good deal indeed if you are white. I am not trying to be cynical here, but merely honest about how little even well-meaning whites have believed they have at stake in racial reconciliation efforts. Whites, and especially white Christians, have seen this project as an altruistic one rather than a desperate life-and-death struggle for their own future.

Unjust systems appear normal to those in power, and any change will produce feelings of loss. True reconciliation, through the cross of Jesus, will affect the lives of the privileged. The colonizer has to completely leave the confines of power and privilege and join with those who are colonized. Of the colonizer Memmi declared, “let him adopt the colonized people and be adopted by them; let him become a turncoat.

Christians can help people receive the message of reconciliation to God by modeling reconciliation among themselves. John 13:35 says, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another.” How well do we show love when we disagree? Nonbelievers look on and wonder if they can trust Christians to deal gently and respectfully with their questions and doubts if we don’t treat each other that way.

That was when I realized that the world is demanding something more of me. That was also when I realized that the world is demanding something more of the church. People like Mavis are watching us and wondering why we remain silent on the critical social issues of our day. Why aren’t we more involved? Why aren’t we pitching in to solve the problems of racial injustice, gender disparity and social inequity in our world? When unarmed young black men are shot and killed in the United States, why are so many Christians silent as we watch these events unfold? When over 200 schoolgirls are abducted in Nigeria or 148 college students are shot to death in Kenya or 43 abducted in Mexico, why is the Christian community not standing in greater solidarity with them? Mavis would have every right, still today, to look us in the eye and demand answers.

No one tribe or group of people can adequately display the fullness of God. The truth is that it takes every tribe, tongue, and nation to reflect the image of God in his fullness. The truth is that race is a social construct, one that has divided and set one group over the other from the earliest days of humanity. The Christian construct, though, dismantles this way of thinking and seeks to reunite us under a common banner of love and fellowship.

Venetia thought of dogs as important enablers on our paths of individual enlightenment. This could manifest itself as our own personal spiritual awareness, represented by the metaphors of religious literature. Or reconciliation with the world as finite and only scientifically explicable. Regardless of the understanding at which you arrive, indulging a dog playfully took you to a moment of truth. Into the present. Real Joy. This is what interested Venetia.

White America’s trust in the system and related belief in its own merit pose a frequent roadblock in racial reconciliation. Many Whites in these settings are fine with discussing White supremacy as an abstract principle, or a historical artifact, or even as an ongoing reality in the lives of people of color. But they are highly resistant to examining their own privilege or to the suggestion that any element of their success may be the product of racial privilege.

White supremacy means that, more often than not, US structures and systems—and the authorities who govern them—were designed to protect White interests and to maintain White dominance in all areas of society. Thus, White Americans are more likely to trust the system because they have been able to count on the fact that it will work in their favor. Moreover, in the cases where the system does not work in their favor, they could assume that it was due to some factor other than their race.

The essential role of the Christian in secular society is to actively carry out the "ministry of reconciliation" with which we have been so clearly charged. Any admixture of political agenda is detrimental to our task: It threatens the clearest possible presentation of the message of the Gospel. It narrows the potential audience for the Christian message to people predisposed to the political views being represented. It distracts and debilitates the Christian in the pursuit of his true life mission.

What Herod realizes is that this Child and the message he brings of universal forgiveness and reconciliation with God do not offer a rival source of power and order but a radical alternative to what the classical world understands as “power” and “order.” They do not seek to replace him on the throne of his kingdom but to usher in a wholly new Kingdom, not providing “spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city” but replacing that city with a new one: the City of Man passes away, the City of God abides forever.

But Mohler's approach represents what I've dubbed "the white Christian shuffle," a subtle two-steps-forward-one-step-back pattern of lamenting past sins in great detail, even admitting that they have had pernicious effects but then ultimately denying that their legacy requires reparative or costly actions in the present. It’s a sophisticated rhetorical strategy that emphasizes lament and apology, expects absolution and reconciliation, but gives scant attention to questions of justice, repair, or accountability.

how valuable mass nonviolent resistance could be. The real goal, however, was not to defeat the white man, but “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority.… The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community” where all men would treat each other as brothers and equals. “There are great resources of goodwill in the southern white man that we must somehow tap,” King asserted, and we must work to “speed up the coming of the inevitable.

The 'ministry of reconciliation' is a stunningly brief encapsulation of the biblical story of the purpose to which God calls people. I do not know a better three-word definition of Christianity, and it does very well as an entry point for Old Testament temple-based Judaism as well. It acknowledges that there is work to do: relationships on all scales are damaged. Nation against nation, communities against communities, families, marriages, even the vital self-worth that describes people's relationship with themselves is often damaged.

This, therefore, is that christian comfort, spoken of in this question of the catechism, which is an only and solid comfort, both in life and death--a comfort consisting in the assurance of the free remission of sin, and of reconciliation with God, by and on account of Christ, and a certain expectation of eternal life, impressed upon the heart by the holy Spirit through the gospel, so that we have no doubt but that we are the property of Christ, and are beloved of God for his sake, and saved forever, according to the declaration of the Apostle Paul:

What Herod realizes is that this Child and the message he brings of universal forgiveness and reconciliation with God do not offer a rival source of power and order but a radical alternative to what the classical world understands as “power” and “order.” They do not seek to replace him on the throne of his kingdom but to usher in a wholly new Kingdom, not providing “spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city” but replacing that city with a new one: the City of Man passes away, the City of God abides forever. This Child marks the end of the machine, the end of the military-industrial complex, the end of force.

What had Chris Hurley dreamt of being? What had Cameron Doomadgee? When Hurley was doing rugby training at a Christian Brothers school, Doomadgee was in a youth detention centre. By the time Hurley was setting up a sports club for kids on Thursday Island, Cameron had a child and a broken relationship. As Hurley picked his way along the police career path, the other man was like his shadow. The date of their meeting was gaining on him. Hurley had success in his name, Cameron had doom in his. But the bitter joke of reconciliation in Australia was that the lives of these two men were supposed to be weighed equally.

Blameshifting is so easy; after all, it has such a long history—it goes back to the Garden. A person’s personal relationship to the counselee is discussed publicly without any knowledge of the fact on his part and without any opportunity for him to straighten out misunderstandings or balance off unfair judgments. His name and his actions are being discussed in an intimate way by a group of people who know nothing about him and have no right to know anything about him. Often the discussion is instigated by a bitter, resentful person who, according to Matthew 18, should have gone directly to the husband or parent or pastor to seek reconciliation if he felt that way.

If enough individuals are full of despair and anger in their hearts, there will be violence in the streets. If enough individuals are full of greed and fear in their hearts, there will be racism and oppression in society. You can't remove the external social symptoms without treating the corresponding internal personal diseases...Pope Francis draws our attention to the 'invisible thread' of the market, which he describes as 'the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature.' This mentality generates inequality, which in turn generates 'a violence which no police, military, or intelligence resources can control'...changed individuals cross racial, religious, ethnic, class or political boundaries to build friendships. These friendship work like sutures, healing wounds in the social fabric. They 'humanize the other,' making it harder for groups to stereotype or scapegoat. They create little zones where the beloved community is manifest...They help people envision the common good--a situation where all are safe, free, and able to thrive. As my friend Shane Claiborne says, our problem isn't that rich people don't care about poor people; it's that all too often, rich people don't know any poor people. Knowing one another makes interpersonal change and reconciliation possible. (p. 167-168)

there is a widespread notion in some of the most energetic contemporary Christian movements that the biblical call to reconciliation is solely about reconciling God and humanity, with no reference to social realities. In this view, preaching, teaching, church life and mission are only about a personal relationship between people and God. Christian energy is focused on winning converts, planting and growing churches, and evangelistic efforts. We have heard pastors say, “We appreciate the work you’re doing, but as the leader of my church I’m called to stay focused on the gospel and not get distracted by other ministries.” For them, Christianity is exclusively about personal piety and morals.

We cannot afford to ignore the powerful effects of systems and structures in our pursuit of racial reconciliation and justice. In fact, addressing racial injustice through discipleship practices requires that we elevate the importance of structures, and not simply for the ways they have warped our imaginations and desires. To spiritually form white Christians in the face of racialized cultural structures, our discipleship practices will need to be sustained by healthy structures of our own. After all, we are not expecting individual white Christians to disciple themselves out of segregation. Instead, community structures that will continually call white Christians to faithful discipleship must be built and nurtured.

Because individualism is the first challenge, it’s important to realize that a discipleship approach to racial justice and reconciliation depends on a community of Christians. There’s nothing especially innovative about this; for generations, Christians have gathered for corporate worship and, by participating in shared liturgical practices such as singing and Holy Communion, have together had their desires aimed toward the kingdom of God. By its very nature the Christian life is communal; individuals find new life within the locally expressed body of Christ. It’s not that we lose our individuality when we become Christians, but that who we are as individuals finds fuller and truer expression within the community of saints.

