Chapter 6: Hurricanes and Humiliation

• In this chapter Nadia writes about how she was conned, willingly and unwillingly
• “I had rescued a pregnant, disadvantaged, teenaged African American girl… and I was about to give them a new life. This was a white privileged liberal’s dream, and I was riding high on it.” (Page 59)
• “Still, of all the betrayals in that circumstance, it was my betrayal of myself that stung the most.” (Page 66)
• “Jesus calls us to welcome the stranger and serve our neighbor. … Who is that neighbor? Being Christian is much harder than I wish it was.” (Page 67)
• “I’m haunted by how much my love was based on my need to be seen as heroic, and yet I can’t deny that it did feel like love. A better Christian would love her anyway and still want to help her. A lousy Christian is conflicted and maybe a little hurt.” (Page 67)
• “God uses our humiliations as much as our victories.”

Chapter 7: I Didn’t Call You for This Truth Bullshit

• In this chapter Nadia writes about a friendship with Candace that does not work out
• “We met in an alcohol recovery meeting a few years earlier and became friends based purely on the unlikely number of things we had in common.” (Page 70)
• “Being a loyal friend is something I haven’t always been good at, so at the time, I was trying to make up for my past dis-loyalties by being (or just making it look like I was) selfless.” (Page 71)
• Nadia writes about a conversation with her sister after visiting Candace in which her sister says, “you have a limited amount of time and emotional energy in your life, and you are squandering tons of it on this one situation just so you can maintain the idea you like to have of yourself as being a loyal friend.” Nadia responds..”I didn’t call you for this truth bullshit.” (Page 71)
• “There’s a popular misconception that religion, Christianity specifically, is about knowing the difference between good and evil so that we can choose the good. But being good has never set me free the way truth has. Knowing all of this makes me love and hate Jesus at the same time. Because, when instead of contrasting good and evil, he contrasted truth and evil, I have to think about all the times I’ve substituted being good (or appearing to be good) for truth.” (Page 72)
• “The truth does crush us, but the instant it crushes us, it somehow puts us back together into something honest. It’s death and resurrection every time it happens. This, to me, is the point of confession and absolution in the liturgy.” (Page 73)
• Writing about the first time she experienced absolution in liturgy she says she thought it was hogwash. “Why should I care if someone says to me that some God I may or may not really believe in has erased the check marks against me for things I may or may not even think are so-called sins? This obviously is the problem with religion for so many: It makes you feel bad enough that you will need the religion to help you feel good again.” (Page 73)
• Then she says absolution in liturgy came to mean everything to her. “It gradually began to feel like a moment when truth was spoken, perhaps for the only time all week, and it would crush me and then put me back together.” (Page 73)
• In talking about the last time she meet with Candace and not being able to tell the truth. “I wish I could say that I had learned how powerful the truth is and that I am unwavering in my commitment to it. But in that moment I couldn’t manage to be good or tell the truth. Instead, I said that I had the friends that I needed. Sometimes we can’t manage to choose the truth or to be good, and in those moments I just hope God comes and does that thing where something is transformed into healing anyway.” (Page 76)

Chapter 8: Clinical Pastoral Education

• In this chapter Nadia writes about her experience as a hospital chaplain
• During her first experience in a trauma room she asked a nurse what her job was, and the response was “Your job is to be aware of God’s presence in the room while we do our jobs.” (Page 80)
• “It wasn’t long before I found myself sensing God’s presence in other rooms, too.” (Page 81)
• “I was the chaplain, but I didn’t have answers for anyone.” (Page 82)
• She writes about her emotions of dealing with two young boys who just lost their mother. “You hear a lot of nonsense in hospitals and funeral homes. .. But this is the nonsense spawned from bad religion. And usually when you are grieving and someone says something so senselessly optimistic to you, it’s about them” (Page 83)
• She writes about reading Marcus Borg’s “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.” “This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time. But it only worked for me for a short while. And soon I wanted to experiment with the harder stuff. Admiring Jesus, while a noble pursuit, doesn’t show me where God is to be found when we suffer the death of a loved one or a terrifying cancer diagnosis or when our child is hurt. Admiring and trying to imitate a guy [Jesus] who was really in touch with God just doesn’t seem to bridge the distance between me and the Almighty in ways that help me understand where the hell God is when we are suffering.” (Page 74)
• Nadia then writes about the image of God she was raised to believe and writes, “this type of thinking portrays God as just as mean and selfish as we are, which feels like it has a lot more to do with our own greed and spite than it has to do with God.” (Page 84)
• She then writes about being at Good Friday service, which was three days after the accident involving the two young boy and hearing the passion story in John’s Gospel with changed ears. “I listened with the ears of someone who didn’t just admire and want to imitate Jesus, but had felt him present in the room where two motherless boys played on the floor.” (Page 85)
• “I realized that in Jesus, God had come to dwell with us and share our human story. Even the parts of our human story that are the most painful. … Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.” (Page 85)
• “There is simply no knowable answer to the question of why there is suffering. But there is meaning. And for me that meaning ended up being related to Jesus — Emmanuel — which means, “God with us.” We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.” (Page 86)

Chapter 3: Albion Babylon

• In this chapter Nadia writes about being part of a community.
• “Church, for all its faults, was the only place outside my own home were people didn’t gawk at me or make fun of me.” (Page 23)
• “Which is why it sucked that there were other reasons I’d eventually not fit in.” (Page 23)
• “Belonging to the Church of Christ — and therefore, being a Christian — mostly meant being really good at not doing things. … The better you were at not doing these things, the better a Christian you were.” (Page 23)
• “..the Church of Christ I was raised in was a community. As churchgoers, our lives were shared.” (Page 26)
• “Unlike my feelings toward the Christian fundamentalism from which I would soon part ways, I never stopped valuing the spiritual weirdness of hospitality and community. … I was looking for a community in which all of me would actually fit in.” (Page 26)
• Nadia writes about sneaking off to a nearby Quaker meeting, and notes, “Still, although the Quakers were a community, I wasn’t really part of it. I was more of a spectator.” (Page 28)
• “This experience (living at Albion Babylon) taught me that a community based on the idea that everyone hates rules is, in the end, just as disappointing and oppressive as a community based on the ability to follow rules.” (Page 29)

