Book Review - Larry Hurtado, "Destroyer of the gods"

Amazon link here

Book Description

"Silly," "stupid," "irrational," "simple." "Wicked," "hateful," "obstinate," "anti-social." "Extravagant," "perverse." The Roman world rendered harsh judgments upon early Christianity―including branding Christianity "new." Novelty was no Roman religious virtue.

Nevertheless, as Larry W. Hurtado shows in Destroyer of the gods, Christianity thrived despite its new and distinctive features and opposition to [the Roman culture].

• Unlike nearly all other religious groups, Christianity utterly rejected the traditional gods of the Roman world.

• Christianity also offered a new and different kind of religious identity, one not based on ethnicity.

• Christianity was distinctively a "bookish" religion, with the production, copying, distribution, and reading of texts as central to its faith, even preferring a distinctive book-form, the codex.

• Christianity insisted that its adherents behave differently: unlike the simple ritual observances characteristic of the pagan religious environment, embracing Christian faith meant a behavioral transformation, with particular and novel ethical demands for men.

Unquestionably, to the Roman world, Christianity was both new and different, and, to a good many, it threatened social and religious conventions of the day.

In the rejection of the gods and in the centrality of texts, early Christianity obviously reflected commitments inherited from its Jewish origins. But these particular features were no longer identified with Jewish ethnicity and early Christianity quickly became aggressively trans-ethnic―a novel kind of religious movement. Its ethical teaching, too, bore some resemblance to the philosophers of the day, yet in contrast with these great teachers and their small circles of dedicated students, early Christianity laid its hard demands upon all adherents from the moment of conversion, producing a novel social project. 

Christianity's novelty was no badge of honor. Called atheists and suspected of political subversion, Christians earned Roman disdain and suspicion in equal amounts. Yet, as Destroyer of the gods demonstrates, in an irony of history the very features of early Christianity that rendered it distinctive and objectionable in Roman eyes have now become so commonplace in Western culture as to go unnoticed. Christianity helped destroy one world and create another.

Additional Resources - Wikipedia

Early Christianity

Christianity in the First Century

Christianity and Paganism

Additional Links

God's Word Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow

Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)

TELESCOPING

“Telescoping" is the fallacy of projecting our modern ideas back upon ancient texts. Jesus' teachings of radical universal love can be very hard to hear when the modern church projects itself upon his words. We must constantly remind ourselves that, when Jesus spoke of the “word," the Bible was not yet compiled. When he asked people to follow him, there was no institutional church to join. When he asked people to "believe in him,” he was standing right in front of them. There were no creeds yet written, so if we spoke to Jesus about the atonement or the trinity, it is entirely possible that he would have no idea what we are talking about. - Jim Rigby

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In cognitive psychology, the telescoping effect (or telescoping bias) refers to the temporal displacement of an event whereby people perceive recent events as being more remote than they are and distant events as being more recent than they are. The former is known as backward telescoping or time expansion, and the latter as is known as forward telescoping. Three years is approximately the time frame in which events switch from being displaced backwards in time to forwards in time, with events occurring three years in the past being equally likely to be reported with forward telescoping bias as with backward telescoping bias. Although telescoping occurs in both the forward and backward directions, in general the effect is to increase the number of events reported too recently. This net effect in the forward direction is because of forces that impair memory, such as lack of salience, also impair time perception. Telescoping leads to an over reporting of the frequency of events.[3] This over reporting is because participants include events beyond the period, either events that are too recent for the target time period (backward telescoping) or events that are too old for the target time period (forward telescoping). - Wikipedia

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A Timeline of Early to Medieval Alphabets

From my friend Rance Darity comes this gentle reminder what "telescoping" means when post-Jesus institutions interpret Jesus' gospel. What theologians like Sanders, Dunn, and Wright have been reminding us these past 30 years (sic, the New Perspective of Paul directing the church to rediscover the Jewishness of the bible). That to read any of the New Testament, including the "Jewish" gospels, must be read within their own contextual existential communities of Jewishness.