The images of communal survival and flourishing our culture feeds us all to easily blur our vision of God‘s new creation – for instance, we think America is a Christian nation, and democracy the only truly Christian political arrangement. Unaware that our culture has subverted our faith, we lose a place from which to judge our own culture. In order to keep our allegiance to Jesus Christ pure, we need to nurture commitment to the multicultural community of Christian churches. We need to see ourselves and our own understanding of God’s future with the eyes of Christians from other cultures, listen to voices of Christians from other cultures so as to make sure that the voice of our culture has not drowned out the voice of Jesus Christ.

This is essential: the Christian ethic is not born from a system of commandments but is a consequence of our friendship with Christ. This friendship influences life; if it is true it incarnates and fulfills itself in love for neighbor. For this reason, any ethical decay is not limited to the individual sphere but it also weakens personal and communal faith from which it derives and on which it has a crucial effect. Therefore let us allow ourselves to be touched by reconciliation, which God has given us in Christ, by God’s “foolish” love for us; nothing and no one can ever separate us from his love (cf. Rom. 8:39). We live in this certainty. It is this certainty that gives us the strength to live concretely the faith that works in love.

If you truly believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ, then you believe that the gospel matters not just for your personal salvation and blessing, but also for God’s pursuit of restoration, redemption, and reconciliation of the entire world. Christians believe in the gospel that is revealed to us in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ: A gospel that not only saves but also serves; A gospel that not only saves but seeks to restore all things back unto the One that ushered forth all that is good and beautiful; A gospel that not only saves but ushers in the kingdom of God; A gospel that not only saves but restores the dignity of humanity—even in the midst of our brokenness and depravity. This gospel is not just for us. The gospel is good news for all. Justice as Discipleship

Between the religion of a people and its actual mode of life there is always a compensatory relation, otherwise religion would have no practical significance at all. Beginning with the highly moral religion of the Persians and the notorious dubiousness, even in antiquity, of Persian habits of life, right down to our own “Christian” era, when the religion of love assisted at the greatest blood-bath in the world’s history—wherever we turn this rule holds true. We may therefore infer from the symbol of the Delphic reconciliation an especially violent split in the Greek character. This would also explain the longing for deliverance which gave the mysteries their immense significance for the social life of Greece, and which was completely overlooked by the early admirers of the Greek world. They were content with naïvely attributing to the Greeks everything they themselves lacked.

The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God. The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realisation both of mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life. But above all, it is a reconciliation because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories. That normal narrative instinct which produced all the fairy tales is something that is neglected by all the philosophies—except one. The Faith is the justification of that popular instinct; the finding of a philosophy for it or the analysis of the philosophy in it. Exactly as a man in an adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man in this philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. In both there is an idea of free will operating under conditions of design; in other words, there is an aim and it is the business of a man to aim at it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it. Now this deep and democratic and dramatic instinct is derided and dismissed in all the other philosophies. For all the other philosophies avowedly end where they begin; and it is the definition of a story that it ends differently; that it begins in one place and ends in another. From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, there is not one of them that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story. There is none of them that really grasps this human notion of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the free man. Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and that destiny that is the death of adventure; or by indifference and that detachment that is the death of drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral consequences; or a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests monotonous; or a bottomless relativity making even practical tests insecure. There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or a determinist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgement.

Splitting is the answer to the question, “How could White people consider themselves Christian while engaging in the daily horrors of slavery, especially when those horrors were targeted toward their supposed brothers and sisters in Christ?” Essentially, White Christians learned to separate their personal ethics from their social ethics. In order to preserve their self-images as good people, they had to minimize, repress, and deny their sinfulness—their active participation in racial oppression or silent complicity with it. Further, they had to create theologies and ecclesiologies that supported this minimization, repression, and denial. Thus, Christian identity became a matter of orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy. In other words, believing in God and feeling good about one’s personal relationship with God became more critical in defining Christian identity than did acting in a manner consistent with Christian social ethics.

For Christians engaged in racial reconciliation, in particular, solidarity is based upon our shared identity as followers of Christ who are bound together through our baptismal covenant. Thus, our solidarity must be evinced by what Duane Bidwell identifies as the characteristics of “helpful and healthful covenant partnerships”: (1) relational justice (the sharing of power, opportunity, and rewards); (2) equal regard (an ethic of interdependent mutuality in which partners empathize with and seek the flourishing of one another); (3) mutual empowerment (the capacity to influence and be influenced by others without domination or losing one’s identity); (4) respect for embodiment (honoring the body of the other, including their lived realities, as a reliable and trustworthy informant about them, the world, and the Divine); (5) and resistance to colonization (working to prevent and dismantle the internalization of harmful cultural beliefs).

long-standing debate in the political arena concerns the extent to which people are materially poor due to their personal failures or to the effects of broken systems on their lives. Political conservatives tend to stress the former, while political liberals tend to emphasize the latter. Which view is correct? Many of us learned as children in Sunday school that Adam and Eve’s sin messed up absolutely everything, implying that both individuals and systems are broken. Hence, Christians should be open to the idea that individuals and/or systems could be the problem as we try to diagnose the causes of poverty in any particular context. This much we learned in Sunday school. Unfortunately, what few of us seem to have learned in Sunday school is that Jesus’ redemption is cosmic in scope, bringing reconciliation to both individuals and systems. And as ministers of reconciliation, His people need to be concerned with both as well, the subject to which we now turn.

CRT teaches that a person’s identity cannot be separated from the group to which they belong. If you are born white, you are labeled an oppressor regardless of your character or personal attitude; individuality is lost within the group you belong to. And if you are born white and you choose to defend yourself against the charge of racism, this only proves that indeed you are racist! Wealthy black Americans are not considered persons of privilege, but a white person born into abject poverty is considered a person of privilege. There is no room for individuality, kindness, forgiveness, or meaningful reconciliation. Even more importantly, in the purely secular application of CRT, redemption is viewed as separating a group from oppressors, not as the need to be freed from sin by the gospel of God’s saving grace. Salvation, in the radical view of CRT, is to gain power over your oppressors. Until the oppressed triumph over their oppressors, the conflict must continue. Pure Marx.

Only after the rise of the Nazi party and the atrocities of the Holocaust was racial science widely rejected. Subsequently, many earlier proponents of racial science began to retract or modify the claims of their previous work, and by the end of World War II, scholarly interest in race had shifted from “proving” the science of race to challenging its ontology and examining the root of racial prejudice. Then, in the 1960s, as the civil rights movement drew widespread visibility to southern racism, many Whites attempted to distance themselves from the image of the “mean racist” by abandoning any mention of race altogether. This was especially the case with respect to whiteness. Having thoroughly identified whiteness with White supremacists, many Whites simply stopped thinking of themselves as White. They crafted a color-blind racial ideology that reinforced the idea that noticing, acknowledging, or talking about race was undesirable. Likewise, noticing, acknowledging, or talking about racism was also undesirable.

The subtitle of this book is Spirituality and Strategies. In Reconciliation, I had proposed that reconciliation is more a spirituality than a strategy. It seemed to me that reconciliation had to be a way of living, had to relate to the profound spiritual issues that reconciliation raises and requires. To think of it only as strategy is to succumb to a kind of technical rationality that will succeed at best partially. Yet strategies cannot be dispensed with. Concrete experiences of struggling to achieve some measure of reconciliation require decisions, and those decisions must have some grounding. I still believe that reconciliation requires a certain spiritual orientation if it is to be successful. The challenge of reconciliation today is such that it requires an interreligious effort. Religious difference is sometimes the cause of social conflict; in all instances, religious people must find ways to work together to achieve reconciliation. What this book hopes to offer is the spirituality that will sustain Christians in their efforts to collaborate with others in that process.

Unlike most preachers in the medieval era, Francis was conflicted and sometimes even hostile toward academics and theologians. He believed that book knowledge was like material possessions — too much of it occasioned pride and got in the way of simple devotion to Jesus. (In The Last Christian, Adolf Holl imagined Francis meeting Augustine, Barth, Aquinas, and Bultmann in heaven for the first time and asking them what they would be without their books. When they can’t come up with an answer, Francis says, “Without your books perhaps you might have become Christians” [p. 63].) When Francis preached, he avoided theological arguments and polemics like the plague. Rather, his preaching was more autobiographical than intellectual, more performative than argumentative, more spontaneous than scripted, more genuine than contrived, more about transformation than about information. The endgame was to help his listeners find peace, reconciliation, and shalom with God, themselves, others, and creation. As Francis said, “We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.

People often view racism as social division based on race; that is, racism occurs when people align and separate themselves based on their affinity for people of the same race and their hostility toward people of other races. A popular way to put this has been to define racism as “prejudice plus power,” that is, it is having the personal power to act on one’s feelings about racial difference. This understanding reduces racism to the level of affect and interpersonal relationships: racism occurs because of how we as individuals feel about other ethnic groups; reconciliation occurs when we eliminate our negative feelings about other racial groups and establish relationships across race. But racism is not about our feelings. Nor is it about the attitudes, intentions, or behavior of individuals. Racism is an interlocking system of oppression that is designed to promote and maintain White supremacy, the notion that White people—including their bodies, aesthetics, beliefs, values, customs, and culture—are inherently superior to all other races and therefore should wield dominion over the rest of creation, including other people groups, the animal kingdom, and the earth itself.