Chapter 4: La Femme Nadia

• In this chapter Nadia writes about how she believes God “plunked her down” on a different path, and allowed not to die in exchange for working for God.
• Have you watched Le Femme Nikita?
• “When you can’t control something — like how if I take one drink all bets are off no matter what motivation I have for controlling myself — it’s easier to arrange life in which it looks like you’ve chosen it all, as opposed to facing the truth: You have lost your ability to choose any of it.” (page 36)
• “I was still looking for an affirmation that I wasn’t an alcoholic, so that, dear Jesus, I could go drink again.”
• “And these people talked about God a lot. But never about an angry God who judged or condemned or was always disappointed in people. The God they spoke of was not the God I was taught to fear.” (Page 36)
• “Her relationship to God wasn’t doctrinal. It was functional.” (Page 36)
• “..I was sitting in a twelve-step meeting in an upstairs Masonic lodge when someone shared about something he had rad in the Bible that week that really spoke to his sobriety. I stood up and walked out. The Bible had been the weapon of choice in the spiritual gladiatorial arena of my youth.” (Page 37)
• “..the connection — the deep, ongoing, and personal connection people like Margery had with God, a power greater than their alcoholic selves — was in no way based on piety or righteousness. It was based solely on something I could related to a hell of a lot more: desperation.” (Page 38)
• “Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward self-destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my collar, me hopelessly kicking and flailing and saying, ‘Screw you, I’ll take the destruction please.'” (Page 40)

Chapter 5: Thanks, ELCA!

• In which Nadia sums up Lutheran theology in one chapter at less than the cost of a Lutheran seminary education.
• “At the time I didn’t know it would take more to escape black-and-white thinking than just no longer attending your parent’s church. The church had provided me a sorting system, which was now ingrained. (Page 43)
• Nadia writes about her first date with her future husband. He says, “Well, my heart for social justice is rooted in my Christian faith.” Nadia responds, “Um, what? I just stared at him saying nothing.” (Page 43)
• “I soon learned that there were actually a whole world of Christians who take Matthew 25 seriously.” (Page 44)
• “I had never experienced liturgy before. But here the congregation said things together during the service. And they did stuff: stood, sat, knelt, crossed themselves, went up to the altar for communion, like choreographed sacredness.” (Page 45)
• “Something about the liturgy was simultaneously destabilizing and centering: my individualism subverted by being joined to other people through God to find who I was. Somehow it happened through God. One specific, divine force. (Page 46)
• “Most of what I had been taught by Christian clergy was that I was created by God, but was bad because of something some chick did in the Garden of Eden, and that I should try really hard to be good so that God, who is an angry bastard, won’t punish me. Grace had nothing to do with it. I hadn’t learned about grace from the church.” (Page 47)
• On page 48 she writes what Pastor Ross taught her about grace.
• “God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings.” (Page 49)
• Nadia then writes about learning how Pastor Ross was removed from the official clergy roster of the ELCA, and how this made her feel: “It feels like the rug of hope that the church might actually be something beautiful and redemptive was pulled out from under me.” (Page 51)
• Pastor Ross responds: “God is still at work redeeming us and making all things new even in the midst of broken people and broken systems and that, despite any idealism otherwise, it had always been that way.” (Page 51)
• Her husband Matthew says, “There’s not enough wrong with it to leave and there’s just enough wrong with it to stay…. Fight to change it.” (Page 52)
• “Every human community will disappoint us, regardless of how well-intentioned or inclusive. But I am totally idealistic about God’s redeeming work in my life and in the world.” (Page 54)
• “If they choose to leave when we don’t meet their expectations, they won’t get to see how the grace of God can come in and fill the holes left by our community’s failure, and that’s just too beautiful and too real to miss.” (Page 54)
• “What makes Lutherans blessed is not, as I once thought, that they’re somehow different from the people in the Church of Christ where I was raised. Rather, what makes us all blessed is that, like the landowner in the parable, God comes and gets us, taps us on the shoulder, and says, ‘Pay attention, this is for you.’ Dumb was we are, smart and faithful as we are, just as we are.” (Page 56)

“For many Christians, the ‘biblical view’ of salvation centers on Jesus’s death. The doctrine of salvation (‘soteriology’) is defined in terms of how Jesus’s death makes salvation possible. It is linked closely with atonement, which is commonly defined as ‘how Christ accomplished our justification (i.e. being found just or righteous before God) through his sacrifice on the cross. I have attempted in this book to show that the Bible’s portrayal of salvation actually does not focus on Jesus’s death as the basis for reconciliation of humanity with God.” (AK location 6523)

“I argue that the biblical story of salvation portrays God as reaching out to human beings with mercy. The God of the Bible responds to human brokeness, violence, and sinfulness with healing love. In telling the salvation story in this way, the Bible refutes the logic of retribution.” (AK location 6535)

The basic argument starting at AK location 6546

“The point of the consequences is not punishment, nor is it that God is unable to forgive without the scale of justice being balanced. Rather, the consequences remind people that wholeness requires harmony with the God of the universe. The consequences themselves point toward God’s healing love that must be trusted in for it to heal.” (AK location 6591)

“Jesus’s death reveals the logic of retribution to be the tool of evil, not the God-ordained rule of the universe.” (AK location 6623)

“The differences between the Bible’s salvation story and atonement theology are significant enough to conclude that we do not find an atonement model in this story.” (AK location 6668)

“As David Brandos concludes, ‘Jesus’s death may have been seen as the center and starting point’ of traditional atonement theology. However, for the Bible ‘what was redemptive was the whole story, that is, all the events making up that story; the cross was redemptive only to the extent that it formed a part of that story.’ (AK location 6668)

Starting at AK location 6695, Grimsrud addresses some of the violence that is in fact in the Bible. He asks, “How should one who reads the Bible in light of the way of Jesus best understand these materials?”

“The book of Revelation provides a closing summary of the Bible’s salvation story in the form of an extended vision that interprets Jesus’s message of salvation.” (AK location 5959)

“Revelation challenges the empire’s notions of salvation, power, and victory and presents the Bible’s notions as a viable alternative.”

“John compares and contrasts these two salvation stories [the empire’s and the Bible’s] to inspire peaceable living.”

