Richard Hays Quotes

The human life cycle no less than evolves around the box; from the open-topped box called a bassinet, to the pine box we call a coffin, the box is our past and, just as assuredly, our future. It should not surprise us then that the lowly box plays such a significant role in the first Christmas story. For Christmas began in a humble, hay-filled box of splintered wood. The Magi, wise men who had traveled far to see the infant king, laid treasure-filled boxes at the feet of that holy child. And in the end, when He had ransomed our sins with His blood, the Lord of Christmas was laid down in a box of stone. How fitting that each Christmas season brightly wrapped boxes skirt the pine boughs of Christmas trees around the world.

God has chosen to save the world through the cross, through the shameful and powerless death of the crucified Messiah. If that shocking event is the revelation of the deepest truth about the character of God, then our whole way of seeing the world is turned upside down… all values are transformed… God refuses to play games of power and prestige on human terms.

The gospel is not a summary of “the necessary truths of reason”; rather, it is a revelation that shatters and reshapes human reason in light of God’s foolishness. The Word is known in contingent human form, and only there. That is the scandal of the gospel.

¿Tienes idea de cuántas vidas debimos cruzar antes de que lográramos la primera idea de que hay más en la vida que comer, luchar o alcanzar poder en la Bandada? ¡Mil vidas, Juan, diez mil! Y luego cien vidas más hasta que empezáramos a aprender que hay algo llamado perfección, y otras cien para comprender que la meta de la vida es encontrar esa perfección y reflejarla.

The question that Luke-Acts puts to the church—then and now—is not “Are you reforming society?” but rather “Is the power of the resurrection at work among you?

Jesus’ death on the cross is not an accident or an injustice that befell him; it is, rather, an act of sacrifice freely offered for the sake of God’s people.

The church embodies the power of the resurrection in the midst of a not-yet-redeemed world.

Se vive así, cobijado en un mundo delicado, y uno cree que vive. Entonces lee un libro (Lady Chatterley, por ejemplo), o va de viaje, o habla con Richard, y descubre que no vive, que está simplemente hibernando. Los síntomas de la hibernación se pueden detectar fácilmente. El primero es la inquietud. El segundo síntoma (que llega cuando el estado de hibernación empieza a ser peligroso y podría degenerar en muerte) es la ausencia de placer. Eso es todo. Parece una enfermedad inocua. Monotonía, aburrimiento, muerte. Hay millones de personas que viven (o mueren) así, sin saberlo. Trabajan en oficinas. Tienen coches. Salen al campo con su familia. Educan a sus hijos. Hasta que llega una brusca conmoción: una persona, un libro, una canción... y los despierta, salvándoles de la muerte.

I have suggested that the unity-within-diversity of the New Testament witnesses can best be grasped with the aid of three focal images: community, cross, and new creation. We can encapsulate the theological implications of these images for the church in a single complex narrative summary: the New Testament calls the covenant community of God’s people into participation in the cross of Christ in such a way that the death and resurrection of Jesus becomes a paradigm for their common life as harbingers of God’s new creation.

In an agricultural society, or during a time of exploration and settlement, or hunting and fathering--which is to say, most of mankind's history--energetic boys were particularly prized for their strength, speed, and agility. [...] As recently as the 1950s, most families still had some kind of agricultural connection. Many of these children, girls as well as boys, would have been directing their energy and physicality in constructive ways: doing farm chores, baling hay, splashing in the swimming hole, climbing trees, racing to the sandlot for a game of baseball. Their unregimented play would have been steeped in nature.

the ethic envisioned by the New Testament writers is not an impossible ideal. If we fail to live in obedient responsiveness to their moral vision, that is because of a failure of the imagination—or perhaps a lack of courage—on our part.

It is striking how seldom Paul uses eschatological judgment as a threat to motivate obedience. More characteristically, he points to the sanctifying work of God’s Spirit, already underway in the community, as a ground of reassurance and hope.

The community, in its corporate life, is called to embody an alternative order that stands as a sign of God’s redemptive purposes in the world.

one cannot become a follower of Jesus in this Gospel’s narrative world without surrendering a position of privilege.

The value of our exegesis and hermeneutics will be tested by their capacity to produce persons and communities whose character is commensurate with Jesus Christ and thereby pleasing to God.22

First, we should guard against falling into a habit of reading New Testament ethical texts in one mode only. If we read the New Testament and find only laws, we are obviously enmeshed in grave hermeneutical distortion. Likewise, if we read the New Testament and find only timeless moral principles, we are probably guilty, as Barth warned, of evading Scripture’s specific claims upon our lives.

To use Matthew’s own language, turning the other cheek makes sense if and only if it really is true that the meek will inherit the earth, if and only if it really is true that those who act on Jesus’ words have built their house on a rock so that it will stand in the day of judgment. Turning the other cheek makes sense if and only if all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus.

It is the vision of a slaughtered Lamb, not a ferocious Lion. “The shock of this reversal,” writes Richard Hays, “discloses the central mystery of the Apocalypse: God overcomes the world not through a show of force but through the suffering and death of Jesus, ‘the faithful witness [martys]

The New Testament has a normative role in Christian theology and ethics that is different from the Old Testament’s role. We do not have a simple, undifferentiated canon running from Genesis to Revelation. The claim that Jesus’ death and resurrection is the central decisive act of God for the salvation of humankind means that the cross becomes the hermeneutical center for the canon as a whole. Thus, within the canon the New Testament has a privileged hermeneutical function.

The ethical issues that confront Christians who try to discern the will of God in Scripture are, as I shall try to show in this book, far more nuanced than a simple conservative/liberal polarity would suggest. One reason that the church has become so bitterly divided over moral issues is that the community of faith has uncritically accepted the categories of popular U.S. discourse about these topics, without subjecting them to sustained critical scrutiny in light of a close reading of the Bible.