At the present time, political power is everywhere constituted on insufficient foundations. On the one hand it emanates from the so-called divine right of kings, which is none other than military force; on the other from universal suffrage, which is merely the instinct of the masses, or mere average intelligence. A nation is not a number of uniform values or ciphers; it is a living being composed of organs. So long as national representation is not the image of this organization, right from its working to its teaching classes, there will be no organic or intelligent national representation. So long as the delegates of all scientific bodies, and the whole of the Christian churches do not sit together in one upper council, our societies will be governed by instinct, by passion, and by might, and there will be no social temple. ...We are beginning to understand that Jesus, at the very height of his consciousness, the transfigured Christ, is opening his loving arms to his brothers, the other Messiahs who preceded him, beams of the Living Word as he was, that he is opening them wide to Science in its entirety, Art in its divinity, and Life in its completeness. But his promise cannot be fulfilled without the help of all the living forces of humanity. Two main things are necessary nowadays for the continuation of the mighty work: on the one hand, the progressive unfolding of experimental science and intuitive philosophy to facts of psychic order, intellectual principles, and spiritual proofs; on the other, the expansion of Christian dogma in the direction of tradition and esoteric science, and subsequently a reorganization of the Church according to a graduated initiation; this by a free and irresistible movement of all Christian churches, which are also equally daughters of the Christ. Science must become religious and religion scientific. This double evolution, already in preparation, would finally and forcibly bring about a reconciliation of Science and Religion on esoteric grounds. The work will not progress without considerable difficulty at first, but the future of European Society depends on it. The transformation of Christianity, in its esoteric sense would bring with it that of Judaism and Islam, as well as a regeneration of Brahmanism and Buddhism in the same fashion, it would accordingly furnish a religious basis for the reconciliation of Asia and Europe.

I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask. I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people. And I told them that, contrary to popular belief, we can’t be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans. We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, so we can smell b.s. from a mile away. The church is the last place we want to be sold another product, the last place we want to be entertained.

In their important book about race and religion in America, Divided by Faith, sociologists Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith observe that what most distinguishes white evangelical Protestants from black Protestants is not their theology or even their desire for racial reconciliation, but evangelicals’ lack of institutional thinking. When evangelicals think about solving social problems like the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States, they think almost exclusively in terms of personal, one-on-one relationships—which is why so many white evangelicals can imagine the problem of racism is solved if they simply have a handful of friends of other races. To think of race this way is to miss the fact that race and racism are institutional realities built on a complex set of artifacts, arenas, rules and roles. A few friendships that happen outside of those arenas and temporarily suspend a few of those rules and roles do little to change the multigenerational patterns of distorted image bearing and god playing based on skin color. Black Christians instinctively know that for the gospel to keep transforming America’s sorry racial story, it will have to keep challenging these deeply ingrained patterns and the structures that even now perpetuate them—while white evangelicals, who identify racism with a handful of dismantled artifacts like twentieth-century Jim Crow laws and legally segregated schools, cannot imagine that racism has a continuing institutional reality.

There are two reasons for white Christianity—churches, fellowships, ministries—to pursue solidarity rather than first seeking to become multiracial/ ethnic/ cultural. First, as we have already seen, racial segregation is less about separateness than about the material damages of our racially unjust society. It is possible to build a multiracial ministry that leaves structures of racism and white supremacy totally undisturbed. In fact, it is easy for multiracial churches to bend toward the comfort of white people rather than the well-being of people of color. Focusing on solidarity moves the focus away from shallow togetherness onto the priorities and flourishing of Christians of color. “White American Christians in our society,” writes Drew G. I. Hart, “must do something seemingly absurd and unnatural, yet very Christian in orientation: they must move decisively toward a counterintuitive solidarity with those on the margins. They must allow the eyes of the violated of the land to lead and guide them, seeking to have renewed minds no longer conformed to the patterns of our world.” 2 The second reason for making solidarity our goal is that every expression of white Christianity can pursue gospel reconciliation immediately. Rather than outsourcing this essential Christian vocation to multiracial churches or to congregations in urban or racially diverse regions, every white congregation can contribute to the unity of the body of Christ across lines of cultural division. In fact, given what we have observed about the particular injustices associated with racial whiteness, it’s not a stretch to say that white churches have a front-lines role in the spiritual battle for reconciliation.

Our political discourse has degenerated into anxieties about whether giving benefits to those people over there will take money out of the pockets of my kind of people over here, even when the changes are those from which we would all benefit." "The church is one of the few remaining institutions in the American scene that normalizes the effects of slavery, with most Christians preserving these segregated spaces in the interests of cultural comfort. Racially separate churches violate the interdependence that should characterize authentic Christian communities. Further, this individualism blocks churches from the blessings of gifts preserved in separate traditions. For example, segregated white churches celebrate the confessions and the rich legacies of the intellectual giants of the faith, but too often preach a weak and disembodied gospel that reduces spirituality to symbolism, and that separates material concerns from moral choices and the pursuit of righteousness." "Indeed, we have reached a sad state of affairs when we are all unwilling to be challenged when we go to church." "We should not move too quickly to a cheap reconciliation that forgets the past rather than honoring it as a clay vessel that contains a refined treasure bearing witness to the presence of Jesus at the margins. We need to make space for the histories of ethnic pain to be shared and revered among whites and all peoples of color, and to be instructed by them. That is, we need to understand how our past impinges on the present before we can move forward together toward our future. We cannot be who we are called to be unless we can gain access to the treasures of the gospel that have been preserved in the separate traditions of now segregated ethnic churches. We will not testify to the glory of God and the manifold riches of his mercy to the nations until we do.

The most consistent execution of this project is to be found in the Letter to the Hebrews, which connects the death of Jesus on the Cross with the ritual and theology of the Jewish feast of reconciliation and expounds it as the true cosmic reconciliation feast. The train of thought in the letter could be briefly summarized more or less as follows: All the sacrificial activity of mankind, all attempts to conciliate God by cult and ritual—and the world is full of them—were bound to remain useless human work, because God does not seek bulls and goats or whatever may be ritually offered to him. One can sacrifice whole hecatombs of animals to God all over the world; he does not need them, because they all belong to him anyway, and nothing is given to the Lord of All when such things are burned in his honor. “I will accept no bull from your house, nor he-goat from your folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell you; for the world and all that is in it is mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving. . . .” So runs a saying of God in the Old Testament (Ps 50 [49]:9-14). The author of the Letter to the Hebrews places himself in the spiritual line of this and similar texts. With still more conclusive emphasis he stresses the fruitlessness of ritual effort. God does not seek bulls and goats but man; man’s unqualified Yes to God could alone form true worship. Everything belongs to God, but to man is lent the freedom to say Yes or No, the freedom to love or to reject; love’s free Yes is the only thing for which God must wait—the only worship or “sacrifice” that can have any meaning. But the Yes to God, in which man gives himself back to God, cannot be replaced or represented by the blood of bulls and goats. “For what can a man give in return for his life”, it says at one point in the Gospel (Mk 8:37). The answer can only be: There is nothing with which he could compensate for himself. But

As I have mentioned how the people were brought into a condition to despair of life and abandon themselves, so this very thing had a strange effect among us for three or four weeks; that is, it made them bold and venturous, they were no more shy of one another, or restrained within doors, but went anywhere and everywhere, and began to converse. One would say to another, “I do not ask how you are, or say how I am; it is certain we shall all go; so ’tis no matter who is sick or who is sound;” and so they ran desperately into any place or any company. As it brought the people into publick company, so it was surprizing how it brought them to crowd into the churches. They enquired no more into who, they sat near to or far from, what offensive smells they met with, or what condition the people seemed to be in, but looking upon themselves all as so many dead corpses, they came to the churches without the least caution, and crowded together, as if their lives were of no consequence compared to the work which they came about there. Indeed, the zeal which they shewed in coming, and the earnestness and affection they shewed in their attention to what they heard, made it manifest what a value people would all put upon the worship of God if they thought every day they attended at the church that it would be their last. Nor was it without other strange effects, for it took away all manner of prejudice or of scruple about the person who they found in the pulpit when they came to the churches. It cannot be doubted but that many of the ministers of the parish churches were cut off, among others, in so common and dreadful a calamity; and others had courage enough to stand it, but removed into the country as they found means for escape. As then some parish churches were quite vacant and forsaken, the people made no scruple of desiring such Dissenters as had been a few years before deprived of their livings by virtue of the Act of Parliament called the Act of Uniformity to preach in the churches; nor did the church ministers in that case make any difficulty of accepting their assistance; so that many of those who they called silenced ministers had their mouths opened on the occasion and preached publickly to the people. Here we may observe, and I hope it will not be amiss to take notice of it, that a near view of death would soon reconcile men of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy situation in life and our putting these things far from us that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued, prejudices, breach of charity and of Christian union so much kept and far carried on among us as it is. Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before. As the people who had been used to join with the Church were reconciled at this time with the admitting the Dissenters to preach to them, so the Dissenters, who with an uncommon prejudice had broken off from the communion of the Church of England, were now content to come to their parish churches, and to conform to the worship which they did not approve of before; but as the terror of the infection abated, those things all returned again to their less desirable channel, and to the course they were in before.