“Lamb theology is the whole message of Revelation. Evil is defeated not by overwhelming force or violence but by the Lamb’s suffering love on the cross. The victim becomes the victor.” (AK location 5982)

“Fundamental to Revelation’s whole understanding of the way in which Christ establishes God’s kingdom on earth is the conviction that in his death and resurrection Christ has already won his decisive victory over evil.” (AK location 5994)

“Jesus also provides “freedom for.” (AK location 6020) This is also a Lutheran conviction.

“When John labels his book a “revelation of Jesus Christ,” he has in mind the Jesus who healed. Revelation, like the Gospels and epistles (and the law and prophets), is about embodiment of God’s healing strategy. What does John want to inspire his readers to do? ‘Follow the Lamb where he goes.’ (AK location 6352)

“Jesus’s crucifixion gains its significance as a ‘revelation’ that shows all with eyes to see that God’s love stand above the Beast’s domination practies. (AK location 6374)

Fall 2005

• Page xvi: “when I experience God it comes in the form of some kind of death and resurrection.”
• Page xvii: The story told in this book is not chronological, but rather thematic. It’s about the development of Nadia’s faith, the expression of her faith, and the community of her faith.
• Page xvii: “How the Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection.”

Chapter 1: The Rowing Team

• In this chapter Nadia writes about how she was called to be a pastor.
• Page 4: “We all find different things challenging in life. Speaking in front of hundreds of people was far less challenging for me than scheduling dental appointments.”
• Page 8: In writing about her friend, PJ, who committed suicide, she says, “He wondered about God: Was he beyond the pale of God’s love?”
• Page 8: Writing about being asked to do PJ’s funeral service, Nadia says, “This is how I was called to ministry. My main qualification? I was the religious one. … These were my people. Giving PJ’s eulogy, I realized that perhaps I was supposed to be their pastor.”
• Page 9: “here in the midst of my own community of underside dwellers that I couldn’t help but begin to see the Gospel, the life-changing reality that God is not far off, but here among the brokeness of our lives. And having seen it, I couldn’t help but point it out. For reasons I’ll never quite understand, I realized that I had been called to proclaim the Gospel from the place where I am, and proclaim where I am from the Gospel.”

Chapter 2: God’s Aunt

• In this chapter Nadia writes about what it was like as a young girl growing up in the Church of Christ, and touches on the gender attitudes that exist within the Christian tribe.
• Page 11: “In the church of my childhood (Church of Christ) it was taught that the ‘age of accountability’ was somewhere around twelve. To hit the age of accountability was to spiritually go off of your parent’s insurance.”
• Page 12: “Because twelve was the age of accountability, it was also the age at which boys could no longer be taught in Sunday school by women.”
• Page 13: “I was a strong, smart and smart-mouthed girl, and the church I was raised in had no place for that kind of thing even though they loved me. By the time I left the church, I questioned everything … I still didn’t manage to be an atheist, as one might be expect. I had never stopped believing in God.”
• Writing about her experience with Wicca. Page 14: “There was something safe about being around women. They let me hang out with God’s aunt, and I couldn’t help but think she liked me.”
• Page 15: “I can’t imagine that the God of the universe is limited to our ideas of God. .. In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.”
• Page 16, Nadia writes “in order for me to be the kind of pastor I would want to be, I would need to look at some of my own personal stuff, … I was experiencing a feeling of purpose, perhaps for the first time in my life.”

“Christian salvation theology has, for better and for worse, tended to be Pauline salvation theology.” (AK location 5275)

“I will argue that Paul understands salvation in ways fully compatible with the Old Testament and the story of Jesus.”

Pauls’ most extended argument related to salvation comes in the first three chapters of Romans

Paul’s Main Concern In Romans

• Footnote 2: “The word translated “faith” (pistis) is a key term for Paul. It may be translated “faith” or “faithfulness.” The meaning of this term continues to be a point of intense debate. In my view, with this term Paul has in mind a way of life that encompasses trust in God, belief in the content of Torah and the gospel of Jesus Christ, and faithful living.” Grimsrud prefers the term faithfulness in the sense of an entire way of life.
• Footnote 3: Grimsrud prefers “justice” rather than “righteousness” in translation of dikaiosune and its various derivatives because he believes it more closely captures Paul’s meaning.

Idolatry: The Problem Paul Analyzes

• What is the problem that Paul believes that humanity needs to be saved from?
• “From a careful reading of Romans 1:18-3:20, we may find at the heart of the sin problem for Paul the dynamic of idolatry, people giving ultimate loyalty to entities other than God.” (AK location 5321)
• Idolatry of the nations (Greeks)
• “People move from the rejection of truth, to lack of gratitude, to trust in created things, to out of control lust, to injustice and violence.”
• This manifests “wrath” Not direct intervention by God, but God “giving them up” to a self-selected spiral of death.
• Since Paul makes clear that God’s intentions towards humanity is salvific (Romans 5:1-11; 11:32) it is a mistake to interpret “wrath” as God’s punitive anger.
• In context of the gospel, “wrath” refers to how God works in indirect ways to hold human beings accountable. (consequences)
• “When human beings exchange trust in ‘the glory of God’ for trust in images that resemble created things, they lose their ability to discern God’s revelation.” (AK location 5354) Paul echoes Psalm 115
• “The paradigmatic expression of this dynamic for Paul is how inter-human love — which indeed reveals God in profound ways — comes to be reduced to lust, and relationships become unjust, broken, contexts for alienation.”
• Paul writes that “for this reason” God gave those consumed by lust (the “lusters”) “up to degrading passions.”
• Neil Elliott: Paul may have in mind the recent history of the Roman emperor’s (Caligula) court and its profligate sexual behavior that had scandalized many.
• Paul sees lust as the problem (not homosexuality per se) because of how it diminishes humanness, reflects worship of “degrading passions” rather than God. (AK location 5368)
• “In this discussion of idolatry in Romans 1:18-32, Paul wants his readers to see their would-be Benefactors (the rulers of the empire) as God’s rivals.” (AK location 5381)
• Idolatry of the covenant people (Jews) : Works of the Law
• James Dunn: Uses the term “works of the law” in Galations 2:16 as helping us distinguish between Paul’s critique of how his opponents understood the law and his own affirmation of the continuing validity of the law.” (AK location 5407)
• “Behind Paul’s critique here is his own earlier commitment to works of the law as boundary markers.”
• “If one points fingers at other idolaters while denying one’s own tendency to worship idols, one will never find such freedom.” (AK location 5421)
• “The antidote to idolatry is recognition of God’s unconditional and abundant mercy. God’s kindness comes first, then comes repentance.” (AK location 5438)
• Condemnation comes to everyone who does evil — Jew first and also Greek (2:9)
• Paul immediately follows this terrifying word with a word of hope. Salvation comes to all kinds of people, Jew first and also Greek. (2:11)
• Paul associates “sin” (a term he introduces in 2:12) with the idolatry he describes
• “sin and idolatry arise when people live without trust and gratitude, become futile in their thinking and darkened in their minds, and practice injustice and move toward lifelessness.” (AK location 5457)
• Paul relates whats going on in Rome to his own life before encountering Jesus.