The living out of the New Testament cannot occur in a book; it can happen only in the life of the Christian community.

this means—in the Apocalypse just as in the prophetic visions upon which it draws (Isa. 65:17–25, 66:22)—that God will have redeemed and transformed the creation, not abolished it.

- ¿Estás intentando emborracharte? - Por supuesto que sí. Si tengo que hablar conmigo mismo, no veo qué necesidad hay de hacerlo sobrio.

Porque no hay una forma adecuada de planificar la vida ni tampoco de vivirla: sólo un montón de formas inadecuadas".

The radical move that Paul makes is to proclaim that all people, Jews and Gentiles alike, stand equally condemned under the just judgment of a righteous God.

Sound familiar? Rutherford B. Hayes was someone who thought that attracting opposition from nearly every direction meant that he was right. James A. Garfield, watching the president flounder in big things and small, thought that the “impression is deepening that he is not large enough for the place he holds” and that his election “has been an almost fatal blow to his party.

No hay necesidad de tocar, besar, abrazar. Pero lo hago de todos modos. Es nuestro último fetiche. El amor no es otra cosa al fin y al cabo, que una interminable serie de actos individuales".

To live faithfully in the time between the times is to walk a tightrope of moral discernment, claiming neither too much nor too little for God’s transforming power within the community of faith.

When the identity of the community is understood in these terms, participation in any form of ethnic division or hatred becomes unthinkable, and ethnic division within the church becomes nothing other than a denial of the truth of the gospel. ‘That is why racism is a heresy. One of the church’s most urgent pragmatic tasks in the 1990s is to form communities that seek reconciliation across ethnic and racial lines.

New Testament scholar Richard Hays notes that there is not “an exact equivalent for ‘homosexual’ in either Greek or Hebrew.”22 The Bible, in its original Hebrew and Greek, has no concept like our present understanding of a person with a homosexual orientation. Indeed, the concept of an ongoing sexual attraction to people of one’s own sex did not exist in European or American language until the late nineteenth century.23

Richard Hays has offered the following important comment on 2 Cor 5:21: Notice carefully what Paul actually says here: Not “so that we might know about the righteousness of God.” Not “so that we might believe in the righteousness of God.” Not “so that we might proclaim the righteousness of God.” Not even “so that we might be justified by the righteousness of God.” Rather, he says, “so that we might become the righteousness of God.” Our commission from God is that we as a community are called to embody the righteousness of God in the world—to incarnate it, if you will—in such a way that the message of reconciliation is made visible in our midst. And of course reconciliation made visible is something that can appear only in practices that show unity, love, mercy, forgiveness and a self-giving grace that the world could not even dream of apart from Christ.158

Durante unos instantes, Pelucón no se movió. Entonces abrió los ojos y levantó la cabeza, y se puso a olisquear a los dos conejos que había junto a él. No dijo nada, y Avellano se preguntó si habría entendido lo que le había dicho. Al final murmuró: «Senior Vulneraria final, ¿sí? ». —Yak— respondió él—. He venido a ayudarte a silflay. Te hará bien, y fuera podemos limpiarte mucho mejor. Vamos, hace una tarde preciosa, sólo hay hojas y sol.

The unity that we discover in the New Testament is not the unity of a dogmatic system. Rather, the unity that we find is the looser unity of a collection of documents that, in various ways, retell and comment upon a single fundamental story.1 That story may be summarized roughly as follows: The God of Israel, the creator of the world, has acted (astoundingly) to rescue a lost and broken world through the death and resurrection of Jesus; the full scope of that rescue is not yet apparent, but God has created a community of witnesses to this good news, the church. While awaiting the grand conclusion of the story, the church, empowered by the Holy Spirit, is called to reenact the loving obedience of Jesus Christ and thus to serve as a sign of God’s redemptive purposes for the world.

The substitution of the automobile for the horse left farmers poorer. “By using the power produced by gasoline instead of by corn- and hay-burning horses,” a rural economist wrote in 1938, “we have deprived the farmer of a market for the crops from many million acres.

The second reason that love is unsatisfactory as a focal image is that it is not really an image; rather, it is an interpretation of an image. What the New Testament means by “love” is embodied concretely in the cross. As 1 John 3:16 declares with powerful simplicity, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” The content of the word “love” is given fully and exclusively in the death of Jesus on the cross; apart from this specific narrative image, the term has no meaning.

Feeding the urban fleet of horses hay and grain supported many thousands of farmers. An idle riding horse in New York City required about 9,000 calories of oats and hay per day. A draft horse in the same city working in construction required almost 30,000 calories of the same feeds.

Do you not know,” he asks, “that you [plural] are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you [plural]?” (3:16). To read this last sentence as though it spoke of the Spirit dwelling in the body of the individual Christian would be to miss the force of Paul’s audacious metaphor: the apostolically founded community takes the place of the Jerusalem Temple as the place where the glory of God resides.54 When the community suffers division, the temple of God is dishonored. But the presence of the Spirit in the community should produce unity rather than conflict.

By far the most important psychological and political part of the Hayes compromise package, of course, was the withdrawal of all federal troops from the South. It was far better, said the new President, for the white man and the black man of the South to make their peace together than to live in constant tension under the surveillance of a federal garrison.

By 1879, national hay production totaled 35 million tons, a figure that had nearly tripled to 97 million tons by 1909. More than half the land in New England was devoted to hay by 1909 as well, and at least twenty-two states harvested more than a million acres a year of hay and forage.11 The mechanization of American agriculture with horse-drawn or horse-powered machinery supported this vast expansion.