There are many who profess to be religious and speak of themselves as Christians, and, according to one such, “as accepting the scriptures only as sources of inspiration and moral truth,” and then ask in their smugness: “Do the revelations of God give us a handrail to the kingdom of God, as the Lord’s messenger told Lehi, or merely a compass?” Unfortunately, some are among us who claim to be Church members but are somewhat like the scoffers in Lehi’s vision—standing aloof and seemingly inclined to hold in derision the faithful who choose to accept Church authorities as God’s special witnesses of the gospel and his agents in directing the affairs of the Church. There are those in the Church who speak of themselves as liberals who, as one of our former presidents has said, “read by the lamp of their own conceit.” (Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine [Deseret Book Co., 1939], p. 373.) One time I asked one of our Church educational leaders how he would define a liberal in the Church. He answered in one sentence: “A liberal in the Church is merely one who does not have a testimony.” Dr. John A. Widtsoe, former member of the Quorum of the Twelve and an eminent educator, made a statement relative to this word liberal as it applied to those in the Church. This is what he said: “The self-called liberal [in the Church] is usually one who has broken with the fundamental principles or guiding philosophy of the group to which he belongs. . . . He claims membership in an organization but does not believe in its basic concepts; and sets out to reform it by changing its foundations. . . . “It is folly to speak of a liberal religion, if that religion claims that it rests upon unchanging truth.” And then Dr. Widtsoe concludes his statement with this: “It is well to beware of people who go about proclaiming that they are or their churches are liberal. The probabilities are that the structure of their faith is built on sand and will not withstand the storms of truth.” (“Evidences and Reconciliations,” Improvement Era, vol. 44 [1941], p. 609.) Here again, to use the figure of speech in Lehi’s vision, they are those who are blinded by the mists of darkness and as yet have not a firm grasp on the “iron rod.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, when there are questions which are unanswered because the Lord hasn’t seen fit to reveal the answers as yet, all such could say, as Abraham Lincoln is alleged to have said, “I accept all I read in the Bible that I can understand, and accept the rest on faith.” . . . Wouldn’t it be a great thing if all who are well schooled in secular learning could hold fast to the “iron rod,” or the word of God, which could lead them, through faith, to an understanding, rather than to have them stray away into strange paths of man-made theories and be plunged into the murky waters of disbelief and apostasy? . . . Cyprian, a defender of the faith in the Apostolic Period, testified, and I quote, “Into my heart, purified of all sin, there entered a light which came from on high, and then suddenly and in a marvelous manner, I saw certainty succeed doubt.” . . . The Lord issued a warning to those who would seek to destroy the faith of an individual or lead him away from the word of God or cause him to lose his grasp on the “iron rod,” wherein was safety by faith in a Divine Redeemer and his purposes concerning this earth and its peoples. The Master warned: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better … that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Matt. 18:6.) The Master was impressing the fact that rather than ruin the soul of a true believer, it were better for a person to suffer an earthly death than to incur the penalty of jeopardizing his own eternal destiny.

Peacemakers don’t avoid spiritual conflicts. Rather, they speak the truth in love and allow the Spirit to minister through them to bring reconciliation. If you see someone who is alienated from God, you are to present him or her with the gospel of peace. If you see two Christians fighting, you are to do everything you can to help them resolve their differences in a righteous manner.

One of the most urgent needs in the church of God today is a recovery of the simple biblical truth that the Christian life is a life of faith in response to God’s Word. Faith feeds on the promises of God and grows healthy and strong by them.

the revelation of the heavenly congregation provides a blueprint and a motivation to seek unity right now. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). Christians have been mandated to pray that the racial and ethnic unity of the church would be manifest, even if imperfectly, in the present. Christ himself brought down “the dividing wall of hostility” that separated humanity from one another and from God (Eph. 2:14). Indeed, reconciliation across racial and ethnic lines is not something Christians must achieve but a reality we must receive. On the cross when Christ said, “It is finished,” he meant it (John 19:30). If peace has been achieved between God and human beings, surely we can have greater peace between people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Instead, Jesus explains that his kingdom is about forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration

Michelangelo’s ceiling was finished in 1512. The next year a church council officially endorsed Ficino’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The world seemed on the verge of a final reconciliation of ancient philosophy and Christian theology, exactly what Raphael had made visible in his frescos in the Stanze. Instead, a chain of events was about to abruptly change the direction of European thought once again—a chain that started virtually outside the Stanze’s doors.

I am committed to justice because first I believed that truly God so loved this broken, aching world.

This is the book I dearly needed when I admitted to myself that I was gay. And it is, I pray, an instrument God will use to help bring healing, reconciliation, and hope to many who need them most.

the Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologica. These last two alone total a stupefying two million words. They are a monumental fusion of learning and faith, and a reconciliation of ancient philosophy and Christian theology, without parallel even in the works of Saint Augustine. In fact, together they make Aquinas the one Christian thinker whose system can stand beside those of Aristotle and Plato—in part because it is a brilliant synthesis of the best of both thinkers.

Repentance is reconciliation with a righteous God.

To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.

And when Wisdom, the focal point of this divine involvement in the world, finally shone forth for Christian faith as the personal Word, the human Christ, all doubts about the possibility of a reconciliation between God and the world disappeared.

I would not think it worth the trouble to argue, as he does, that—given the paradoxes and seemingly irreconcilable pronouncements of scriptures on the final state of all things—Christians may be allowed to dare to hope for the salvation of all. In fact, I have very small patience for this kind of “hopeful universalism,” as it is often called. As far as I am concerned, anyone who hopes for the universal reconciliation of creatures with God must already believe that this would be the best possible ending to the Christian story; and such a person has then no excuse for imagining that God could bring any but the best possible ending to pass without thereby being in some sense a failed creator.

This treatise on the church would seem to make the "true church" an article of faith that could be neither proved nor disproved, safe from refutation, in a realm beyond the range of reason's dreadful artillery. It represents a tour de force not only against the Catholic Church but also against the notion that history, tradition, or custom could be proof of the validity of any institution. In this direction lay perhaps Luther's most truly revolutionary impulse. The medieval mentality had been to say that anything long sanctioned by tradition was valid because tradition or custom represented the working out of the will of an almighty and invisible God. The Middle Ages much more than the age of Enlightenment might sing in almost unanimous chorus, "Whatever is, is right." This willingness to dismiss the authority of custom in favor of a scriptural text that might radically contradict custom-or tradition-could lead to the notion that all the institutions of society might be made over anew. These might include positive law-law as announced in statutes and royal decrees. They might include even the political order itself. Yet this thundering treatise against Catharinus with its hidden church known only to God ran against a stronger impulse of Luther's that was soon to assert itself once it became clear that he would have no reconciliation with the Catholic Church. He was by temperament conservative in his political views, and like other educated people of his time he feared the common people. Moreover, despite the apocalyptic fervor of this tractate, Luther was far from being one of those souls who look skyward every day expecting to hear the last trumpet and to see the heavens split with the return of Christ in judgment. The end times had begun; but he did not make predictions about how long they would last, nor did he claim that Christians might help things along by revolting against Catholic princes.

Much later in his life, Auden would borrow a musical metaphor from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and say that Kierkegaard was a 'monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament -- in his case, the theme of suffering and sacrifice -- but is deaf to its rich polyphony.' And for the Auden who emerges in the pages of this volume [Prose, Volume III: 1949-1955], the unique power of Christian doctrine is its polyphonic character, its capacity to address every dimension of our being, to give a comprehensive account of how history and nature relate, and -- decisively in Christ's incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection -- how they may be reconciled. (The Poet's Prose)

Priests are keen on the message of forgiveness. To them it sums up, I think, the purpose of faith: to reconcile one person with another and one horrible event with a tranquil life. The trouble is that people don’t always want to forgive. Some things happen that are too big for reconciliation. They want vengeance to start with: for God to arrive with a big stick and chastise the sinner mightily. The time for forgiveness comes later. Repentance and explanation must come first, then punishment; forgiveness may or may not follow, hopefully before everyone dies. You don’t miss out the first steps and jump to the last like the clergy do too readily.

It’s time for Christianity to rediscover the deeper biblical theme of restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitation and reconciliation, not punishment.

As might be surmised, CWC was multi-racial, multi-denominational, inclusive of all faiths. It had members from the Christian faith, the Islamic faith and the Jewish faith. The primary objective was to build bridges, to effect reconciliation, to attempt to live lives that projected well into the future, to a time when the laws that separated us according to skin colour would be no more. It was a fond dream put forward as a testimony of faith. We truly believed the possibility existed for apartheid to be dismantled. Therefore, it behoved us to hasten the process by living the future now.

