#michael hardin

[preacherman316]

There is One Spirit

“The Bible teachings about the Holy Spirit and his works are among the most neglected phases and aspects of our teaching,” wrote H. Leo Boles in 1942. I’m not sure we’ve drastically improved in that regard in the past 82 years. More recently gospel preacher Michael Hardin wrote, “The Holy Spirit is a subject about which there is much false teaching and popular misunderstanding.” Continue reading…

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[milkboydotnet]

Christianity is being deconstructed today and it isn't by the atheist, it isn't by the gays, it is by the Holy Spirit.

Michael Hardin

[entanglingbriars]

Conservative Christians are not being persecuted for following Jesus. They would first have to follow Jesus in order to be persecuted for that.

Michael Hardin

[gospelofthekingdom]

This is a prolific work, one that I want to re-read in the near future.  The next best thing to purchasing your own copy [which is unfortunately quite expensive], is reading an excellent review like this one from Michael Hardin.

 "Against The Protestant Gnostics first published in 1987 by Oxford University Press details with critical acumen and extensive evidence that whether fundamentalist or liberal, Protestantism in America is no different than Gnostic Christianity of the first centuries of the church.  

What are the results of a Gnosticized Protestantism? Lee suggests rejection of the good earth, a disdain for the ecology of the planet and a concomitant acceptance of the Bomb, our willingness to destroy physical reality with militant technology; the triumphal vision of the autonomous self and its private revelations; the separation of the sacred and the secular and the consequence of escape from any social ethic; the worship of the Individual and equality for the few.

Finally in what will be a crucial discussion for historic peace churches, Lee pleads for a non-Gnostic understanding of the liturgy, reaffirming ritual, both baptism and eucharist, but a ritual bound by a theology of the cross. There really is something of the nature of ‘blood and guts’ going on in the sacraments.

Christians that reject peace do so not because they like violence but because they don’t take violence seriously, they have demythologized it. It is the soul or the spirit that lives on that counts, earthly realities like sickness, poverty and war are not worthy of our concern, so we can call them illusions or we can ignore them but they are not real. Peace in a Gnostic trajectory will always be at the end of a gun or a rope or a sword, or a bomb.

This is one of those books I would put into the hands of every pastor and lay person who really sought to understand the deep presuppositions of our current fascination with violence and our deep complicity in human suffering. If you are looking to understand the tragic roots of the ‘fall of Christianity’ look no further. We can keep trimming the false theological tree of its dead branches but until we get at its roots it will continue to grow back and poison us. Buy this book and read it, it will change the way you understand American civil religion and it will give you the tools to call Christianity back to the roots of the gospel in the peace, grace and love of Jesus Christ."

[gospelofthekingdom]

A Psalm for the Persecuted in Iraq

"Lord, I woke today with your sun shining on me and your birds singing; I go to sleep weeping in anguish. I have seen the pictures Lord Jesus, of your little children, bodies torn, blood poured out to Molech. I weep, and my eyes have run dry.

Lord, I have sought to follow you, to learn your ways, and to live in peace; I have sought to know you in your love and to share that love with all others. But tonight, a fury has been stoked within my breast, and a hot breath is ripped from my lungs. A breath of anger, of injustice unrequited; And like those I so despise, those brutal butchers, those false priests I too seek blood, for justice, for vengeance, for peace as the world gives.

Lord I don’t seek your blood, which spoke a word of mercy and forgiveness; For tonight I hear the voices of the blood of innocent children which cries from the ground and my ears are full of their screams, their fears, and their anguish.

I never wanted to hear such voices Lord Jesus. I never wanted to live in such a world as this.

I hate, I despise, I loathe these murderers of tiny hands, these rapists of your children, these hangmen of Molech. My heart burns within me and I am torn between carrying a cross and inflicting a crucifixion on my enemies as they have done to others.

Selah.

But you O Lord, you know the dawn from the dusk, the beginning from the end. You know my heart and the heart of every man, woman and child who take their last breath as their blood pours out. For you O Lord, have been our victim, you have been our sacrifice, you have been the one tortured by injustice, brutalized by power and broken by the hands of the wicked.

Lord in your mercy, teach me how to pray. Teach me how to allow your Spirit to breathe new life in me. Teach me how to walk in a world strewn with landmines, IED’s and hatred. Show me the path of peace for I cannot find it on my own. Show me your path and hold my hand, for I am shaking.

I do not ask you to dry my tears but to teach me how to weep for my enemy. Open my eyes to your faithfulness and the promise of a day when all of this death shall forever be wiped away.

Selah."

-Michael Hardin

[leuc-anthemum]

In the "evangelical" version of the Gospel, God has a problem. God's problem is that God creates us, gets angry at us, and now, in order for God to not destroy us, God has to have a way to deal with God's anger. So, in essence, God in that model has an anger management problem. God literally requires blood. So we find this theological model playing itself out in real social and political thinking that has tremendous detrimental effect on real human lives. We found this out particularly after the Holocaust where our ethics has to fall in line with our driving narrative. If that's who God is, if God can justify murder and so on, we can too. They did a poll of some evangelicals asking if torture is justified and they all said absolutely! And so we learn these mechanisms of blame and attributing guilt and scapegoating. The death of Jesus is not like that. Jesus' blood is not the blood of the retributive victim like Abel, whose cries out from the ground saying, "I demand vengeance, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, you must do justice to me." No, the blood of Jesus is blood that says, "I forgive you. And as I forgive you as persecutors, you can forgive each other now and allow that to seep into all of your relationships." That's why Hebrews says that Jesus' blood speaks a better word than Abel's. There was a beautiful story on CNN yesterday where a Rwandan pastor's family members were killed and now he's become the pastor to these people who actually murdered his family. He's teaching these people forgiveness by modeling it to them and these prisoners are absolutely transformed as a result. For me, that's the Gospel.

Michael Hardin, interview on Girard with Homebrewed Christianity, 37:30-46:20

[cdbaca]

Michael Hardin on the Bible & Atonement

Around minute 53, Hardin makes a really great point. During the original Holy Week, Jesus is seen as the "lamb that takes away the sin of the world." The thing is, in Judaism, Yom Kippur is seen as the day when the people received atonement for sin (not Passover), and there is never a time when a lamb takes away sin - it's always two goats.

So in becoming the lamb that takes away the world's sin, Jesus changes the way we view sacrifice, and how atonement works. Instead of a reinforcement of the old system of sacrifice, where we need a scapegoat to take our blame, Jesus takes on humanity's violence and retribution, and offers peace and forgiveness in return.

This is the beauty of atonement in Christianity - not that God is vengeful and needs to settle the cosmic score (so to speak), but that God takes on our need for retributive violence and says "No more."

[milkboydotnet]

Apocalypse might be the penultimate word, but the Final Word is Jesus who comes to us a Friend from the Future. If we can make a case that there is no violence in God and that Jesus' death was not a penal transaction but a revelation of the character of God, it seems that we should also be able to say the same thing about the God to whom we are coming and who is coming to us.

Michael Hardin