But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so [literally “let him/her separate”]; in such a case the brother or sister is not bound. It is to peace that God has called us.37 (7:15) This declaration implies a crucial claim: participation in the community of faith is the most fundamental commitment, more basic than marriage. The line that divides the new creation from the old can run right through a marriage.

The apocalyptic scope of 2 Corinthians 5 was obscured by older translations that rendered the crucial phrase in verse 17 as “he is a new creation” (RSV) or—worse yet—“he is a new creature” (KJV). Such translations seriously distort Paul’s meaning by making it appear that he is describing only the personal transformation of the individual through conversion experience. The sentence in Greek, however, lacks both subject and verb; a very literal translation might treat the words “new creation” as an exclamatory interjection: “If anyone is in Christ—new creation!” The NRSV has rectified matters by rendering the passage, “If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation.” Paul is not merely talking about an individual’s subjective experience of renewal through conversion; rather, for Paul, ktisis (“creation”) refers to the whole created order (cf. Rom. 8:18–25). He is proclaiming the apocalyptic message that through the cross God has nullified the kosmos of sin and death and brought a new kosmos into being. That is why Paul can describe himself and his readers as those “on whom the ends of the ages have met” (1 Cor. 10:11).14 The old age is passing away (cf. 1 Cor. 7:31b), the new age has appeared in Christ, and the church stands at the juncture between them.

This sort of reading of the Apocalypse was nowhere more eloquently performed than in the simple anthem of the U.S. Civil Rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.” The word “overcome” was taken from the King James Version’s rendering of the verb nikan, used pervasively in Revelation and translated in most modern versions as “conquer.”33 The word is used in the refrain of promise that concludes each of the letters to the seven churches. For example, “To him that over-cometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne” (3:21, KJV). As freedom marchers from the black churches joined hands and sang, “We shall overcome someday,” they were expressing their faith that, despite their lack of conventional political power, their witness to the truth would prevail over violence and oppression.

I would propose the following minimal guideline: extrabiblical sources stand in a hermeneutical relation to the New Testament; they are not independent, counterbalancing sources of authority. In other words, the Bible’s perspective is privileged, not ours. However tricky it may be in practice to apply this guideline, it is in fact a meaningful rule of thumb that discriminates significantly between different approaches to New Testament ethics.

First, beginning with the Gospels tends to create a perspectival distortion. The letters of Paul are actually the earliest extant Christian writings, the oldest texts in the New Testament. When we begin with Jesus and the Gospel traditions, we foster, consciously or unconsciously, the impression that Paul is interpreting or reacting to the Gospels. In fact, however, the Gospels that we know were written well after Paul’s death, and Paul makes only a few passing references to the teachings of Jesus

Sharing, not abortion, is the answer. That is what it means for the community to live out the power of the resurrection. Surely the liberal Protestant church’s advocacy of abortions for poor women who cannot afford to raise children is a tragic symbol that the church has lost its vision for communal sharing and has consequently acquiesced to the power of death. The church’s confusion on the issue of abortion is a symptom of its more fundamental unfaithfulness to the economic imperatives of the gospel.

(Inevitably, someone raises the question about World War II: What if Christians had refused to fight against Hitler? My answer is a counterquestion: What if the Christians in Germany had emphatically refused to fight for Hitler, refused to carry out the murders in concentration camps?) The long history of Christian “just wars” has wrought suffering past all telling, and there is no end in sight. As Yoder has suggested, Niebuhr’s own insight about the “irony of history” ought to lead us to recognize the inadequacy of our reason to shape a world that tends toward justice through violence. Might it be that reason and sad experience could disabuse us of the hope that we can approximate God’s justice through killing? According to the guideline I have proposed, reason must be healed and taught by Scripture, and our experience must be transformed by the renewing of our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ. Only thus can our warring madness be overcome. This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus. This might well mean, as Hauerwas has perceived, that the church would assume a peripheral status in our culture, which is deeply committed to the necessity and glory of violence. The task of the church then would be to tell an alternative story, to train disciples in the disciplines necessary to resist the seductions of violence, to offer an alternative home for those who will not worship the Beast. If the church is to be a Scripture-shaped community, it will find itself reshaped continually into a closer resemblance to the socially marginal status of Matthew’s nonviolent countercultural community. To articulate such a theological vision for the church at the end of the twentieth century may be indeed to take most seriously what experience is telling us: the secular polis has no tolerance for explicitly Christian witness and norms. It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence. Let it be said clearly, however, that the reasons for choosing Jesus’ way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms, this way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of nonviolent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our skins, pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing nonviolence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God’s love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.

Y. Collins has rightly perceived the radical stance of opposition taken by this writing: Given a situation of persecution a variety of responses are possible. One might decide to write an apology for the Christian faith rather than an apocalypse. The fact that the author chose to write an apocalypse and one which involves such a thorough-going attack on the authority of Rome is an indication that he shared the fundamental theological principle of the Zealots: that the kingdom of God is incompatible with the kingdom of Caesar.16

I have proposed that such appropriation necessarily entails a complex fourfold task: reading the individual witnesses closely, reflecting synthetically about the common elements in their moral visions, considering the hermeneutical procedures that we employ in bringing the texts to bear upon our own situation, and performing the texts in Christian community. In order to illustrate how this procedure might work in practice, I have offered a series of discernments about five test cases: violence, divorce, homosexuality, anti-Judaism, and abortion.

the church is called to expand and extend the same vocation that was Israels: I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth. (ISA.49:6) When the identity of the community is understood in these terms, participation in any form of ethnic division or hatred becomes unthinkable, and ethnic division within the church becomes nothing other than a denial of the truth of the gospel. ‘That is why racism is a heresy. One of the church’s most urgent pragmatic tasks in the 1990s is to form communities that seek reconciliation across ethnic and racial lines.