I say existential because by that time the world was bathed in Hellenism and Roman ideology. So even back then the studied Jewish scribe and Pharisee struggled mightily to explain God and their faith as it was encapsulated within a post-Second Temple Reconstructive era (515 BCE) some 450 to 600 years earlier according to their Jewish traditions. Remember too that Pharisaism developed around 135 CE from the more ancient scribal traditions under Ezra and Nehemiah 635 years earlier. That Pharisasm was the ancient precursor to Rabbinic Judaism later established 100 hundred years after Jesus's death which has evolved into the various Jewish Orthodox traditions of today (so it was roughly 500 years in the making if you count the Intertestamental Period between the Old and New Testaments as canonical variants developed within their scribal camps). Overall, these groups were interested in preserving God's Word which they knew as the Tanakh, which was the Jewish canonical collection of Hebrew texts we know as the Old Testament today.

And then into this mix came the Sadducees who were all too willing to mix the Tanakh's Torah teachings with the popular philosophies of their day (a process known as Hellenization) while jettisoning some of the favored Torah teachings of old Judaism from the Hebrew Bible, along with the Prophets (Nevi'im), and Writings (Ketuv'im). In essence then, the Pharisees and their scribes were attempting to honor the old Jewish Scriptures against the incursion of newer non-Jewish ideas and radical redactionism. And yet, having done a yeoman's job in protecting the Bible they were most curiously Jesus's worst enemies who Himself was the living Bible! Talk about your paradoxes, ironies, and riddles!

A Medieval Version of the Septuagint (the Hebrew OT written in Koine Greek
during the 3rd and 2nd BCE era under King Ptolemy)

Then came a competing bible begun under Egpytian King Ptolemy from Alexandria comparable to what King James of England did in the early 1600s later known as the King James Bible. Unlike James the Ptolemy's commissioned the creation of the Septuagint during the 3rd to 2nd Century BCE, and to be written from the old Hebrew Canon (using the Masoretic tradition from the 7th and 10th Centuries BCE) into Koine Greek - which  was the common language everyone spoke and understood throughout Egypt, eastern Africa, and the Middle East. In time, since people could only read Greek, even the Jews of the New Testament era of Jesus' day would prefer the Septuagint over their own Jewish bible. They could read it and understand it and it was this bible which Jesus and His disciples preached out of. Later on this same undertaking was again made when St. Jerome was commissioned  by Pope Damasus I in 382 CE to update the Septuagint into a Latinized Version of the bible known as the Latin(Catholic) Vulgate. Being a wise old man, and contemporary to St. Augustine, Jerome used not only the Septuagint but also the Masoretic text of the Hebrew bible to recapture what may have been lost through the centuries in translation and transmission. Having done this job the Catholic Church of the Roman Empire could distribute its pages to its priests throughout the ancient world that all Latin-speaking people might know and understand God's good news in Christ.

The  Vulgate of Clementine. Prologue of St. John
(the Hebrew OT written in Latin by Jerome c.382 AD)

But if one goes even further back into time before the restored Second Temple era (constructed in 515 BCE to be later destroyed by Rome in 70 CE 585 years later), back into the time of old Israel and Judah themselves, back into the time of the tribes of Israel before they were a kingdom, and even further back into the time of Moses and Abraham, then God's revelation of Himself had changed and synthesized greatly down through these eras. So it was no small task for the scribes of Ezra's day to recapture and attempt to encapsulate Israel's profound history over 1500+ years of oral tradition with the God who loved and led them unto salvation by works of redemption throughout their turbulent eras.