The Universality of the Dominance of Sin

• “no one will be made whole and gain salvation by using the letter of the law as the basis for condemning others in order to strengthen their own standing before God. Paul here in a nutshell captures the following of the path he himself had taken.” Rom 3:20 (AK location 5554)
• “This is the problem: the universality of the domination of the ‘power of sin’ (3:9) over all groups of people.”
• “Paul’s logic here follows this path: humanity is trapped in bondage to systems of injustice that claim to be our Benefactors and agents of God’s will. This claim is false; such systems (be the Roman or Jewish) enslave rather than liberate.” (AK location 5569)
• “wrath refers to the process of God ‘turning us over’ that allows us to worship as we please with self-inflicted consequences.” (AK location 5580)

The Resolution: Justice Apart from Works of the Law

• “Paul answers the question about deliverance in Romans 3:21-31. These verses provide a remarkable (and dense) summary of how he understands salvation — that parallels what we have seen in the Old Testament and in the Gospels.” (AK location 5580)
• “Paul also emphasizes that salvation has simply to do with turning to God and trusting in God’s mercy.”
• “The resolution has to do with the justice of God, going back to the beginning of Paul’s argument where he proclaims that the justice of God is revealed in the gospel of salvation. (Rom 1:16-17)
• “This justice has been disclosed. The Greek word, pephanerotai, echoes the term used in 1:17, apokalypsis. God has disclosed or revealed the truth — the very thing idolaters suppress (1:18)” (AK location 5597)
• “This disclosure that Paul will describe ‘is attested by the law and prophets.’ … Whatever he goes on to say, he insists that his gospel directly links with the Bible’s message.” (AK location 5612)
• “The justice of God is seen in Jesus’s faithfulness (3:22) Jesus discloses the true nature of God, the path to life, and the agenda of the Powers that seek to separate humanity from God’s love. Romans 8:38-39 (AK location 5624)
• “God’s justice disclosed through Jesus brings salvation ‘for all who believe.’ .. Those ‘who believe’ are those who see Jesus and God for who they are, who see the Powers for what they are, and who commit their lives to the path of justice set out in Jesus’s life and enabled now by the presence of Jesus’s Spirit.” Romans 8:9-11
• “Paul earlier asserted the universality of bondage to sin in order to now assert the universality of liberation from this bondage.” (AK location 5639)
• “Paul emphasizes that God initiates the needed liberation — strictly out of God’s mercy. Just as God ‘put forward’ Moses and freed the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, Paul asserts that God ‘put forward’ Jesus to free Jew and Greek alike from enslavement to the power of sin. God is not the recipient of this act but the doer of it. In no sense, according to Paul’s argument, does the liberation come from God’s own retributive justice.” (AK location 5655)
• “God puts Jesus forward as a ‘sacrifice of atonement.’ (3:25) What does Paul mean by ‘sacrifice of atonement’ (Greek: hilasterion)?”
• The meaning of this term continues to be highly contested.
• Let’s note here some points about the broader context of Paul’s thought.
• God is responsible for this saving action, the one who offers the sacrifice (not the one who receives it).
• “How is Jesus a ‘sacrifice’? Not as a blood offering to appease God’s anger or honor or holiness but as one who freely devoted his own life to persevering in love all the way to the end.” (see AK location 5666)
• “Thus the ‘sacrifice’ should be understood as Jesus’s self-sacrifice expressed in faithful living, his way of being in the world.
• “The ‘atonement’ (at-one-ment, reconciliation) is not a sacrifice to God that satisfies God’s neediness (that God is not needy for sacrifices has been established back with Psalm 50). The ‘atonement’ illumines the truth that humanity has suppressed (Rom 1:18), truth that helps (or allows) sinners to see God’s welcoming mercy clearly. This illumination makes ‘one-ment’ with God possible — not from God’s side (God has always welcomed sinners) but from the human side.”
• “The ‘sacrifice of atonement’ is given ‘by Jesus’s blood’ (3:25). What does ‘blood’ signify here?” (AK location 5679)
• “The need for offerings rests on the human side. Offerings are necessary to concretize for the human imagination the reality of God’s mercy and the expectations God has for life lived in the light of that mercy.”
• “It seems to symbolize Jesus’s life of self-giving, giving to the point of being killed by the Powers. This ‘self-sacrifice’ by ‘blood’ is ‘effective through faithfulness’ Paul states (3:25)” (AK location 5695)
• “Our sense of what Paul means here, of how ‘putting forward Jesus’ expresses God’s justice, will be determined by how we define ‘justice’ in this broader Romans passage.” (AK location 5695)
• Romans 1:16-17 Paul links God’s justice to bringing salvation
• Romans 3:21-24 Paul links the disclosure of God’s justice directly with sinners being justified (made whole, saved) by God’s grace.
• “Clearly, the revelation of God’s justice in Jesus has to do with God’s healing and restorative work.”
• “Because God’s mercy serves as the basis for salvation, we have no reason to ‘boast.’ By ‘boasting,’ Paul here has in mind the kinds of attitudes and behaviors that characterize his own life as a judger.” (AK location 5725)
• “The contrast Paul makes here has to do not with a distinction between ethics and belief (‘works’ versus ‘faith’) but between exclusivism versus inclusive, healing, restorative justice.” (AK location 5725)
• Romans 3:28 “By ‘justified by faith’ Paul means we are made whole through faithfulness. This faithfulness involves trusting in Jesus in such a way that one commits oneself to following Jesus’s way of life.” (AK location 5737)
• “Justification has to do with faithfulness (Jesus’s and his followers’), not with ethnic identity, relation to the empire, a punitive sacrifice, or doctrinal belief. Justification and salvation are about a living relationship with God that is manifested in love of neighbor.” (AK location 5750)
• Paul makes this affirmation clear in Romans 13:8-10