Revelation can be read rightly only by those who are actively struggling against injustice. If Revelation is a resistance document, its significance will become clear only to those who are engaged in resistance. It is no coincidence that the most powerful modern readings of Revelation have come from interpreters in socially marginalized positions who were seeking to call the church to countercultural resistance movements: for example, Martin Luther King, Jr., William Stringfellow, and Alan Boesak.31 Something very strange happens when this text is appropriated by readers in a comfortable, powerful, majority community: it becomes a gold mine for paranoid fantasies and for those who want to preach revenge and destruction.

The volume of water and feed that city horses consumed was matched by their daily output of urine and manure. A working horse produced about a gallon of urine daily and thirty to fifty pounds of manure. That volume filled the New York streets daily with about four million pounds and a hundred thousand gallons of redolent excreta that had to be cleared away. When it wasn’t, the streets mired up. Urban manure, both human (night soil) and animal, was a valuable by-product of city living throughout the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. Street-cleaning departments collected horse manure from stables and streets and sold it to local farmers, who used it to fertilize the gardens, pastures, and fields where they grew food, hay, and grain for the city.

One may readily concede that the historical factuality of the resurrection cannot be affirmed with the same level of confidence as the historical factuality of the crucifixion. All historical judgments can be made only with relative certainty, and the judgment that Jesus rose from the dead can be offered—from the historian’s point of view—only with great caution. The character of the event itself hardly falls within ordinary categories of experience.28 Still, something extraordinary happened shortly after Jesus’ death that rallied the dispirited disciples and sent them out proclaiming to the world that Jesus had risen and had appeared to them. Reductive psychological explanations fail to do justice to the widespread testimony to this event within the original community and to the moral seriousness of the movement that resulted from it. The best explanation is to say that God did something beyond all power of human imagining by raising Jesus from the dead. To make such a claim is to make an assertion that redefines reality.29 If such an event has happened in history, then history is not a closed system of immanent causes and effects. God is powerfully at work in the world in ways that defy common sense, redeeming the creation from its bondage to necessity and decay. That, of course, is precisely what the early Christians believed and proclaimed: I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. (EPH. 1:17–21. emphasis mine)

William H. Willimon tells the story of a group of ministers debating the morality of abortion. One of the ministers argues that abortion is justified in some cases because young teenage girls cannot possibly be expected to raise children by themselves. But a black minister, the pastor of a large African American congregation, takes the other side of the question. “We have young girls who have this happen to them. I have a fourteen year old in my congregation who had a baby last month. We’re going to baptize the child next Sunday,” he added. “Do you really think that she is capable of raising a little baby?” another minister asked. “Of course not,” he replied. No fourteen year old is capable of raising a baby. For that matter, not many thirty year olds are qualified. A baby’s too difficult for any one person to raise by herself.” “So what do you do with babies?” they asked. “Well, we baptize them so that we all raise them together. In the case of that fourteen year old, we have given her baby to a retired couple who have enough time and enough wisdom to raise children. They can then raise the mama along with her baby. That’s the way we do it.

¡Papás, tengan cuidado! Cuando se tiene a un hijo sensible y talentoso, asegúrense de unirse a su mundo y después traerlos al de ustedes. Como lo describí en el Capítulo Dos, la primera vez en donde la vinculación afectiva es crítica para un desarrollo sano del sentido de masculinidad del muchacho es desde el año y medio a los tres años. Durante este periodo, el niño aprende a caminar y a hablar. Después aprende a diferenciarse e individuarse de su madre y debe identificarse con el rol del modelo de su propio género, su padre, o una figura que sustituya al padre. Si esto no sucede, el muchacho seguirá identificando su género con el de su madre. Algunos investigadores y terapeutas de la AMS, creen que este factor es la razón por la que hay más homosexuales hombres que homosexuales mujeres, porque las niñas, aun cuando también ellas se diferenciarán e individuarán de sus madres, seguirán teniendo una identidad de género con ellas. Los muchachos tienen esta tarea adicional en el desarrollo, lo que explica por qué los padres son tan importantes para sus hijos en esta y otras etapas del desarrollo. La buena noticia para los padres de hijos con AMS es que pueden restaurar la relación con su hijo adolescente o adulto en cualquier momento (desde luego esto es cierto también para las madres de hijas con AMS). ¡Nunca es demasiado tarde para sanar! (Por

Feeding the urban fleet of horses hay and grain supported many thousands of farmers. An idle riding horse in New York City required about 9,000 calories of oats and hay per day. A draft horse in the same city working in construction required almost 30,000 calories of the same feeds. Annually, each draft horse consumed about 3 tons of hay and 62.5 bushels (1 ton) of oats. It took roughly four acres of good farmland to supply a working city horse that year’s worth of feed.9 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when cities in America were limited largely to the East Coast, farmers seldom transported bulky loose hay more than twenty to thirty miles to city markets.10 The commercialization of the hay press in the 1850s, operated by hand or by horse-powered sweep, reduced the bulk and thus lowered the cost of shipping hay, while the opening of the Midwest’s tallgrass prairies to settlement and farming in the intervening years met the increasing demand for horse feed. By 1879, national hay production totaled 35 million tons, a figure that had nearly tripled to 97 million tons by 1909. More than half the land in New England was devoted to hay by 1909 as well, and at least twenty-two states harvested more than a million acres a year of hay and forage.11 The mechanization of American agriculture with horse-drawn or horse-powered machinery supported this vast expansion.

