ComeFrom?
03-18-2006, 05:48 PM
Every movement we make in response to God has a ripple effect, touching family, neighbors, friends, community. Belief in God alters our language. Love of God affects daily relationships. Hope in God enters into our work. Also their opposites unbelief, indifference and despair. None of these movements and responses, beliefs and prayers, gestures and searches can be confined to the soul. They spill out and make history. If they dont, the are under suspicion of being fantasies at best, hypocrisies at worst.
Christians have always insisted on the historicity of Jesus an actual birth, a datable death, a witnessed resurrection, locatable towns. There is a parallel historicity in the followers of Jesus. As they take in everything Jesus said and did all of it a personal revelation of God in time and place at all gets worked into local history, eventually into world history.
Philemon and Onesimus, the slave owner and slave who figure prominently in the letter from Paul, had no idea that believing in Jesus would involve a radical social change. But as the two of them were brought together by this letter, it did. And still does.
Christians have always insisted on the historicity of Jesus an actual birth, a datable death, a witnessed resurrection, locatable towns. There is a parallel historicity in the followers of Jesus. As they take in everything Jesus said and did all of it a personal revelation of God in time and place at all gets worked into local history, eventually into world history.
Philemon and Onesimus, the slave owner and slave who figure prominently in the letter from Paul, had no idea that believing in Jesus would involve a radical social change. But as the two of them were brought together by this letter, it did. And still does.