God’s Saving Justice

• “According to Paul in Romans 1-3, the fundamental need humanity has is liberation or salvation from the power of sin. He defines ‘sin’ as most basically expressed in the dynamics of idolatry.” (AK location 5765)
• “These various expressions of idolatry leave human beings in bondage to whatever Power they give ultimate loyalty to — with the consequence of living lives characterized by ‘wrath’ rather than genuine justice.”
• “So, what is needed is something to break this spiral toward death. That ‘something’ is the core element of Paul’s theology of salvation.”
• “The resolution to this crisis of humanity may be found in God’s revelation of the true nature of humanity’s problem and God’s solution. The resolution is a process of illumination. God provides sight and breaks the hold of blindness that idolatry has on humanity with its misplaced loyalties.” (AK location 5781)
• “Paul makes clear, in full continuity with the Bible’s salvation story, that the salvation he describes comes to humanity due to God’s initiative.” (AK location 5793)
• “So, the ‘justice of God’ that stands at the center of Paul’s theology of salvation from start to finish is restorative justice, not retributive justice.”
• “Paul adds no new spin to the Bible’s salvation story. He reiterates what the call of Abraham, the exodus, the gift of Torah, the sustenance of the community in exile, and the message of Jesus have all (in harmony with one another) expressed: God is merciful and offers empowerment for just living for all who embrace that mercy and let it transform their lives.” (AK location 5803)
• “Paul’s distinctive contribution in Romans 1-3 to the biblical salvation story lies in his powerful portrayal of the problem of idolatry both in the empire and in the faith community.”

From Chapter 1 of Instead of Atonement by Ted Grimsrud

• Grimsrud equates retribution with violence. “At the core of this ‘logic’ usually rests a commitment to the necessity of retribution; using violence is justified as the appropriate response to wrongdoing.” (AK location 134)
• “We find it deeply ingrained in the religious consciousness of the United States the belief that retribution is God’s will.”
• “A theologically grounded ‘logic of retribution’ underlies rationales for using violence. In ‘the logic of retribution,’ when all is said and done, people understand God most fundamentally in terms of impersonal, inflexible holiness. They see God’s law as the unchanging standard by which sin is measured, and believe God responds to violations of the law with justifiable violence.” (AK location 145)
• “Within the logic of retribution, salvation (i.e., the restoration of harmony with God) is achieved as the result of violence.” (AK location 179)

Why does the resurrection matter? What would have happened if God had not resurrected Jesus? What does the resurrection have to say about salvation? What is the logic of retribution?

Is the Easter story a story of what Jesus did and/or a story of what God did?

“Jesus apparently understood early on that his conflict with the religious leaders would move beyond the ‘on the ground’ differences with the Pharisees. Luke tells us that he proposed to ‘turn to Jerusalem’ (Luke 9:51) and that as he did so his language took on a more ominous tone.” (AK location 4869)

“Jesus’s words and actions, given the popular support he gathered, threatened to undercut the legitimacy of the temple among the Jewish population.”

• “On a deeper level, for many Jews the temple did serve as the locus for God’s presence among the people.” (AK location 4881)

“The logic of retribution led the Powers of cultural exclusivism to seek to destroy Jesus (even if they were ultimately unable to do so). It, in turn, led the Powers of religious institutionalism actually to take steps to arrest Jesus, try him, and turn him over to the state for punishment. However, the Powers of political authoritarianism actually took the final step and used the state’s ultimate tool of punishment to execute Jesus.” (AK location 4911)

“The collaborative work of the Powers did eliminate Jesus. His counter-cultural movement that had sought a Torah-centered renewal of the way of mercy and shalom in Israel lay in ruins.”

God Vindicates Jesus

• “Jesus’s followers experienced his arrest and crucifixion as a devastating blow to their hopes and beliefs.” Luke 24:21 they “had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel.” (AK location 4922)
• “Though the story tells that Jesus alluded to resurrection when he discussed his likely death, it seems clear that no one actually understood him to mean his personal resurrection prior to the general resurrection at the end of time.” (AK location 4935)
• “That is, the events of Easter Sunday took everyone by surprise.” (AK location 4946)
• “To underscore that no one expected Jesus’s personal resurrection at this point, we read of the women’s absolute terror. Mark’s gospel ends with this terror, as they flee from the empty tomb. (Mark 16:8)
• “This was not an anticipated characteristic of the Messiah, but came as a surprise to everyone.” (AK location 4960)
• “The evidence suggests that by the time of Jesus, most Jews either believed in some form of resurrection or at least knew it as standard teaching. What surprised believers was that Jesus would have been resurrected immediately following his death, not that resurrection could happen.”
• What does this all mean?

Jesus’s Resurrection Vindicates His Life

• “First of all, and perhaps most fundamentally, when God raised Jesus from the tomb, against all expectations, God vindicated Jesus’s life as fully reflective of God’s will for humankind.” (AK location 4974)
• “The message of healing justice that Jesus embodied is revealed to be a message from the heart of God through his vindication and affirmation.”
• Jesus’s basic strategy to bring salvation to the world included:
• 1. He welcomed all people even across the boundary lines of the cultural exclusivists
• 2. He reiterated the core message of Torah concerning God’s mercy and human responsibility
• 3. He directly challenged the Powers
• 4. He simply proclaimed and demonstrated God’s love
• What would have happened to the strategy if God did not resurrect Jesus?
• His story would not have provided much hope
• “Jesus’s life, morally exemplary as it may have been, would not likely have been seen to reflect God’s will for human beings by many people.” (AK location 4989) 
• “Walk this path and you too will end up abandoned.” (AK location 5001)
• Recall what happened to the followers of John the Baptist after his execution
• “Due to God’s unprecedented act of raising Jesus, the message that emerges from the story of his life is one of hope and empowerment, not defeat and despair.” (AK location 5012)
• Jesus’s followers “concluded that Jesus was the Messiah because of the way the resurrection validated his life.”