Gansey felt the feeling of time slipping--one last time. The sense of having done this before. He gently laid the backs of his hands on her cheeks. He whispered, "It'll be okay. I'm ready. Blue, kiss me." The rain splatted about them, kicking up splashes of red-black, making the petals around them twitch. Dream things from Ronan's newly healed imagination piled around their feet. In the rain, everything smelled of these mountains in fall: oak leaves and hay fields, ozone and dirt turned over. It was beautiful here, and Gansey loved it. It had taken a long time, but he'd ended up where he wanted after all. Blue kissed him. He had dreamt of it often enough, and here it was, willed into life. In another world, it would just be this: a girl softly pressing her lips to a boy's. But in this one, Gansey felt the effects of it at once. Blue, a mirror, an amplifier, a strange half-tree soul with ley line magic running through her. And Gansey, restored once by the ley line's power, given a ley line heart, another kind of mirror. And when they were pointed at each other, the weaker one gave. Gansey's ley line heart had been gifted, not grown. He pulled back from her. Out loud, with intention, with the voice that left no room for doubt, he said, "Let it be to kill the demon." Right after he spoke, Blue threw her arms tightly around his neck. Right after he spoke, she pressed her face into the side of his. Right after he spoke, she held him like a shouted word. Love, love, love. He fell quietly from her arms. He was a king.

Events in the African American town of Hamburg, in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, were typical of many others across the former Confederacy where white paramilitary groups mobilized to regain control of state governments. Their aim was simple: prevent African Americans from voting. In July 1876, a few months before the election that gave the presidency to Hayes, a violent rampage in Hamburg abolished the civil rights of freed slaves. Calling itself the Red Shirts, a collection of white supremacists killed six African American men and then murdered four others whom the gang had captured. Benjamin Tillman led the Red shirts; the massacre propelled him to a twenty-four-year career as the most vitriolic racist in the U.S. Senate. Following the massacre, the terror did not abate. In September, a 'rifle club' of more than 500 whites crossed the Savannah River from Georgia and camped outside Hamburg. A local judge begged the governor to protect the African American population, but to no avail. The rifle club then moved on to the nearby hamlet of Ellenton, killing as many as fifty African Americans. President Ulysses S. Grant then sent in federal troops, who temporarily calmed things down but did not eliminate the ongoing threats. Employers in the Edgefield District told African Americans they would be fired, and landowners threatened black sharecroppers with eviction if they voted to maintain a biracial state government. When the 1876 election took place, fraudulent white ballots were cast; the total vote in Edgefield substantially exceeded the entire voting age population. Results like these across the state gave segregationist Democrats the margin of victory they needed to seize control of South Carolina's government from the black-white coalition that had held office during Reconstruction. Senator Tillman later bragged that 'the leading white men of Edgefield' had decided to 'seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson.' Although a coroner's jury indicted Tillman and ninety-three other Red Shirts for the murders, they were never prosecuted and continued to menace African Americans. Federal troops never came to offer protection. The campaign in Edgefield was of a pattern followed not only in South Carolina but throughout the South. With African Americans disenfranchised and white supremacists in control, South Carolina instituted a system of segregation and exploitation that persisted for the next century. In 1940, the state legislature erected a statute honoring Tillman on the capitol grounds, and in 1946 Clemson, one of the state's public universities, renamed its main hall in Tillman's honor. It was in this environment that hundreds of thousands of African Americans fled the former Confederacy in the first half of the twentieth century.

A similar theological—and particularly ecclesiological—logic shapes the Durham Declaration, a manifesto against abortion addressed specifically to the United Methodist Church by a group of United Methodist pastors and theologians. The declaration is addressed not to legislators or the public media but to the community of the faithful. It concludes with a series of pledges, including the following: We pledge, with Cod’s help, to become a church that hospitably provides safe refuge for the so-called “unwanted child” and mother. We will joyfully welcome and generously support—with prayer, friendship, and material resources—both child and mother. This support includes strong encouragement for the biological father to be a father, in deed, to his child.27 No one can make such a pledge lightly. A church that seriously attempted to live out such a commitment would quickly find itself extended to the limits of its resources, and its members would be called upon to make serious personal sacrifices. In other words, it would find itself living as the church envisioned by the New Testament. William H. Willimon tells the story of a group of ministers debating the morality of abortion. One of the ministers argues that abortion is justified in some cases because young teenage girls cannot possibly be expected to raise children by themselves. But a black minister, the pastor of a large African American congregation, takes the other side of the question. “We have young girls who have this happen to them. I have a fourteen year old in my congregation who had a baby last month. We’re going to baptize the child next Sunday,” he added. “Do you really think that she is capable of raising a little baby?” another minister asked. “Of course not,” he replied. No fourteen year old is capable of raising a baby. For that matter, not many thirty year olds are qualified. A baby’s too difficult for any one person to raise by herself.” “So what do you do with babies?” they asked. “Well, we baptize them so that we all raise them together. In the case of that fourteen year old, we have given her baby to a retired couple who have enough time and enough wisdom to raise children. They can then raise the mama along with her baby. That’s the way we do it.”28 Only a church living such a life of disciplined service has the possibility of witnessing credibly to the state against abortion. Here we see the gospel fully embodied in a community that has been so formed by Scripture that the three focal images employed throughout this study can be brought to bear also on our “reading” of the church’s action. Community: the congregation’s assumption of responsibility for a pregnant teenager. Cross: the young girl’s endurance of shame and the physical difficulty of pregnancy, along with the retired couple’s sacrifice of their peace and freedom for the sake of a helpless child. New creation: the promise of baptism, a sign that the destructive power of the world is broken and that this child receives the grace of God and hope for the future.29 There, in microcosm, is the ethic of the New Testament. When the community of God’s people is living in responsive obedience to God’s Word, we will find, again and again, such grace-filled homologies between the story of Scripture and its performance in our midst.