We have the right to allow people around us to go to hell. But can we honestly love others and not share with them the most important, wonderful, life changing, lifesaving truth about salvation through Jesus Christ? God has committed to us the message of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:19). We have the most urgent, vital message in the world, one by which God miraculously transforms hearts and lives. What a privilege that He uses broken vessels like you and me!

Then there was the Black Liberation Army, which murdered seventeen American police officers in the 1970s, including six in New York City alone. There was the Symbionese Liberation Army, of Patty Hearst kidnapping fame. On the other side of the spectrum was the United States Christian Posse Association, a precursor of Aryan Nations, which preached violent white supremacy. It was domestic terror groups such as these that led the assault on the United States. In one poll taken at the time, more than 3 million Americans favored a revolution. The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 and the strength of capitalism brought an end to the socialist insanity that marked the prior decades. Even Bill Clinton tried to ride the prevailing winds. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act he signed in 1996 sought to combat the cycle of poverty by putting limits on welfare. Still, under the surface, the cracks in the Democrats’ foundation spread and deepened.

Speaking of God in Northern Ireland has too often fomented distrust and prejudice, not peace and reconciliation; speaking of God has too often been part of the problem, not of the solution

IN CHRIST I am accepted: • John 1:12 I am God’s child. • John 15:15 I am Christ’s friend. • Romans 5:1 I have been justified. • 1 Corinthians 6:17 I am united with the Lord and one with Him in spirit. • 1 Corinthians 6:20 I have been bought with a price—I belong to God. • 1 Corinthians 12:27 I am a member of Christ’s body. • Ephesians 1:1 I am a saint. • Ephesians 1:5 I have been adopted as God’s child. • Ephesians 2:18 I have direct access to God through the Holy Spirit. • Colossians 1:14 I have been redeemed and forgiven of all my sins. • Colossians 2:10 I am complete in Christ. I am secure: • Romans 8:1-2 I am free from condemnation. • Romans 8:28 I am assured that all things work together for good. • Romans 8:31-34 I am free from any condemning charges against me. • Romans 8:35-39 I cannot be separated from the love of God. • 2 Corinthians 1:21-22 I have been established, anointed, and sealed by God. • Colossians 3:3 I am hidden with Christ in God. • Philippians 1:6 I am confident the good work God has begun in me will be perfected. • Philippians 3:20 I am a citizen of heaven. • 2 Timothy 1:7 I have not been given a spirit of fear but of power, love, and a sound mind. • Hebrews 4:16 I can find grace and mercy in time of need. • 1 John 5:18 I am born of God and the evil one cannot touch me. I am significant: • Matthew 5:13-16 I am the salt and light of the earth. • John 15:1-5 I am a branch of the true vine, a channel of His life. • John 15:16 I have been chosen and appointed to bear fruit. • Acts 1:8 I am a personal witness of Christ’s. • 1 Corinthians 3:16 I am God’s temple. • 2 Corinthians 5:17-20 I am a minister of reconciliation. • 2 Corinthians 6:1 I am God’s coworker. • Ephesians 2:6 I am seated with Christ in the heavenly realm. • Ephesians 2:10 I am God’s workmanship. • Ephesians 3:12 I may approach God with freedom and confidence. • Philippians 4:13 I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988), I would not think it worth the trouble to argue, as he does, that—given the paradoxes and seemingly irreconcilable pronouncements of scriptures on the final state of all things—Christians may be allowed to dare to hope for the salvation of all. In fact, I have very small patience for this kind of “hopeful universalism,” as it is often called. As far as I am concerned, anyone who hopes for the universal reconciliation of creatures with God must already believe that this would be the best possible ending to the Christian story; and such a person has then no excuse for imagining that God could bring any but the best possible ending to pass without thereby being in some sense a failed creator. The position I want to attempt to argue, therefore, to see how well it holds together, is far more extreme: to wit, that, if Christianity is in any way true, Christians dare not doubt the salvation of all, and that any understanding of what God accomplished in Christ that does not include the assurance of a final apokatastasis in which all things created are redeemed and joined to God is ultimately entirely incoherent and unworthy of rational faith. This is an exorbitant and somewhat insolent claim, I realize, and I would not make it if I did not earnestly believe every alternative view of the matter to be ultimately unsustainable.

The breathtakingly good news is that hope for forgiveness and reconciliation with God is available! God Himself has taken the initiative in reconciling with His rebellious children. The glorious solution to our fundamental human problem is the gospel: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16–17 ESV) On the cross, God incarnate bore the punishment we deserved for our sinful rebellion in order to show us a mercy we could never deserve. The cross and resurrection opened the way for the reconciliation of our broken relationship with God, and all of our other broken relationships as well.

• Jesus was sent to be “the savior of the world.” • Jesus said he would “draw all people” to himself. • Jesus prayed for the salvation of all, and his will is to save everyone. Are these things true? Or will Jesus fail? Most people I’ve met believe Christ will fail spectacularly. Not for them, of course, but for everyone else. Today most modern Christians teach that God lacks either the power or the desire to save us all. They tell us Jesus will not succeed in achieving his stated purpose, and that some people will unfortunately slip through the cracks and be lost forever. I disagree.

The "First Mediation" is that between the divine and the human ... the "Second Mediation" [is] the inter-human mediation, the reconciliation of different human groups ... a "Third Mediation" has become an imperative ... the mediation between the human community and the Earth ... It is not only food for the body that comes from Earth, but our very powers of thinking and the great images of our imagination. Our arts and education, too, all proceed from Earth. Even our knowledge of God comes from our acquaintance with Earth, for the divine reveals itself first of all in the sky and in the waters and in the wind, in the mountains and valleys, in the birds of the air and in all those forms that flower and move over the surface of the planet.

What is Christianity? For our purposes, I’ll define Christianity as the body of believers who assent to these great ecumenical creeds. They believe that the triune God created the world, that humanity has fallen into sin and evil, that God has returned to rescue us in Jesus Christ, that in his death and resurrection Jesus accomplished our salvation for us so we can be received by grace, that he established the church, his people, as the vehicle through which he continues his mission of rescue, reconciliation, and salvation, and that at the end of time Jesus will return to renew the heavens and the earth, removing all evil, injustice, sin, and death from the world.

André Aciman’s letter reflected a widespread concern that, even though the first decade of the Twenty–First Century was closing with a search for reconciliation and understanding between Christian and Muslim societies, Jews who had lived in Muslim lands would not be remembered, nor their hopes for justice upheld.

American Christianity (particularly evangelicalism) has often lost sight of a holistic understanding of the gospel. There’s an emphasis on proclamation of the good news, but it tends to be theologically disconnected from demonstration of that good news. There’s an emphasis on loving God as expressed in the Great Commandment, but it’s theologically disconnected from loving neighbor. There’s an emphasis on being reconciled to God through Christ, but it’s theologically disconnected from being sent into the world by Christ as ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:20).

In a nutshell, the Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22 tells the story of a god reckless with desire to get his family back. God struck the decisive blow of reconciliation when he sent the Son on the long journey to planet earth. The Bible’s last scene, like the parable of the lost son, ends in jubilation, the family united once again.

One brilliant manifestation of God’s mercy is found in the elimination of the holes that are continually being dug by the men who are attempting to fill them.

In a letter from Tegel Prison, written on the occasion of the baptism of the son of Eberhard and Renate Bethge in May 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of the new form that Christian witness would assume in “the revolutionary times ahead”—that period following the German church’s complicity in mass death and the mission to create a world without Jews. Bonhoeffer offered this “first child of a new generation,” Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge, a sober assessment of the possibility and future of Christianity. It was not solely intended to gentle him into the faith; the challenges of the coming years would throw everyone back to first convictions. What could be more obvious than that the church had lost its capacity to make real the word of reconciliation and redemption to the world? “We have spent too much time in thinking, supposing that if we weigh in advance the possibilities of any action, it will happen automatically. We have learnt, rather too late, that action comes, not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. For your thought and action will enter on a new relationship; your thinking will be confined to your responsibilities in action. With us thought was often the luxury of the onlooker; with you it will be entirely subordinated to action.”1

White Christianity claims to seek racial harmony and reconciliation, but it is only possible through a personal relationship with their white Jesus who they say can move across all racial and ethnic lines. The problem is that Jesus was never white, and the suggestion that he can reach all people regardless of race is inconsistent with the fact that they robbed him of his true race to make him conform to their ideals.

White Christians who offer reconciliatory rhetoric while remaining unwilling to give up any of the benefits of whiteness cannot be allowed to define the terms of racial reconciliation.