Jesus’s Resurrection Rebukes The Powers

• “When God raises Jesus from the dead, God not only endorses Jesus’s way as God’s way, but also rebukes the Powers that put Jesus to death.” (AK location 5023)
• “Jesus’s resurrection makes the point that his critique of those Powers for usurping God came not from some disaffected prophet railing against the status quo. Rather, Jesus’s resurrection proves that Jesus’s critique reflected the will of the God of the universe.” (AK location 5036)
• “Each of these Powers, in their own way, claimed to represent God and thereby justified their demand for loyalty.”
• “So, for Jesus not to stay dead serves to rebuke those forces that killed him. They were not all-powerful; more importantly, they actively rejected God’s Son.” (AK location 5068)
• “When it rebukes the Powers, Jesus’s resurrection unmasks their use of the logic of retribution as antithetical to salvation. God does not operate in accord with the logic or retribution when God brings salvation to the world. Rather, the Powers operate according to this logic in trying to destroy the saving efforts of God.” (AK location 5079)
• “Jesus’s resurrection makes clear that salvation is rooted in God’s deep, persevering love, not God’s inviolable holiness and anger that must be appeased when holiness is violated.” (AK location 5092)

Jesus’s Resurrection Points to His Follower’s Vocation

• “The purpose of God’s gift of healing has from the time of Abraham and Sarah been to ‘bless all the families of the earth. (Gen 12:3) The purpose of the exodus from Egypt was for the Hebrew people to mediate God’s mercy to the world (Exod 19:6). The giving of the Commandments followed directly from God’s mercy (Exod 20:2), for the purpose of guiding the people in merciful living. The very heart of the Levitical holiness code emphasizes the Hebrews’ responsibility to care for each other, especially the vulnerable ones in their community, but also to love the outsiders in their midst. (Leviticus 19) (AK location 5120)
• “the purpose of salvation is not simply to bless the recipient; the purpose is to move the blessing out into the world.”
• “the main implication is that because Jesus was raised, his followers are commissioned to go out into the world and share the good news of the presence of God’s healing mercy.”
• “The Gospels say nothing along the lines of Jesus is risen, therefore you will be too.” (AK location 5120)
• “Jesus’s resurrection provides his followers with a vocation. This vocation links with the content of Jesus’s life and teaching; the resurrection does not redirect the content of the message.” (AK location 5131)
• Matthew 28:18-20
• “It speaks of the main ramifications for his followers without any allusion to their own promised resurrection and eternal life (quite likely because this was already assumed by many Jews, especially those in the Pharisaic tradition; Jesus’s own resurrection did not challenge that assumption).” (AK location 5143)
• “The primary meaning of Jesus’s resurrection does not lie in the personal future of individuals after we die. The message is not, ‘you too can have life after death.’ Rather, what the story tells the believer is that God has a plan to transform the entire creation through the vocation of God’s people — and you are to be part of this task. Jesus is raised, so now get involved in blessing all the families of the earth.” (AK location 5143)
• Is this an easy thing to sell?
• “So the story links the resurrection inextricably with Jesus’s life and teaching. Its meaning lies primarily in its reiteration that the content of Jesus’s life does indeed reflect god’s will for human beings and that the calling of Jesus’s followers is to do as he did — with the great likelihood of facing the same consequences.’ (AK location 5155)
• One more piece of evidence, is the account in Acts of Paul’s encounter with the risen Jesus
• “the point is not that Paul now knows he will get to go to heaven after he dies (as a Pharisee, he already believed that); the point is that now Saul/Paul himself has a new vocation.” (AK location 5167)

Jesus’s Resurrection Reveals the Nature of Reality

• “The creator and sustainer of the universe is the one who brought Jesus back from the dead.” (AK location 5180)
• “When the early Christians confess Jesus as Messiah, … they affirm that Jesus’s way is God’s way, the way of the cosmos.”
• “the revelation the resurrection gives makes clear that the universe (and God) have always been this way — Jesus’s resurrection simply makes this more clearer.”
• “Jesus’s resurrection, then, serves as a strong statement that the logic of retribution, based as it is on an understanding of God’s holiness as inflexible, does not cohere with the nature of the cosmos.”
• “The resurrection of Jesus confirms the argument in this book that the biblical portrayal of salvation provides a strong basis to reject the logic of retribution. Jesus lived and taught mercy, not retribution. When he did so, he alienated the Powers of his time to the point that they joined together in deadly retributive violence.” (AK location 5204)
• “The holiness of God that transforms the world from brokenness to wholeness does so in that it heals, not that it punishes. This is the basis for our hope for wholeness.”

“From Genesis through Revelation, all the biblical stories take place in the shadow of some sort of empire.” (AK location 4266)

Contra Egypt

• “Out of fear of the proliferating Hebrew people who had resisted full assimilation into Egyptian society and its empire state-ideology, the Pharaoh acts against them.” Exodus 1:10-11 (AK location 4279)
• “The story of the exodus exposes how Pharaoh clung to power. In the end, Pharaoh’s stubbornness led to disaster for his empire and liberation for the Hebrew slaves.” (AK location 4294)
• “The exodus testimony, ‘this most radical of all of Israel’s testimony about Yahweh,’ verifies that the God of Israel is a relentless opponent of human oppression, even when the oppression is undertaken and sponsored by what appear to be legitimated powers.” (AK location 4317)

Israel’s Monarchy and the Critique of Empire

• “The tradition’s hostility toward empire, reflected implicitly in the law codes providing for a decidedly non-empire-like social order, found overt expressions at a major crossroads in the story of the Hebrew community” (AK location 4317)
• “in those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” Judges 21:25
• Samuel made his sons judges over Israel, but they did not follow his ways, took bribes and perverted justice.
• On top of this the Hebrews faced an external threat, an emerging regional empire of the Philistines.
• As a consequence, the elders of Israel sought a human king, like other nations. (1 Sam 8:5)
• Feared losing their identity by being conquered by the Philistines
• But becoming like other nations could also lead to the elimination of the covenant community
• Samuel argued that there was a third option: continue to trust in Yahweh as your only king, maintain a distinct identity oriented around exodus and Torah, and Yahweh will see that the covenant promises remain viable.
• Anti-empire argument; if Israel takes the human king route it would also become empire-like
• The people refuse to listen to Samuel (1 Sam 8:19-20) so Yahweh instructs hi to relent and “set a king over them” (8:22)
• Deuteronomy establishes a kingship that is still subordinate to Torah. The king was to come from within the Israelite community, in other words one who had grown up observing Torah. (Deut 17:18-20)
• “The accounts that follow in 1 and 2 Kings almost all reflect the king’s unwillingness to submit to Torah in this way.” (AK location 4379)
• A rebellion of King Rehoboam’s (Solomon’s son) treatment of Jeroboam led to a split between the northern kingdom, Israel, and the southern kingdom, Judah.
• Kings of both Judah and Israel turn toward idolatry, authoritarianism, corruption, and injustice.
• The northern kingdom, Israel, falls to the Assyrian empire near the end of the eighth century BCE, and a 100 years latter Judah falls to the Babylonian empire.
• Outside of Israel kingship was a blessing of the gods. Within Israel, kingship was regarded as human rebellion. (AK location 4409)