La crueldad gratuita... Hay que reconocer que no pasa nunca de moda, y los nazis la habían elevado a la categoría de filosofía.

E. P. Sanders has forcefully argued the case that Jesus’ demonstration in the Temple was a prophetic action symbolizing its destruction. Oddly, however, he dismisses the Jeremiah allusion in 11:17 as secondary and inauthentic. Indeed, he suggests that the Evangelists have used the quotation about the “den of robbers” to cover up the embarrassing historical fact of Jesus’ threat of destruction and to “make it appear that Jesus was quite reasonably protesting against dishonesty

1. Estar cegado por la tecnología. Las nuevas tecnologías, como big data e IA, son muy atractivas, sobre todo para los más tecnológicos. Cuando se inicia un proyecto basado en datos, inevitablemente ellos se sienten atraídos por este y lo primero en lo que piensan es en la plataforma de big data o en el algoritmo de IA que hay que utilizar: cuanto más sofisticado, mejor. Sin embargo, esto es como construir una casa empezando por el tejado. Para comenzar, resulta fundamental tener claros los problemas del negocio que hay que resolver, identificar los datos relevantes a los que hay que recurrir para buscar la solución y asegurarse de que son de suficiente calidad.

Cuanto mejor se comprenda cómo se hace bien una cosa, tanto más se preocupa uno por ello. Pero en las instituciones basadas en las transacciones a corto plazo y las tareas en constante cambio no hay lugar para esa profundidad. En realidad, incluso es posible que la organización le tema; la expresion clave de los sectores gerenciales es aquí ENCERRADO EN SÍ MISMO. Quien profundiza en una actividad simplemente para realizarla correctamente puede dar a los otros la impresión de estar encerrado en sí mismo, de haber quedado fijado a una única cosa, y la obsesión es en verdad un elemento necesario de la artesanía. Esta persona es lo opuesto al consultor, que pica en todo pero no se detiene en nada.

Saber más sobre lo que tus protectores intentan cuidar puede ayudarte a abrirles más el corazón al hacerte una mejor idea de aquello a lo que se enfrentan y todo lo que está en juego.

Un hombre que se enorgullece de llevar una línea recta en la vida es un idiota que cree en la infalibilidad. Los principios no existen: sólo existen los hechos; no hay más leyes que las de la conveniencia.

Plantation owners redefined their former slaves as sharecroppers to maintain harsh and exploitative conditions. Events in the African American town of Hamburg, in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, were typical of many others across the former Confederacy where white paramilitary groups mobilized to regain control of state governments. Their aim was simple: prevent African Americans from voting. In July 1876, a few months before the election that gave the presidency to Hayes, a violent rampage in Hamburg abolished the civil rights of freed slaves. Calling itself the Red Shirts, a collection of white supremacists killed six African American men and then murdered four others whom the gang had captured. Benjamin Tillman led the Red Shirts; the massacre propelled him to a twenty-four-year career as the most vitriolic racist in the U.S. Senate. Following the massacre, the terror did not abate. In September, a “rifle club” of more than 500 whites crossed the Savannah River from Georgia and camped outside Hamburg. A local judge begged the governor to protect the African American population, but to no avail. The rifle club then moved on to the nearby hamlet of Ellenton, killing as many as fifty African Americans. President Ulysses S. Grant then sent in federal troops, who temporarily calmed things down but did not eliminate the ongoing threats. Employers in the Edgefield District told African Americans they would be fired, and landowners threatened black sharecroppers with eviction if they voted to maintain a biracial state government. When the 1876 election took place, fraudulent white ballots were cast; the total vote in Edgefield substantially exceeded the entire voting age population. Results like these across the state gave segregationist Democrats the margin of victory they needed to seize control of South Carolina’s government from the black-white coalition that had held office during Reconstruction. Senator Tillman later bragged that “the leading white men of Edgefield” had decided “to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson.” Although a coroner’s jury indicted Tillman and ninety-three other Red Shirts for the murders, they were never prosecuted and continued to menace African Americans. Federal troops never again came to offer protection. The campaign in Edgefield was of a pattern followed not only in South Carolina but throughout the South. With African Americans disenfranchised and white supremacists in control, South Carolina instituted a system of segregation and exploitation that persisted for the next century. In 1940, the state legislature erected a statue honoring Tillman on the capitol grounds, and in 1946 Clemson, one of the state’s public universities, renamed its main hall in Tillman’s honor. It was in this environment that hundreds of thousands of African Americans fled the former Confederacy in the first half of the twentieth century.*

I come from the lower orders, that is understood by all. Not the lowest; you’d have to go back to my grandfather for the lowest. He was a night-soil remover, did you know that, Sam? One shilling per stinking cesspit. Did you know that they set me to working with him when I was a boy? One summer I chucked it, ran to the countryside, hid in a hay mow. Farmer found me in the morning, took pity, let me stay. Let me work with him and his dogs, tending his sheep. It was bliss. I never loved anything like I loved them dogs. Then my father showed up and dragged me home. Why? He didn’t want me. “Never mind. You could say my father’s rise to running his own public house was nothing short of a miracle, really. And then I went and edged up a rung from him, didn’t I, when I became a constable. Promoted to detective. Then chief of detectives. Still and all, I got about as high as I could possibly go, given what I come from. And that ain’t particular high. Just ask Sir Richard Mayne, commissioner of the Metropolitan, if you’re unsure of that.” Llewellyn sighed deeply and shook his head. “You seem impatient, Mr. Llewellyn. Am I keeping you?” Field poured the last of the whiskey into his glass. “Now, forget my old man. Forget the night-soil remover. Start over. Say I come from a monkey. And so did you. And Commissioner Mayne—him, too.” He looked around the tavern. “And so did every bleeding body on the whole earth come from monkeys, and those monkeys come from God knows what—fish? Worms? Who benefits, Sam? Who gets hurt? Who likes it, and who don’t?” Llewellyn shrugged. “I’ll tell you who don’t like it: the merchants who run the bleeding empire don’t like it, not one bit. It puts every man on the same level as them, see? The rich, the poor, the light-skinned, and the dark. The bishops don’t like it, nor the lords, because if Mr. Darwin has his way, where’s the control? Who’s in charge, who’s on top and who’s not? Bad for business, Mr. Darwin’s notions are. But for blokes like me and you? Well, even a policeman can dream, can’t he? It’s not flattering, perhaps, having an orangutan as your forefather, but there’s a kind of hope in it, don’t you see? Last I checked, there weren’t no quality monkeys, nor were there lower-class ones.” “And?” “Crash, boom, Mr. Darwin brings it all down. Rule Britannia and the lot. Brings it down harder and more thorough than Mr. Marx ever dreamt in his darkest revolutionary dream.

