I shall wade into the waters that I (gently) stirred in Wide and Narrow. If you didn’t read it — or don’t want to now — what I basically said is that Christians tend to narrow their orthodoxy and widen their orthopraxy, which I think is quite the opposite to how things should be. I refrained from expanding on […]
Tag Archive for 'sermon-on-the-mount'
Going the second mile is a cliché that nobody understands the meaning of. At least, that’s the conclusion that I came to after reading Walter Wink’s interpretation of this saying of Jesus in his book The Powers That Be. I’ve already covered his interpretation of turning the other cheek and giving up your cloak in […]
My last post dealt with Walter Wink’s interpretation of “turning the other cheek” in The Powers That Be. Moving on the the next section, he deals with Mat. 5:40, in which Jesus says “if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.” I must admit, this is […]
In reading Walter Wink’s The Powers That Be, I’m being confronted by a biblical-theological condemnation of all violence and an upholding of nonviolence as the true way of following Jesus. It is clear that Jesus advocated nonviolence in the Sermon on the Mount:
You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. […]