The Hebrews Among the Empires

• Four large empires: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Persia
• Greece during the inter-testamental period
• Rome dominates the New Testament

Egypt

• The story of Solomon includes several allusions to Egypt. “Solomon made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh” (1 Kgs 3:1)
• “The irony that Solomon would marry into the Egyptian Empire’s leadership class rings loudly when we remember Samuel’s warning about the people, under their desired king, returning to slavery.” (AK location 4428)

Assyria

• Located north of Israel.
• 2 Kings 17:5-23 gives the account of Assyria destroying Israel
• “Nahum joyfully proclaims the impending doom of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, as due to Assyria’s injustice and brutality.” (AK location 4461)
• The book of Jonah, as mentioned earlier, centers on the capital of Assyria, Nineveh.

Babylon

• Nebuchadnezzar ruled the Babylonian Empire from 605 BCE to 562 BCE.
• Not long after Nebuchadnezzar’s death, the Persians, led by Cyrus, replaced Babylon as the dominant empire
• “those were extraordinarily eventful years for the Hebrews, and the Babylonian Empire and Nebuchadnezzar loom large in biblical writings, down through the final book of the New Testament.” (AK location 4478)
• “The role of Babylon in Israel’s consciousness as the paradigmatic example of political authoritarianism may be seen in the use of “Babylon” in symbolic ways down through the writings of the New Testament.” (AK location 4502)
• In Revelation “Babylon symbolizes the brutalities and blasphemies of the Roman Empire

Persia

• Emerged mid-sixth century BCE under Cyrus
• Is presented in a more positive light than the other empires
• “The Persians evidently concluded that their purposes would be better served if they permitted their conquered nations a measure of self-determination. Perhaps this would provide for greater tax revenue and overall productivity in the occupied territories.” (AK location 4515)
• “The positive impression the Old Testament gives of the Persian Empire in part stems from the likelihood that during this time most of the Hebrew Bible reached its final form.” (AK location 4528)
• “The Persian period provides evidence that the covenant community was capable of survival apart from operating its own nation-state”

Roman Domination

• The greatest empire of the ancient world emerged in the second century BCE
• Rome appoints Herod “king of the Jews” and rules at behest of Rome from 37 BCE until his death at 4 BCE
• After Herod’s death Rome divided his kingdom into thirds among his sons
• Herod Antipas – Galilee and Perea (40 years)
• Philip – Trachonitis and Iturea (40 years)
• The third son, Archelaus, was given Judea, but he failed to maintain control and so Pontius Pilate was appointed governor of Judea

Jesus and Empire

• In Palestine of Jesus’s day, society is divided into two groups:
• The ruling class, including representatives of the Roman Empire
• The second group included most everyone else, the peasants in the countryside and the vast majority of the population of Jerusalem
• Jesus came from this second group and oriented his ministry towards them
• “When Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, he challenged the Pax Romana. He prayed for the coming of God’s kingdom and expected it soon. He believed his own work would inaugurate this kingdom. He did not accept the empire’s claims to bring the ‘gospel’ (good news) of peace. And he rejected the claims that the empire acts on behalf of God.” (AK location 4590)
• “When seen in conjunction with his ministry as a whole, Jesus is in both cases presenting his politics as an alternative to Roman political authoritarianism in the here and now” (AK location 4615)
• “In Jesus’s execution, two contradictory notions of peace meet head on.” (AK location 4630)
• Pax Romana (peace through violence) vs the non-violent Peace of Jesus

The Death of a Political Criminal

• “The central conflicts in Jesus’s career occurred with the Jewish religious leaders, not the representatives of the Roman Empire.” (AK location 4630) Yet it was Rome that crucified Jesus
• Crucifixion carried enormous symbolic weight
• The allegations of Jesus claiming to be king stand at the center of Pilate’s concern when he faces Jesus.
• Pilate asks, “Are you king of the Jews?”
• Jesus replies, “My kingdom is not of this world.”
• What did Jesus mean? Did me mean to advocate only a purely spiritual “otherworldly” kingdom, or did he mean that his kingdom was not like the typical kingdoms of this world and as was known through the entire Biblical story?
• “Jesus was apolitical only if we understand ‘politics’ strictly as power politics, the politics of the sword. However, if we understand politics more generally to mean the way human beings order their social world, Jesus was political.” (AK location 4669)
• Summary of last three chapters: (AK location 4705)
• Jesus asserted the possibility of direct access to God. In doing so, he undercut the authority of the temple.
• Jesus challenged the interpretations of the law that empowered the Pharisees. He advocated an approach to the law that placed the priority on mercy and justice, not on the legalistic focus on external regulations
• Jesus rejected the Roman Empire at a basic level. He replaced a violent, debt-oriented way of seeing with a way that started with God’s mercy.