in a compromise that gave the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, the White House. In return for southern Democratic support of their presidential candidate, Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops who had been protecting African Americans in the defeated Confederacy.

Hace años , todos los actuales vecinos de la comunidad tenían que madrugar porque había mucho que hacer y el día tenía un número limitado de horas. Ahora madrugan porque hay mucho que hacer y la vida tiene un número limitado de días

Hay cientos de miles de especies de amor, inventadas por separado, cada una más ingeniosa que la anterior, y todas siguen actuando.

Elizabeth sale al aire frío del atardecer sin mirar atrás. Los días se están volviendo más breves y cada vez salen más bufandas de los armarios. El verano aún tiene al otoño bajo control, pero no por mucho tiempo. ¿Cuántos otoños más le quedarán a Elizabeth? ¿Cuántos años más de ponerse un par de botas cómodas y caminar entre la hojarrasca? Un día llegará la primavera y no la encontrará en casa. Los narcisos seguirán floreciendo junto al lago, pero ella no estará para verlos. Así son las cosas. Hay que disfrutarlas mientras sea posible.

Digan lo que digan acerca del tiempo y sus propiedades curativas, hay cosas en la vida que se rompen y nunca más se recuperan.

with insight and wisdom. θεοῦ γάρ ἐσμεν συνεργοί 1 Cor 3:9

She looked so old that she reminded me of a comic book hero of my childhood: The Heap. It was a World War I German pilot who was shot down and lay wounded for months in a bog and was slowly changed by mysterious juices into a ⅞ plant and ⅛ human thing. The Heap walked around like a mound of moldy hay and performed good deeds, and of course bullets had no effect on it. The Heap killed the comic book villains by giving them a great big hug, then instead of riding classically away into the sunset like a Western, The Heap lumbered off into the bog. That’s the way the old woman looked.

One reason that the church has become so bitterly divided over moral issues is that the community of faith has uncritically accepted the categories of popular U.S. discourse about these topics, without subjecting them to sustained critical scrutiny in light of a close reading of the Bible.

Man to woman; man to man in letter words will stand the philosophy of coming in along by the bay of hay made so sublime be that it outlasts the coming time.

Es cierto que hay cientos de pilotos que vuelan sin temor, en medio de oscuras noches y sobre kilómetros de neblina, pero su tranquilidad no proviene del saber y del control sino de una fe ciega en ese conjunto de piezas de metal que

Action flows from character, but character is not so much a matter of innate disposition as of training in the ways of righteousness. Those who respond to Jesus’ preaching and submit to his instruction will find themselves formed in a new way so that their actions will, as it were, “naturally” be wise and righteous.

The basic problem with the desire of Jewish Christians to maintain Torah observance was, according to Paul, not that it engendered “works righteousness” but rather that it fractured the unity of the community in Christ.

John Barclay has well summarized the ethical issue at stake: “The problem here is not legalism (in the sense of earning merit before God) but cultural imperialism—regarding Jewish identity and Jewish customs as the essential tokens of membership in the people of God.

To be sure, Paul hopes for the ultimate triumph of God’s grace over all human unbelief and disobedience (Rom. 11:32, Phil. 2:9–11). Until that eschatological consummation, however, Paul speaks only to the community of faith. He articulates no basis for a general ethic applicable to those outside the church.

When the topic of pseudonymous composition arises, I like to ask my students whether all those albums issued under the name of Bob Dylan for the last fifteen years can possibly be the work of the same person who performed “Highway 61 Revisited.”)

All actions, however ostensibly spiritual, must meet the criterion of constructive impact on the church community.

(It is a peculiar irony that in the modern—and “postmodern”—world, Christianity has come to be regarded as narrow and moralistic. Originally, it was quite the reverse: figures such as Jesus and Paul were widely regarded as rebels, antinomians, disturbers of decency.)

Barth identifies three temptations that beset Christian ethics: (1) apologetics: the temptation to justify theological ethics on nontheological grounds; (2) differentiation: the temptation to isolate theological ethics as a special sphere of inquiry sharply distinguished from philosophical ethics; (3) coordination: the temptation to correlate theological ethics and philosophical ethics as mutually complementary.

As great-grandchildren of the Enlightenment, we like to think of ourselves as free moral agents, choosing rationally among possible actions, but Scripture unmasks that cheerful illusion and teaches us that we are deeply infected by the tendency to self-deception.

The Bible undercuts our cultural obsession with sexual fulfillment. Scripture (along with many subsequent generations of faithful Christians) bears witness that lives of freedom, joy, and service are possible without sexual relations. Indeed, however odd it may seem to contemporary sensibilities, some New Testament passages (Matt. 19:10–12, 1 Cor. 7) clearly commend the celibate life as a way of faithfulness.