One of Many Interpretive Designs of the Biblical Canon

So that by the first century of the Christian Era (CE) - into this theological soup of parsing, reparsing, and interpretive synthesis - comes Jesus, who speaks the "word" of God come to Israel after so many long years of "divine silence" (...but not really. God was always there bespeaking Himself to His children). But especially into the stage of human travail and mis-allocation of God's words by His children to sharpen-up and re-form the points of discussion of what God had been saying all these many long years since Adam's day. But this time God spoke through Himself (aka Jesus) without interpreter. And He spoke directly into the Jewish society of His children having lost their way in too many words and ideas about divinity, holiness, sin, and the afterlife.

Now this is not unlike the church today whereby we do this same task of the scribe and the Pharisee by attempting to historically discover God's Word and traditions when redacting the Christian Canon into our own era's travails and mis-allocations. And to speak it plainly without losing its way within out extra-biblical influences (unless those influences conform with biblical theology) as the Sadduccees once did. And to contemporize the preaching of God's good news buy placing it in the common language and understanding of our times (English, predominantly). Even as Jesus and His disciples did when reading from the Greek Septuagint rather than from the Jewish text which would have been gibberish to their listeners. Why? Because their audience could read, write, and speak in Koine Greek - even as their Jewish leadres and neighbors did who had long ago forgotten their mother language of Judaism through centuries of war and dissettlement. Again, we see the painstaking guidance and leadership of God to carefully maintain the pith, the center, of His revelation to man. And what is this teaching God wants us to know? Read on...

The many variants of Redaction to Interpreting the Bible
both in its meaning, transmission, adjudication, and relevancy

So then how does one interpret the Bible? And which Bible does one interpret? A Bible that is literal or a Bible that is a living paraphrase? In point of fact the Septuagint was all of this. And then there is the problem of redaction - how does one interpret the Bible we have? And finally there is the problem of examining our own needs-and-wants placed upon both bible and God which may be more scribal and Pharisaical in doing the hard of being faithful to the various traditions of the OT (and now the NT whose essence is distilled in the Gospels of Jesus). But even so, each era must have its "Jesus-like" moments of clarity (and human clarions) which removes man's words from God's words to hear afresh God's call to love and to act in love. That the gospel of God in the OT and the gospel of God in the NT demonstrated through His life and death is no more, nor no less, than to love one another when boiled down to its essence. And when you think about it it really isn't that hard is it? Bible interpretation has much less to do with what we believe, our Creeds and our doctrines, then how our beliefs affect our actions towards others. There's the nub of it. With James, Paul says faith without works is dead, ineffectual, unlively, a dung pile. But with it, each of our dung piles - our compost piles - may become composted gardens of resurrection enriching and nourishing all who look upon God's faithfulness and beauty.

So what is the work of God in our world today? It is no different than His work over the many long centuries of time. It is to renew our fellowship both in Himself and with one another that a spiritual healing might cleanse our benighted lands so full of turmoil and darkness. To repent of our divisive and discriminating inequities and injustices that prevent us from sitting at a table of fellowship with one another. To worry less about being "biblical" and more about being "unrighteous." To seize the days of opportunity we have now that we might build a new society of men and women focusing on the majors, the knowns, the necessaries rather than the minors, the preferentials, and ideologicals. To do the best work as we can like the scribes and Pharisees to preserve as pure a sense of God within our communities but to let go of these efforts if they should miss the simple and sublime beauty that God is love and offers this love of peace and binding to broken hearts everywhere crucified upon the pangs of sin and death.

And lastly, like God's words to Abraham, to Moses, to the prophets and kings of Israel's long history , these words are no different then Jesus and the apostles words to us now. Yes, culturally Gods words must be worked out in all of its existential variations by society, tribe, and geographic region, no less than we must always do when doing the hard work of redacting our understanding of the divine. But as a gentle reminder to us God bespoke His ancient word to ancient peoples again and again and again until finally He spoke them through Himself we know as as our Savior-God Jesus. To show to us who He is, and what it means to be in fellowship with the Creator of life, who redeems His creation from all its hard burdens of freedom gifted from the moment of our birth unto the twilight years of our grave and into the midnight sun of eternity with Him as our Lord, Shepherd, and Friend. Amen and amen.