How is it that in a supposedly relativistic, you-do-you age, so many people have been shamed or “dragged” online, helplessly watching their reputation or career be destroyed? The answer is not just that some people are mean but that the form of the web undermines moral reconciliation

I realize that, from an orthodox point of view, this attitude poses a problem from the orthodox point of view vis-à-vis the word sacrifice. But the word is common to all the churches. The texts seem to indicate that at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, there was in certain traditions an interpretation both anti-sacrificial and religious at the same time. But immediately, Luther in particular fell into ultra-sacrificial [supersacrificielles] definitions. The basic point, I believe, is that the non-sacrificial reading not only illuminates, but reinforces, all the great orthodox and patristic dogmas, and far from eliminating the idea that Jesus “sacrifices” himself for the salvation of man [Jésus se “sacrifie” pour le salut des hommes], it strengthens that also. The only thing to look at is the misunderstanding, from here on, in the vocabulary, and so I repeat my question. Can one use the same word for what the bad prostitute did in the Judgment of Solomon and for what the good one did?95 Is it not essential today to achieve reconciliation, not only between Christians, but more essentially between Jews and Christians, to demonstrate to Jews as to Christians how the thing that is most essential [que ce qu’il y a de + essential] in Judaic inspiration demands the recognition of Christ as fulfillment, just as it was presented throughout the Middle Ages? [la reconnaissance du Christ comme accomplissement ainsi que l’a pressenti tout le Moyen Age?]. Is it not essential to dispel what seems to me to be the inevitable sacrificial misunderstanding? I think that all this, in spite of the still [encore] abrupt and hazardous character of certain formulations, is moving in the direction of the current evolution of the church and its own self-examination [sa propre mise en question], of which the blandness of the progressives is only a caricature.

For Christians, especially postmodern Christians bereft of any consensus, sexual difference is a similar category. We will not know what it means until we allow God to tell us what it means. The tradition has claimed that we do not know who we are and what it means to find ourselves differentiated as men and women until we allow the premises and practices of revelation to unfold. In the tradition, stretching from Augustine to John Paul II, sexual difference is not mute, inert, nonexistent, or indifferent. In this tradition, God brings man to woman and tells the two sexes something they would not otherwise know: that their creation is good, that their creation as two sexes is for the sake of enabling a church and a covenant, and that, despite their fallenness, their twoness can in itself become a witness to reconciliation and redemption through marriage. Marriage gives this aspect of our creation the power to testify, and the nonmarried offer supporting testimony through their chastity, which creates the social ecology supporting marriage.

Any subsidiary vaults and structural extensions assume the shape of a cross, the ultimate symbol of reconciliation and transfiguration (especially from the sixth-century reign of Justinian). The same iconographic pattern is extended and applies to the Evangelists, or authors of the four Gospels, who are depicted above the four columns supporting the church’s dome, as well as to Saint John the Baptist, or Forerunner, who is portrayed on the icon screen, always turned toward and pointing to Jesus. THE

According to Tertullian, impatient actions do not produce what they promise. Instead, impatient actions make things worse, bringing about massive misfortunes. “Now, nothing undertaken through impatience can be transacted without violence, and everything done with violence has either met with no success or has collapsed or has plunged to its own destruction.” 57 Patience, on the other hand, brings new possibilities. Patience is the source of the “practices of peace,” which bring reconciliation week by week in the Christian worship services (Matt. 5: 24).

Mission in our neighborhoods or social ministry across town can be reframed when we recognize that friendship and love belong at the heart of every Christian ministry and act of reconciliation. Reconciliation requires friendship wherever we find ourselves. Friendships that cross the divisions of class, education, race, gender, ethnicity, age and ability are crucial for reconciliation and for the life of the church.

We violate God’s intention for the human family by creating false categories of value and identity, based on identifiable characteristics such as culture, place of origin, and skin color.”10 Seeing such identifiable differences as a source for celebration, rather than as a cause for differently valuing one another, is essential for putting us on the path away from division and toward racial reconciliation

A renewal movement is at work within our nation, a movement of reconciliation with God. In our nation’s short history there have been two great awakenings, and I believe the third is rising in the water. The water has come ashore, and soon it will splash across our desert land.

Let us note the fundamental reversal involved in the central idea of this letter; what from the earthly point of view was a secular happening is the true worship for mankind, for he who performed it broke through the confines of the liturgical act and made truth: he gave himself. He took from man’s hands the sacrificial offerings and put in their place his sacrificed personality, his own “I”. When our text says that Jesus accomplished the expiation through his blood (9:12), this blood is again not to be understood as a material gift, a quantitatively measurable means of expiation; it is simply the concrete expression of a love of which it is said that it extends “to the end” (Jn 13:1). It is the expression of the totality of his surrender and of his service; an embodiment of the fact that he offers no more and no less than himself. The gesture of the love that gives all—this, and this alone, according to the Letter to the Hebrews, was the real means by which the world was reconciled; therefore the hour of the Cross is the cosmic day of reconciliation, the true and definitive feast of reconciliation. There is no other kind of worship and no other priest but he who accomplished it: Jesus Christ. c.

...there is a constant theme at the centre of all her writings which forms the heart of her vision of God, From her earliest novel to the mature vision of her autobiography, the central importance of unity, reconciliation, one-ness, is reiterated; for she came increasingly to see everything in life, even the darkness of fear and pain and suffering, as part of the one perfect whole that is Creation, that tiny hazelnut of Dame Julian's vision that was all that is made.

The nature of salvation is peace, or reconciliation – peace with God, peace with others, peace within.

First, we are obviously trying to get people back into a relationship with God. Almost everyone who desires to grow as a Christian works on this. But beyond that, we generally see only two other emphases: one is to reconcile people to each other, and the other is to reconcile people to the idea of holiness and pure living. For many, these three emphases constitute the ministry of reconciliation. And, to be sure, great life change and healing are to be had when these three things occur. But there is more to be done. Spiritual growth is not only about coming back into a relationship with God and each other, and about pursuing a pure life, but it is also about coming back to life— the life that God created for people to live. This life of deep relationship, fulfilling work, celebration, and more gives us the life we desire and solves our problems. As Paul says, we are “separated from the life of God” (Eph. 4:18). We must be reconciled to life the way it was created to work.

The apostle Paul writes of unity as shorthand for the kingdom of God or the new creation. And like those images, unity is something the universe is bent toward, which has been decisively launched by Jesus Christ but is not yet present in its fullness. The Christian disciplines of reconciliation, service, sacrificial love, and mutual submission make that hoped-for unity real in the present.

A church that truly understands the implications of the biblical gospel, letting the “word of Christ dwell in [it] richly” (Col 3:16), will look like an unusual hybrid of various church forms and stereotypes. Because of the inside-out, substitutionary atonement aspect, the church will place great emphasis on personal conversion, experiential grace renewal, evangelism, outreach, and church planting. This makes it look like an evangelical-charismatic church. Because of the upside-down, kingdom/incarnation aspect, the church will place great emphasis on deep community, cell groups or house churches, radical giving and sharing of resources, spiritual disciplines, racial reconciliation, and living with the poor. This makes it look like an Anabaptist “peace” church. Because of the forward-back, kingdom/restoration aspect, the church will place great emphasis on seeking the welfare of the city, neighborhood and civic involvement, cultural engagement, and training people to work in “secular” vocations out of a Christian worldview. This makes it look like a mainline church or, perhaps, a Kuyperian Reformed church. Very few churches, denominations, or movements integrate all of these ministries and emphases. Yet I believe that a comprehensive view of the biblical gospel — one that grasps the gospel’s inside-out, upside-down, and forward-back aspects — will champion and cultivate them all. This is what we mean by a Center Church.

Iraq's Christian communities date back to the first centuries of the religion. Before the 2003 U.S-led invasion, around 1 million Christians called Iraq home. But since then, the community has been a frequent target for militants. Attacks on churches, worshipers and clergymen have prompted many Christians to leave the country. Church officials now estimate the community at around 450,000. The prime minister, who has ruled the country since 2006, is under pressure to step aside and not seek a third consecutive term. Many in Iraq accuse al-Maliki's Shiite-led government of helping fuel the crisis by failing to promote reconciliation with the Sunni Muslim minority, and say he has become too polarizing a figure to unite the country and face down the militant threat.

Evangelicals usually fail to challenge the system not just out of concern for evangelism, but also because they support the American system and enjoy its fruits. They share the Protestant work ethic, support laissez-faire economics, and sometimes fail to evaluate whether the social system is consistent with their Christianity.

Evangelicals come from all ethnic and racial backgrounds, but nearly 90 percent of Americans who call themselves evangelicals are white.

From the isolated, individualistic perspective of most white evangelicals and many other Americans, there really is no race problem other than bad interpersonal relationships.

Evangelicalism, as perhaps the strongest Protestant religious movement in the United States, relies heavily on marketing principles for its strength and growth, often intentionally segmenting its market, targeting specific populations, and using homogeneity to its advantage to create religious meaning and belonging and dense ingroup social ties. Although this evangelical vigor can and is used to address racial division in unique ways, the movement also, by its heavy reliance on racially homogenous ingroups and the segmented market, ironically undercuts many of its own best efforts.

Part of the irony of religion’s role is that in strengthening micro bonds between individuals, religion contributes to within-group homogeneity, heightens isolation from different groups, and reduces the opportunity for the formation of macro bonds—bonds between groups—that serve to integrate a society.