The Legacy of Solomon’s Temple

• Before Solomon built the temple at Jerusalem, worship was done in a number of sanctuaries, most prominently Shiloh, which was destroyed by the Philistines.
• Solomon’s temple: 1 Kings 6-7
• “Solomon constructed the temple as a central element of his successful efforts to centralize the power of the king office in Israel.” (AK location 3709)
• Solomon also implemented a system of tax districts
• “Under Solomon’s administrative policies the concern for equitable distribution of economic resources reflected in the covenant law codes is displaced by an economics of privilege that begins to create sharp class divisions of wealth and poor within Israel.” (AK location 3721)
• “The construction of the temple on ‘Mount Zion’ creates in Israel a tradition in tension with the prophetic/Torah tradition.” (AK location 3731)
• “For Mosaic faith, Israel serves a transcendent God, not simply a God who supports Israel’s interests whatever they may be.” … “With Solomon, God enters Israel’s life at the beck and call of the king and his minions. The king’s servants control access to God.” (AK location 3745)
• “Israelites came to see the temple as evidence for God’s support of Israel.”
• “The prophets, at their most intense, portray the temple as being opposed to God.” (AK location 3798)
• Jeremiah 7 contains harsh words for the temple and its leaders. Jeremiah 7:9-11 (AK location 3808)
• “In violent and daring ways, Ezekiel makes clear that all to which Yahweh has been committed is revocable.” (AK location 3823)

The Second Temple

• Solomon’s temple is destroyed in 587 BCE by the Bablyonian armies
• Most the Judean ruling class from Jerusalem is deported to Bablyon, then after the Persian Empire conquered the Bablyons the Jewish exiles were allowed to return to Palestine. The Persian’s allowed the Israelites to rebuild the temple on a much more modest scale. (Ezra 1-2)
• This second temple was constructed under the leadership of Zerubbabel in the years 520-516 BCE
• Walter Brueggemann: “..a miracle wrought by the Judeans themselves. They were the only people in antiquity exiled from the homeland and national religion who maintained their religious and social identity in captivity.” (AK location 3838)
• “That the elite of the empire approved the rebuilding of Israel’s temple and its faith community indicates that they saw such efforts to serve the empire’s purposes.” (AK location 3853)
• In the years that followed, Jews exhibited various attitudes towards the second temple.
• Beliefs linked with the first temple — the temple as the dwelling place of God, unique in all the earth. Both Ezekiel and Zechariah seems to acknowledge this.
• Others rooted in the story expressed more hostility toward the temple. “This more negative viewpoint found expression in the emergent apocalyptic expressions of faith that arose during the inter-testamental period.” (AK location 3867)

The Temple in Jesus’s Time

• “The temple housed the one Jewish altar on which the high priest performed the sacrificial rites of atonement once a year for the entire Jewish world.” (AK location 3879)
• Forgiveness of people’s sins
• After the Romans gained control of Palestine, they established Herod as their client king. Herod embarked on an ambitions building project, expanding the temple greatly.
• “As many as 18,000 priests participated in the temple activities.” (AK location 3892)
• The temple treasury functioned as a huge national bank. Devout Jews living beyond Palestine traveled to the temple three times a year to celebrate religions festivities.
• Feast of Passover – deliverance from Egypt
• Feast of Pentecost – thanks for the first fruits of the harvest
• Feast of Tabernacles – gratitude for the completed harvest
• Day of Atonement
• Holiday in autumn
• High priest sacrificed a goat for his own sins and sent another one into the desert for the sins of the people.
• Only the high priest, in purity, could part the curtains and enter the holy of holies in the very presence of God once a year on the Day of Atonement.
• The Sanhedrin, the final Jewish authority in religious, political, and civil matters, made their home at the temple, along with the high priest.
• The high priest became the most powerful Jewish leader in relation to the occupying Roman leaders.
• The religious party that centered in Jerusalem and made up most of the Sanhedrin were known as the Sadducees.
• The Sadducees rejected the oral tradition and professed skepticism about personal immortality, including the resurrection.
• Generally came from the wealthy upper class
• Accepted Roman occupation and cooperated in order to keep the temple viable
• “Unlike with Leviticus, for the temple in the first century sacrifice served as a means to connect with God that required the mediation of the religious institution whose wealth and power served the king’s interests.” (AK location 3949)
• “Sacrifice in Leviticus stems from an experience of God’s mercy and serves the community as a whole, not only the power elite.”
• “As a ‘conservative,’ that is, one who drew directly from the tradition of Moses as filtered through prophetic critique, Jesus ended up on a collision course with the temple hierarchy — a course that exposed the true nature of religious institutionalism, its violence and subservience to political authoritarianism.” (AK location 3949)

Jesus and the Temple

• “Jesus had a nuanced attitude toward the temple and its sacrificial system” (AK location 3960)
• He understood the sacrificial system as peripheral to the dynamics of salvation (“I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” Matt 9:13 and 12:7 quoting Hos 6:6)
• The two birth accounts, in Matthew and Luke, give a mixed perspective on Jesus’s relation with the temple.
• Luke tells of his parents dedicating him in the temple (Luke 2:21-40), their dedication frame as adherence ‘to the law of Moses.’ Encounter to old ‘saints’ Simeon and Anna, both who praise God when they see Jesus for God’s work of salvation.
• “So, Luke presents Jesus coming from a devout family that observed temple rituals, and he shows that in the temple itself people are found who understand Jesus as an agent of God’s saving work for the whole world.” (AK location 3990)
• “The impression in Matthew’s birth story is subtler. For one thing, Matthew does not actually mention the temple.”
• Up until Jesus’s final entry into Jerusalem, the temple plays a peripheral role in stories of Jesus’s ministry. In particular, when Jesus pronounced people forgiven, he circumvented the temple’s role in the process of dealing with sins.

Jesus’s Conflict with Religious Institutionalism

• “The problem with the temple is that it has failed to be ‘a house of prayer for all the nations.’ Instead, the temple had become a center for religious exclusivism and economic exploitation.” (AK location 4053)
• “For Mark’s Gospel, there is a clear connection between Jesus being put to death and Jesus’s conflict with the temple, Jerusalem’s center of religious institutionalism” (AK location 4117)
• Mark 11:12-13:38
• Mark 13 begins with the foretelling of the destruction of the temple
• “Mark’s treatment of the temple concludes in Mark 15:38. When Jesus died, ‘the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.’ The torn ‘curtain of the temple’ juxtaposes Jesus and the temple as alternative places of divine presence. (AK location 4101)
• “In the end, though Jesus’s death does not signal that the religious authorities were victorious. Jesus’s death actually signifies the opposite. The temple curtain is torn. Jesus, even on the cross, fulfills what the temple was meant to and did not — he engendered worship of God by Gentiles as well as Jews. The Gentile centurion confesses, ‘surely this was God’s son’ (Mark 15:39)
• “So, in effect, the old temple must be torn down, and a new, open and inclusive temple based on Jesus himself must take its place.” (AK location 4143)
• “Institutionalism stifles creativity. When institutional survival takes priority, then order, security, peace at all costs take precedence.” (AK location 4143)