We all know that Christ and His Apostles taught us to love our enemies, to pray for those who use and abuse us, and to serve those who persecute us. These are the basic fundamentals of a Christian life. But often the how and why have eluded us. This article looks at the Sermon on the Mount as the Manual for How to Be a Christian and explores exactly what Christ meant, why it matters how we live, and how we are supposed to live as His disciples. This is how you be a good Christian.
Tag: Love your enemies
How Can You Be A Good Christian? Part 1
What does it mean to be a Christian? We talk a lot about how to become a Christian, but how to be a good Christian often gets lost in the debate. This article and its sequel are designed exactly to address the question of what it means to be a Christian by looking at what Christ and His Apostles taught about who we are, what our relationships to God and each other are, and how we are supposed to treat everyone in our life. This article is about what it means to be a good Christian and how being one transforms not only you but the entirely world around you.
Nonviolence in Early Christianity, Part 1
Some of the oldest and most affirmed truths in all of Christendom are that Jesus Christ commands us to love our enemies, to renounce violence, and to reject all other worldly loyalties – be they nation, empire, or people – for the Church, the Gospel, and Jesus Christ Himself. These truths can been in the writings of the earliest surviving Christian leaders and writers. What follows below is the first part in an effort to share a small sampling of these statements which I have tried to place within a rough chronological order. Hopefully they will help the reader, whether Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Pentecostal, Christian Scientist, Latter-day Saint, etc. to understand the role of what we now call nonviolence, civil disobedience, rejection of world powers -what we today call the State – and loving and serving your enemy as central beliefs in the long history of true Christianity, ancient and modern.
The Christian Case For Nonviolence
The following address, “A Case for Christocentric Nonviolence”, is a copy of a presentation made by New Testament scholar Dr. Preston Sprinkle. It is merely the tip of the iceberg of the evidence and arguments from Christian scripture, history, and theology he uses in his book “Fight” to demonstrate that Christianity is rooted in an absolute ethic of God-like love for all and the commandment to renounce all violence for all causes as Christians are ordered by Christ’s word, deeds, and example to save our enemies, not destroy them. In it he discusses four basic theses, statements of fact that will be proven, which demonstrate the nonviolent nature of Christ and Christian teaching. Then he deals with four arguments commonly made by people trying to justify Christian violence – Romans 13, the cleansing of the temple by Jesus, Jesus telling the Apostles to go buy sword, and the Second Coming – and after demonstrating the errors in them and answering those concerns he concludes by suggesting but a few ways of how this should effect the way we think and act as Christians today in both terms of violent personal self-defense and in war.