Because evangelicals view their primary task as evangelism and discipleship,1 they tend to avoid issues that hinder these activities. Thus, they are generally not counter-cultural. With some significant exceptions, they avoid “rocking the boat,” and live within the confines of the larger culture. At times they have been able to call for and realize social change, but most typically their influence has been limited to alterations at the margins. So, despite having the subcultural tools to call for radical changes in race relations, they most consistently call for changes in persons that leave the dominant social structures, institutions, and culture intact. This avoidance of boat-rocking unwittingly leads to granting power to larger economic and social forces. It also means that evangelicals’ views to a considerable extent conform to the socioeconomic conditions of their time.

Conflict cannot be resolved without solid forgiveness between the conflicting parties. It is essential for the parties in conflict to forgive each other in order to come with a long lasting solution to conflict. According to the teachings of the bible, reconciliation should be soldered by solid forgiveness. A good example of solid forgiveness in the bible is that of Joseph and his brothers. He forgave his brothers and they reconciled even after they sold him to Egypt as a slave. There are other people in the bible who established a concrete reconciliation with God by seeking solid forgiveness. Similarly, Christians are supposed to seek solid forgiveness from God and fellow human beings whenever there is conflict as way of ensuring peace relationship with our neighbors.

Christianity is not a religion; it is the proclamation of the end of religion. Religion is a human activity dedicated to the job of reconciling God to humanity and humanity to itself. The gospel, however — the good news of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ — is the astonishing announcement that God has done the whole work of reconciliation without a scrap of human assistance.”14 ROBERT FARRAR CAPON

[The Christian] knows therefore that this holiness is not to precede his reconciliation to God, and be its cause; but to follow it, and be its effect. — William Wilberforce, A Practical View of Christianity

God’s gift of a call to be Christ’s ambassadors of reconciliation intends to unseat other lords—power, nationalism, race or ethnic loyalty as an end in itself—and give birth to deeper allegiances, stories, spaces and communities that are a “demonstration plot” of the reality of God’s new creation in Christ. Put simply, reconciliation both names the church as and requires the church to be the sign and agent of God’s reconciliation.

the Pope said, ‘Whoever meets Jesus Christ meets Judaism.’ Karol Wojtyla, who was once Bishop of Krakow and helped Jews during the Holocaust, described Judaism as Christianity’s older brother and Christianity as an offshoot of the trunk of King David. He said that it was time that the Catholic Church recognised its responsibility in fostering the anti-Semitism which had made the Holocaust possible, and urged reconciliation between Catholics and Jews.

clergy, and church leaders, teaching and travel in Korea, and study of Korean religion and culture. HeeSun Kim is a Korean who has done academic work and ministry in Korea and the United States. From our experiences we believe there are life-giving perspectives in Korea that need to be shared with United States and Korean religious leaders who are searching for God’s spirit at work for healing, liberation, and reconciliation. What Is Pastoral Theology? Christian pastoral theologians and counselors in the United States have produced some of the most creative ideas about the nature of human suffering and hope in the contemporary world. Experiments in new forms of Christian pastoral counseling started in the 1920s with Anton Boisen and Russell Dicks, who understood the promise of the new psychologies in dialogue with Christian theology and practices. In almost one hundred years these theologies and practices of care have spread over the world. Students from Asia, South America, Africa, Europe, and Australia have studied in the United

An effective ecumenist loves the Church, because the Church’s life is part of the mysteries we assent to in our act of faith. Secondly, we have to meet other Christians always in a spirit of reconciliation, mutual respect and understanding.

We will find God present throughout the journey toward reconciliation in the depths of fear, in the hopelessness of dark nights, in the tears of reconnection.

Tolerance and mutual submission both promise unity. Yet the difference between them is that of peace-loving versus peacemaking. Tolerance believes conflict can be overcome without sacrifice. Mutual submission offers the making of genuine peace—defined as the presence of harmony and reconciliation. In this way we escape individualism’s orbit.

Reconciliation is understood as both a place we are trying to reach and the journey that we take up with each other.

[The Christian] knows therefore that this holiness is not to precede his reconciliation to God, and be its cause; but to follow it, and be its effect. — William Wilberforce,

This explains the vehemence of Paul's reaction to Peter when the latter refused to eat with Gentiles converts (Gal 2:11-21). To object to sharing the table of the Lord with fellow-believers is a denial of one's being justified by faith (cf Räisäinen 1983:259). Where this happens, people are trusting in some form of justification by works. The reconciliation with God is in jeopardy if Christians are not reconciled to each other but continue to separate at meals. The unity of the church—no, the church itself—is called in question when groups of Christians segregate themselves on the basis of such dubious distinctives as race, ethnicity, sex, or social status. God in Christ has accepted us unconditionally; we have to do likewise with regard to one another.

The church has lost its ability to lament!” This heartfelt cry came from a seminary student as she prayed with other graduate students, faculty and staff who gathered together to seek God for racial justice and reconciliation throughout our nation. As we cried and prayed together we realized that our theology and spiritual formation hadn’t given us sufficient permission, language or tools to adequately sit with the despair and sadness of recent racial injustices, senseless acts of gun violence and social unrest taking place in the world around us. We even saw this on social media where people also seemed paralyzed and helpless to know what to do and how to respond. Sincere, well-meaning Christian people asked, “What should we do?” while people who were fed up with the seeming indifference of those around them expressed their outrage through a hashtag that proclaimed “Silence is Violence!

Bergoglio’s talks show him developing two major vaccinations against the lure of ideology. The first was the God’s-holy-faithful-people idea: following Congar, God’s power was to be discerned not in elite schemes but in the ordinary believing poor. The second was a series of governing “Christian principles,” a kind of sapiential wisdom captured in a series of criteria for discernment. In 1974, when he addressed the provincial congregation, there were three: unity comes before conflict, the whole comes before the part, time comes before space. By 1980, he had added a fourth, anti-ideological principle: reality comes before the idea. They were principles deduced from various of his heroes—the early companions of Saint Ignatius, the Paraguay missionaries, even the nineteenth-century caudillo Rosas—and one major source: what he called “the special wisdom of the people whom we call faithful, the people which is the people of God.”13 Those four principles, said Bergoglio, “are the axis around which reconciliation can revolve.” They would constantly appear from now on in his writing and speeches—and were shared with the world in Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), Pope Francis’s first authored document, released in November 2013.

In the Christian tradition, we speak regularly of the need for reconciliation, for peace in the community. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us that “there is no peace without justice.” The hope for the oppressed does not reside in setting aside differences and joining their oppressors—at least not until after justice has been wrought.

In this context, my endeavor was actually a search for reconciliation between Christianity and Islam, for as I witness the recent state of affairs in the world I can sense this reconciliation is absolutely necessary so that the future of humanity's spiritual evolution is not endangered, and that we—as members of humanity—could create the opportunity to be permeated by cosmic consciousness and be able to attain a highly spiritualized state of love.

When we asked him why he was so dedicated to reconciliation and to being willing to make concessions to his opponents, he did not hesitate to say that it had all been due to the influence and witness of the Christian churches. This was echoed by Tokyo Sexwale, the first Premier of the leading industrial province of Gauteng, when he too came to greet our synod as it was meeting in his province. Clearly the Church had made a contribution to what was happening in our land, even though its witness and ministry had been something of a mixed bag. Presumably without that influence things might have turned out a little differently. It could also be that at a very difficult time in our struggle, when most of our leaders were in jail or in exile or proscribed in some way or other, some of the leaders in the churches were thrust into the forefront of the struggle and had thereby given the churches a particular kind of credibility—people like Allan Boesak, formerly leader of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, Frank Chikane, former general secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), Peter Storey, former head of the Methodist Church, Beyers Naudé, the most prominent Afrikaner church dissident and also a general secretary of the SACC, Denis Hurley, formerly Roman Catholic Archbishop of Durban, and leaders of other faith communities who were there where the people were hurting. Thus when they spoke about forgiveness and reconciliation they had won their spurs and would be listened to with respect.

We must now define what it means to be Christian because the hypocrisy of some can be confusing to a watching world. In addition to loving the Lord our God with all our hearts and loving our neighbor as ourselves, mature Christians must: Preach the gospel to all creation (Mark 16:15) and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19); preach the Word in season and out of season (2 Timothy 4:2) in order to reach the lost, hopeless, hurting, and afflicted with the good news. Teach others to observe everything Jesus commanded (Matthew 28:20); encourage, train, and restore by calling to reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:20) believers who have conformed to this world and are struggling with sin. When necessary, confront, correct, and rebuke (2 Timothy 3:16). Contend for the faith (Jude 1:3) and be prepared at all times to defend the truth while giving a clear, convincing answer, explaining what we believe and why we believe it (1 Peter 3:15). Rather than approving of or participating in sin, expose it (Ephesians 5:11), always pointing people to the saving truth of Jesus Christ. Can we accomplish any of these things by being silent? Can we avoid the spiritual warfare every Christian must endure? The world often interprets the silence of Christians as our approval, indifference, or both.