Finally, the ethical staying power of the Apocalypse is a product of its imaginative richness. The text throbs with theopoetic energy, expressed in its numerous songs of praise and worship. It is no accident that Milton drew inspiration from Revelation or that Handel found the lyrics for the climactic choruses of the Messiah (“Hallelujah” and “Worthy Is the Lamb”) in the poetry of Revelation: “The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever” (based on Rev. 11:15).

Beware of the interpreter who always quotes only the Haustafeln (e.g., Col. 3:22: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything”) and never wrestles with Galatians 5:1 (“For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery”)—or vice versa.

The temptation to project upon the figure of Jesus our own notions of the ideal religious personality is nearly irresistible.

the critic who reconstructs a “historical Jesus” inevitably becomes a “fifth evangelist,” cutting and pasting the tradition so as to articulate a new vision of Jesus for his or her own time.

The kingdom of God belongs to the poor, the outcasts, the weak, the children. Wherever the church becomes acclimated and deferential to conventional human authority that rests upon pride and coercion, it has lost continuity with the Jesus of history. Jesus’ emphatic reaffirmation of the prophetic call for justice and mercy as the hallmarks of God’s covenant people suggests that a community bearing his name ought to return again and again to the prophets to find its ethical bearings.

For the church, it is perhaps important to know that the obedience of faith was lived out in history by the flesh-and-blood man Jesus, for his example teaches us that to trust in the power of God over history is not to trust in vain.

ever since the second century, interpreters who have adopted similar reading strategies have experienced similar disappointments. Whether the Beast was identified with the pope or Cromwell or Napoleon or Hitler or Gorbachev, the result has been the same: history goes on, and the ardent predictions of the interpreters are consigned to the junkyard of exegetical curiosities. Yet history’s inexorable disconfirmation of all such attempts never seems to discourage new generations of readers from thinking that now at last the pattern of events concealed in Revelation’s mysterious symbolism is coming to light in the present time.

God overcomes the world not through a show of force but through the suffering and death of Jesus, “the faithful witness [martys]” (1:5).

Rome rules by the power of violence, but the one who is the true King of kings and Lord of lords rules by virtue of his submission to death—precisely the opposite of armed violence against the empire. That is why he alone is worthy.

the sword with which he strikes down the nations comes from his mouth. We are to understand that the execution of God’s judgment occurs through the proclamation of the Word.

Pregunta: ¿cuántos Wal-Marts se necesitan para cambiar un bombillo? Respuesta: 3 230. La historia que hay detrás de esta anécdota es interesante. Tiene que ver con el interés de Wal-Mart por ahorrar energía, con lo cual no solamente le hicieron un favor al medio ambiente y a sus clientes sino a sí mismos. Allá por el año de 2008, se dio una conversación en Wal-Mart sobre la nueva tecnología de bombillos de luz fluorescente compacta (CFL), que les permitiría a los clientes ahorrar dinero en las cuentas de electricidad. Alguien preguntó: “por pura curiosidad, ¿qué diferencia veríamos si cambiamos los bombillos incandescentes en todos nuestros ventiladores de techo y ponemos bombillos ahorradores?”. Al parecer, un almacén típico de Wal-Mart en los Estados Unidos tiene diez ventiladores de techo, cada uno de los cuales utiliza cuatro bombillos. Eso equivale a un total de cuarenta bombillos por almacén, multiplicados por los 3 230 almacenes que tienen en el país. Alguien se puso a hacer las cuentas en el respaldo de un sobre y se encontró con la asombrosa cifra de seis millones de dólares en ahorro de energía, simplemente cambiando los bombillos incandescentes por ahorradores, en todas las tiendas de Wal-Mart.

estelar— mostrando lo mucho que se tomaba en serio su nueva postura como activista ambiental. Como ocurre casi siempre, un avance en materia ambiental por lo general trae muchos otros más. En este caso, dado que cada bombillo CFL tiene una vida útil equivalente a la de seis a diez bombillos incandescentes, si Wal-Mart vende 110 millones de bombillos ahorradores, se elimina la necesidad de fabricar, empacar, transportar, comprar y desechar 110 millones de los bombillos antiguos en los próximos seis años. Según Wal-Mart esos 110 millones de bombillos ocupan el espacio de casi 300 camiones articulados al año y eso sin contar la flota de camiones de basura necesarios para llevar los 110 millones de bombillas incandescentes quemadas al botadero y la gasolina que consumen en el proceso. Es evidente que, en el largo plazo, Wal-Mart podría estar perjudicándose a sí misma, pues, en un ciclo de reemplazo de seis a ocho años con los bombillos ahorradores, los ingresos obtenidos por ventas de bombillos incandescentes obviamente disminuyen. No obstante, los ejecutivos de Wal-Mart declaran que esperan con ansias la llegada del día en que sus estantes de bombillos ocupen la mitad del espacio. Aunque en apariencia esta parece una táctica comercial negativa, no hay tal: ¡Wal-Mart no se convirtió

It is not possible to use the just war tradition as a hermeneutical device for illuminating the New Testament, nor have the defenders of the tradition ordinarily even attempted to do so.

The New Testament itself repeatedly insists on the necessity of embodiment of the Word. The sequence of the verbs in Romans 12:1–2 is significant: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice [Hear the metaphor!]…. Be transformed…that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Knowledge of the will of God follows the community’s submission and transformation. Why? Because until we see the text lived, we cannot begin to conceive what it means. Until we see God’s power at work among us, we do not know what we are reading. Thus, the most crucial hermeneutical task is the formation of communities seeking to live under the Word.32