by | Sep 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
The theologian set aside his nearly finished magnum opus while in prison, investing instead in creative writing.
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
“A Christian’s secular vocation receives new recognition from the gospel only to the extent that it is carried on while following Jesus.”
You may have heard these calls to a radical Christian life before, as well as other quotations from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer is one of the most-quoted Christian theologians of the last 100 years, inspiring generations of believers. What you may not have heard is that Bonhoeffer spent his final months in Tegel Prison creating art.
Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo at his parents’ home in Charlottenburg, Germany, in April 1943. He had broken many German laws by helping Jewish neighbors and by using his position as a government intelligence officer to evade service in the Nazi army. Bonhoeffer was jailed until October 1944 at Tegel Prison north of Berlin in relative comfort, allowing him the time and space to read and write prolifically for most of his imprisonment.
After his participation in the now-famous Hitler assassination plot was exposed, Bonhoeffer was convicted of new crimes and was moved from Tegel to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, then to Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally to Flossenbürg, where he was hanged with six others on April 9, 1945, just one month before Germany’s surrender to the Allied forces. Bonhoeffer’s short life came to a premature end.
A question haunts us: Did Bonhoeffer waste the last months of his life in prison by spending time on creative writing instead of finishing his best book, the much-anticipated Ethics? The Bible invites us to “number our days” (Ps. 90:12) and warns, “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then …
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by | Sep 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
Arab believers want American visitors to see the “living stones” in Israel.
Jack Sara sees buses of American Christians pass by his house as they tour around his homeland. He sees them stop, get out for a few minutes to take photos, and then get back on their buses and leave.
He wonders why they never come talk to him.
“The land of Christ is not just a museum,” said Sara, an evangelical pastor and the president of Bethlehem Bible College in Israel. “There is still a church they could meet and pray and fellowship with and get encouraged from.”
As many as 400,000 Americans visit religious sites in Israel each year. They go to walk where Jesus walked and see the land of the Bible: from the river Jordan to the Sea of Galilee to the traditional site of the Nativity, with stops at Mount Carmel, King David’s tomb, and the Mount of Olives, where Christ is said to have ascended. Yet few of these religious pilgrims connect with modern-day Christians in the Holy Land.
About 180,000 Christians live in Israel—just under 2 percent of the population. Three out of four of them are Arab. They include Byzantine, Roman, and Maronite Catholics; Eastern Orthodox; Coptic Orthodox; Armenian Christians; and a small number of Protestants like Sara.
Sara is a Palestinian who grew up in a nominal Christian home in Jerusalem’s Old City. He made a personal profession of faith and committed his life to Christ at Jerusalem Alliance Church in the early 1990s. Now—as president of the school he attended to grow deeper in his Christian faith—he hopes to connect more Christians from around the globe with the vibrant evangelical churches in Israel.
The Bible college is offering online classes to allow people to “Discover Jerusalem,” “Discover Bethlehem,” and “Discover …
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by | Sep 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
3 tools to help us develop empathy.
Eight years ago, my younger brother, Timothy D. Kim, was murdered. Tim and I didn’t always get along or agree on everything; we were very different. But Tim had so many good qualities. We shared lots of laughs and love. My heart grieves whenever I hear that siblings are no longer on speaking terms.
Even within nuclear families, we are divided over every topic under the sun—politics, science, immigration, gender, race, climate—to the point where we no longer speak to each other. Is any disagreement important enough to “cut off” our flesh and blood? Similarly, can we dismiss friends so easily on account of disagreements, as is the trend today? Aren’t treasured relationships with our family members and friends worth fighting for?
Over the past year, I’ve begun to see a Christian psychologist and psychiatrist about longstanding traumas and related mental health concerns.
One afternoon, my psychologist and I were bemoaning today’s society. He observed something so simple yet notoriously difficult for people to embrace: “God never intended for us to agree on everything. A basic human ethic is that people can have different opinions.”
People will disagree and are expected to disagree with each other. Why, then, is it so difficult to overlook differing opinions and remain civil toward one another? On nonessential issues, why can’t we disagree and still be friendly? Why are we so fearful of “the other”?
Why do we so nonchalantly dismiss or end relationships within the family of God—whose spiritual blood we share? Whether the debate is over women in pastoral leadership, Christian nationalism, or racism, vitriolic conflicts lead to relational malaise and …
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by | Sep 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
Neutrality doesn’t work in church. But we can recover the heart of our faith.
I’m a textbook middle child. I’ve spent a lifetime perfecting the art of placation, walking fine lines and threading needles. For years as a pastor, I relied on such diplomatic instincts to shepherd a politically and theologically diverse congregation.
In our current era of heightened polarization, it has become more challenging to carve out a place where people with serious differences can fellowship and worship together. Still, carving leaves a void. You keep everyone in the same room, but to what end? Neutrality suppresses incendiary topics and calls it peace.
Most people with strong beliefs distrust middle ground, especially when convinced that their perspective is biblical truth that must be fiercely defended. Decades ago, Sen. Barry Goldwater observed this tendency: “Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise.”
To the purists, the middle is where hard truth gets watered down, making it more palatable and less meaningful. Even God shows a disdain for the lukewarm in-between (Rev. 3:16). Be hot or cold, but don’t be tepid.
No wonder many congregations have homogenous viewpoints. Half of US Protestant churchgoers say they’d prefer attending a church where people hold similar political views, Lifeway Research found, and more than half think the members of their church already do. Sometimes, this unity is obtained through attrition, as unwelcome voices simply leave.
Of course, not all arguments are equally valid. Truth isn’t relative and sin matters. And when it comes to the most essential, common Christian convictions, there is not room for …
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by | Sep 8, 2023 | Uncategorized
The late novelist’s final books are ambitious portraits of the Western world and the human soul.
In the Middle Ages, there was a popular group of texts that made up the so-called contemptus mundi genre (which, loosely translated, could mean “how to develop a visceral disdain for the world”). One of the genre’s most famous works is Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. These rather “Platonic” works, in the sense of being in the vein of the philosopher Plato, were intended to coach Christians toward holiness, teaching them how to pry their fingers loose from the throat of life and begin longing for heavenly, immaterial realities.
This was done through contemplating things that now seem off-putting to us: how treacherous people in the world are, how you were born in woe and will die in suffering, and all of the icky things about the human body. The goal was to drag those things we try to forget (mainly the “Four Last Things”: death, judgment, heaven, and hell) out from the hiding places of our consciousness, lest we forget how fleeting, disappointing, and volatile this world ultimately is.
Just a couple of years ago, I would have considered the contempus mundi genre dead, with the possible exception of a brief revival in T. S. Eliot’s late religious poetry. But the late novelist Cormac McCarthy resurrected the genre in his final books, The Passenger and Stella Maris, which were released as a pair late last year.
Although the two books are less violent than The Road or Blood Meridian, they partly compensate for that with their raw language, crude jokes, suicidal longings, and graphic descriptions of incestuous sexual desire. McCarthy was no plaster angel, even in his later years. But even though McCarthy’s novels do deal frankly with these strong and off-putting …
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