Today is Thanksgiving Sunday here in Canada, but as I was getting ready to write a post in honour of the holiday, I realized that today’s Gospel reading is a very important one, and one that I’ve never actually reflected on in this space. For it’s in this parable that Jesus explains how he understood … Continue reading The Cross from Jesus’ Perspective: A Reflection on Matthew 21.33-46
As we saw last week, for the past thousand years, the Western Christian imagination has understood Jesus' death primarily as a sin sacrifice, almost to the exclusion of other biblical metaphors for sin and salvation. Specifically, Western theology has been dominated by a specific interpretation of what sacrifice meant and means, substitutionary atonement: In sacrifice, … Continue reading A Survey of How the Bible Talks about Sacrifice
This series exploring different biblical metaphors for sin and salvation would be incomplete without looking at the understanding of sin that most readily comes to mind for most of us: sin as infraction, rule-breaking or trespass. This approach understands sin as crossing agreed-upon boundaries. What makes this image interesting theologically is that it doesn't have … Continue reading Law-Breaking and …?
