Here’s the expectation: Christ suffered; don’t expect better. Here’s the expectation: Christ came to save His own and His own knew Him not; don’t expect better. I can say it but I don’t think we really believe it. We live in a place where we go to school to be guaranteed a job. We go to doctors to be guaranteed good health. We invest in our 401K to be ensured with a retirement fund.
All these things that we do with an expectation of a return; we do it just right, we get a cosmic ‘Attaboy.
I like to look at situation and, no matter how rough, consider what would be ideal. I think that’s important. In circles with friends or family I have convincingly argued for The Ideal and then stood there as someone asks “That’s awesome; how do we get there?” only to shake my head and respond “I don’t know.” Now the fact is that I do know that the impending ideal of a dawning future reality will establish a system that we, of our own power, can’t possibly implement. But people don’t get that so I want to talk about why that’s important.
Romans 5 is a theological watershed: Adam Christology; the nature of the New Humanity; Original Sin; the Progression of Original Sin; and more. In this post I just wanted to examine the relationship of humanity to Adam and what his role is as decider.
Nervous because it looks like the page is getting hacked and in the hopes of making sure I keep these excellent links, I am backing up Joe Carter’s Jesus the Logician project here at the Bible Archive. Mind you this is not the repository for said articles. If you have new submissions you can send them to Joe Carter. It was sparked by Dallas Willard’s article here (with a pdf here). The abstract from said article is as follows with the backup of Joe Carter’s collection from the blogosphere after the jump:
ABSTRACT: In understanding how discipleship to Jesus Christ works, a major issue is how he automatically presents himself to our minds. It is characteristic of most 20th century Christians that he does not automatically come to mind as one of great intellectual power: as Lord of universities and research institutes, of the creative disciplines and scholarship. The Gospel accounts of how he actually worked, however, challenge this intellectually marginal image of him and help us to see him at home in the best of academic and scholarly settings of today, where many of us are called to be his apprentices.
Psalm 137 is gorgeous and some would say “almost perfect”. Lots of Psalms fall into that category in people’s minds: that Almost Perfect slot. You usually know where people feel any Psalm falls short during the Lord’s Supper when one of the brothers is sharing a Psalm and stops just short of the end. Surely the rest of the Psalm was right and nice…but that last bit really threw the whole thing off. Psalm 137 is, once again, a perfect example.