God is working to bring all things together. The purpose is to heal and to reconcile people with each other and with God. God’s mission is also ours. We have been given the same ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18-20).

Not only does the Lord through forgiveness of sins receive and adopt us once for all into the church, but through the same means he preserves and protects us there. For what would be the point of providing a pardon for us that was destined to be of no use? Every godly man is his own witness that the Lord's mercy, if it were granted only once, would be void and illusory, since each is quite aware throughout his life of the many infirmities that need God's mercy. And clearly not in vain does God promise this grace especially to those of his own household; not in vain does he order the same message of reconciliation daily to be brought to them. So, carrying, as we do, The traces of sin around with us throughout life, unless we are sustained by the Lord's constant Grace and forgiving our sins, we shall scarcely abide one moment in the church. But the Lord has called his children to eternal salvation. Therefore, they ought to ponder that there is pardon ever ready for their sins. Consequently, we must firmly believe that by God's generosity, mediated by Christ's merit, through the sanctification of the Spirit, sins have been and are daily pardoned to us Who have been received and engrafted into the body of the church.

A recent example of the racial reconciliation paradigm at work is the #AllLivesMatter retort. In an interview in The New York Times, philosopher Judith Butler unpacked the problem: If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, “all lives matter,” then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of “all lives.” That said, it is true that all lives matter (we can then debate about when life begins or ends). But to make that universal formulation concrete, to make that into a living formulation, one that truly extends to all people, we have to foreground those lives that are not mattering now, to mark that exclusion, and militate against it.113

Race is real. Race is powerful. But race is also a social construct. This understanding of race begins to shed light on the conundrums of whiteness. In the United States constructions of race have never been morally neutral. Racial construction processes have always meant and continue to mean today that persons with phenotypes marking them as “white” receive better treatment, greater social access, and more institutional benefits than those with phenotypes that mark them “of color.

Confronting issues of racial and economic prejudice is part of missions work, the work of the church. Left without a Christian response, advocates for the poor or minorities must turn to political means for relief. Unfortunately, they must rely on a rights-based approach rather than a biblical love-based approach. Without the church leading the way, secular agendas of multiculturalism, diversity, tolerance, and racial reconciliation provide only a humanistic, man-centered solution.

You can't get reconciliation between the powerful and powerless unless you disempower the powerful.

Every aspect of the way God views and saves sinners is designed to undermine racism and lead to a reconciled and redeemed humanity from every people group in the world.

Flavius Marcellinus, tribune and notary, was assigned this position when he presided at the Conference of Carthage in 411, where Caecilianist and Donatist bishops debated which party represented the true church in Africa. He ruled against the Donatists and enforced the legislation which had been held in abeyance during the attempt at reconciliation. Dulcitius, a tribune, was sent by Honorius and Arcadius to Africa in about 420 as an executor, charged with forcing the Donatists to turn over the property that had been remanded to the Caecilianists

Once a person or a people comes to recognize an evil for what it is, even if that evil is then allowed to continue for a time, in whole or in part, the most radical change has already come to pass. Thereafter, everything—penitence, regeneration, forgiveness, rebellion, reconciliation—becomes possible. For what it is to be human has been, in some real way, irrevocably altered.

Frederick Douglass wrote, We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! all for the glory of God and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand.

We’ve looked in other chapters at how the individualistic gospel of the United States is a perversion of discipleship. The antidote—the vision of discipleship that the Bible gives us—is wholistic, communal, and unified in Christ.

How can children of God sit silently as their brothers and sisters experience racial injustice?

Can you imagine how different the church would be? God’s people are to be salt and light, a means of grace to a world deeply divided. Our unity in Christ, fueled by holy living, becomes a lighthouse in an ocean of chaos.

But in 1947, when his older brother Clyde, a World War II hero who had earned a Purple Heart, was killed by a New Hebron police officer, it became a matter of life and death. A White police officer had targeted Clyde at the movie theater, striking him in the back of the head with a club. Clyde, not knowing who had hit him, responded to the coward’s attack with a defensive posture. When he did, the police officer fired two shots into his abdomen. JP was with his brother—an American hero—in the ambulance and in the Colored hospital when he died. JP’s brother went all the way to Europe to fight against Hitler and the Nazis only to die at the hands of a racist police officer in America.

Pastor, when those White police officers were terrorizing me, I saw them as less than human. I saw them as maggots. If I’d had a nuclear grenade, I would have detonated it and killed them and me. They filled me with hate.” But he told me, “Then I realized I was a bigot too. But I knew as a Christian, I cannot hate these men. I must love. I want to preach a gospel strong enough to heal this madness and hatred.”[2] JP writes, For too long, many in the Church have argued that unity in the body of Christ across ethnic and class lines is a separate issue from the gospel. There has been the suggestion that we can be reconciled to God without being reconciled to our brothers and sisters in Christ. Scripture doesn’t bear that out. . . . It’s going to take intentionally multiethnic and multicultural churches to bust through the chaos and confusion of the present moment and redirect our gaze to the revolutionary gospel of reconciliation.[3]

The scene of the crime is your mind.” What I mean by this is that how we think influences how we live. We must partner with the Holy Spirit in allowing Christ to form, renew, and shape how we think. Dark powers want to influence our thinking; therefore, we must intentionally set our minds above, where Christ is seated, allowing him to transform our minds as we soak in the sacred Scriptures.[

His entire life is summarized by the church in the word: he who suffered. Through the cross alone, he has triumphed over the principalities and powers. That was his only weapon. Alone and never in anything other than in the sign of the cross, he has achieved victory. That is the point: all things are reconciled and reunified. Just as everything turned away from God through the tree of knowledge, so everything returns to God through the cross. After having accomplished reconciliation, he now proceeds to gather all things under him as the head in the fullness of time—everything that is in heaven and on earth [Eph. 1:10]. As king he will reign until all his enemies are laid under his feet. Considering all this now, the church once again raises its eye with vivacity and declares, I believe in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord.

When I first met Jesus, I was infatuated with what he had done for me. It was me, Jesus, and my Bible. But the more I read, the more I learned that the Bible is about Jesus, his church, and his mission to make all things new. Just as Paul told the first Christians, we are adopted into Abba’s family, and in Christ, we are God’s workmanship. We become his paintbrushes, and creation becomes the canvas in which he uses our redeemed colors and cultures to create the beauty of his Kingdom on earth: “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10).

The late John Stott writes, If we love our neighbor as God made him, we must inevitably be concerned for his total welfare, the good of his soul, his body and his community. . . . Which means the quest for better social structures in which peace, dignity, freedom and justice are secured for all men. . . . The gospel lacks visibility if we merely preach it, and lacks credibility if we who preach it are interested only in souls and have no concern about the welfare of people’s bodies, situations and communities.

Echo chambers of homogeneity morph into cages that limit our capacity to empathize and mourn. When our neighborhoods and churches lack ethnic diversity or when we just do not attempt to connect with the “other,

The crowd resembled Transformation Church—a mixture of young and old and swirls of different colors. I thought, Why is a BLM protest more diverse than the church in America? This sort of diversity should be the composition of every church in America where demographics make it possible.

American churches are ten times more segregated than the neighborhoods they are in and twenty times more segregated than nearby schools.[4] Echo chambers of segregation and disunity reinforce ethnic division, intensify political division, breed inequality, and foster injustice.[5] The implications of the segregated church in America stifle the mission of God, hinder discipleship, and display a divided church. This segregation does not reflect the character of Jesus that Christians are called to display.

Repentance is reconciliation with God to do what is right.

God sees the child He created in the fool that sees neither.

When evangelicals focus on bringing people together, they often leave out any analysis of the systemic and institutional forces that led to the separation in the first place. Occasional racial proximity is too low a goal for reconciliation.

At Jesus’ fountain of living water, there are no separate water fountains for God’s people; regardless of our ethnicities, we all drink at the same well of grace. In our dry and weary land of racial division, Jesus provides living water that reconciles us to him and to each other so we can live in harmony.

We are not responsible for the sins of our forefathers, but we are responsible to mourn and undo their damage as best we can. This is basic Christianity. Mourning the sins of our forefathers may seem strange in American Christianity, but it is a normative spiritual discipline in the Bible.

Reconciliation with God is through repentance.

Secular modernism has tried to get the fruits of the Jesus-message without the roots. It can’t be done. Christianity was the original multicultural society, committed to caring for the poor and to sharing a common life across racial boundaries. Trying to recreate a society like that without Jesus leading the way is like trying to type with your fingers tied together.

It is easy, and all too common, to confuse watching for God as a passive acceptance of reality. But watching for God is an act of holy observation and subversive hope. In the midst of turmoil, chaos, and despair, it asks, "What is God doing, and what would God have us to do?

As Nikos Kazantzakis puts it: “Wherever you find husband and wife, that’s where you find God; wherever children and petty cares and cooking and arguments and reconciliation are, that is where God is too.” 19 The God of the incarnation is more domestic than monastic.