Tag: audacity

No Neutrality!

by Phillip Ross • August 2, 2010 • 0 Comments

The thesis is that if and when Christians individually and as a community assert the kingship of Jesus Christ in the world (this present evil world, alienated from God, the Father), the world will not merely oppose such a confession…

Faulty Sales Technique

by Phillip Ross • August 2, 2010 • 0 Comments

Salespeople are both a blessing and a bane to every industry. You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them. “How are you tonight, Mr. Smith?” “Fine.” “Glad to hear it! Mr. Smith, my name is Phil, and…

Do It Right!

by Phillip Ross • August 2, 2010 • 0 Comments

I haven’t always lived up to this axiom, and occasionally have to re-learn its wisdom. It’s not easy to achieve compliance with this one. It’s like painting a room in your home. Once painted, the other rooms look worse in…

The Hopelessness of Audacity

by Phillip Ross • January 28, 2009 • 1 Comment

I have been reading President Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope. It’s actually well-written, exept for one section–the Faith section. Take this paragraph from page 218: This brings us to a different point–the manner in which religious views should inform…

Hoype

by Phillip Ross • September 1, 2008 • 0 Comments

The high-handed headiness of our new age politics provides the rare opportunity of coining a new word. This is not a simple reflection of common usage in the 21st Century, but a pouring of molten silver into the coin press…

Christ came to free people from bondage to the law of Moses, but not through the absolute abandonment of all law. Paulâ€™s training as a Pharisee made him the most biblically competent of the Apostles, which is reflected by his dominance as an author of the New Testament letters. My intention here is not to impose a foreign metanarrative upon the text, but to reveal the actual metanarrative of the Old Testament in the light of Christ as Paul presented it to the Galatians. That metanarrative was not what he had been taught as a Pharisee, nor what they had been taught by the Temple establishment. It was shockingly different, but it made undeniable sense of the Old Testament. The Temple establishment version was full of ancient mystery and symbolism that was difficult to understand, and cast the role of Israel as the hero of the story. Paulâ€™s version, on the other hand, was clear, simple, and practicalâ€”though it required the abandonment of much well-established Temple superstition. Paulâ€™s version cast the role of Jesus Christ as the hero.

While understanding the story of the Old Testament in the light of Christ is not difficult, abandoning our own false presuppositions about it requires some personal tenacity. Jesus continues to challenge our ideas about who we are and our role in history, Godâ€™s story. The story that Paul grew up with was the story about the importance and purity of the Temple. But the story that he learned from Jesus was about the corruption and failure of the Temple. Similarly, Christians today are Sunday-schooled in the importance of the institutional church, but the actual ongoing story in the light of Christ is about the corruption and failure of the church as an institution. In the following pages you will see that this story has played out over and again throughout history because of the pertinacity of sin.