R.E. Slater

July 9, 2015

A Word of Admonition

To not forget to "gyroscope" in the days of "telescoping."

To remember at all times our bearings, headings, and drift.

- res

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TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE -

ITS TREES, HERITAGE, ARRANGEMENT, OUTLINE

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A Timeline of Textual Transmissions

Textual Transmission of the Hebrew Canon

Textual Transmission of the Jewish Old Testament

Textual Transmission of the Christian New Testament

OT Canonical Arrangement

Comparison Timeline of OT Eras to one another

Comparison Outline of NT Canonical Arrangement to one another

The Many Voices of the Church - A Quick Assessment of the 2014 ETS & AAR Conference Meetings

Each November the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) and American Academy of Religion (AAR) conferences meeting separately as independent organizations to discuss Christianity and Religion both in America and globally throughout the world. ETS emphasizes its evangelical doctrinal themes as it perceives them (largely now through the Southern Baptist lens it seems: sic, What Happened to Evangelical Theology?) while AAR speaks to a broader range of non-evangelical themes.

66th Annual Meeting - San Diego, CA

The ETS meeting will be held Wednesday through Friday, November 19-21, 2014

at the Town and Country Resort & Convention Center in San Diego, CA.

AAR site link here

The AAR meeting will be held Saturday through Tuesday, November 22-25, 2014

at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California

Because there are so many program sessions between each group it is hard to digest specifically the heart throb of 21st century Christianity without paying attention to book titles and media-generated themes throughout the year from a variety of publishers and news organizations. Generally, to read through the program sessions of each conference is to notice news worthy trends of interest to everyday Christians around the world in one fashion or another:

ETS Program Sessions - 128 pages

AAR Program Sessions - 133 pages

For instance, for the Tony Jones follower, we see an interest in whether Emergent Christianity is still a viable player within today's brand of evangelicalism, and if not, then in what way it may have left its dissenting mark upon present church structure, worship, governance, and ideology since the 1990s (sic, Is the Emergent Church relevant?).

For the Christianity Today reader the question of Stan Grenz as a proper evangelical was discussed as to whether the revered evangelic theologian in his remaining years was pursuing Open Theology, gay rights, and a postmodern theology ala the later paths of Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and Tony Jones (sic, see article below, What Happened to Evangelical Theology?). Or whether he might rightly be acclaimed by the conservative Protestant and Catholic church as its own brand of conservative evangelicalism which has traditionally been less open to these contemporary Christian movements.

And inasmuch as Grenz is the theologic divide between a conservative Christianity or a postmodern one may be the very reason that we are having these discussions today against a more dogmatic form of Christianity.

Learning How to Divide True from False

It is to this divide in evangelicalism that Relevancy22 had responded over recent years to provide another voice to a non-dogmatic version of enculturated conservative Christianity. That is, the themes that have been rehearsed in each of the separate sessions of both the ETS and AAR should be themes that have been well-responded to in the many articles found within this blogsite over the years. Built not as from one voice or denomination but broadly from many voices, theologians, scientists, and scholars.

Why?

So that a broader, more inclusive Gospel of Christ might be proclaimed relevantly into this needful, contemporary world crying "God is Dead (or unconscious)" when in fact this very God is dead to us and not to Himself. A God who lives through His church by willing hearts, minds, hands, and feet able to hear His voice and grasp His plan of salvation not by structure or device but by Christ's very heartthrob for humanity itself.

To understand that no one branch of Christianity gets a say on how to interpret the Bible by delimiting its message to a more preferred message by some - whether they be a majority or a minority of Christians. But to learn to read the Bible in a broader manner based upon the certainty of its major themes - that of love and reconciliation to all men everywhere through Christ Jesus our Lord.

To recognize deceptively trendy arguments declaring Scripture as primary authority and tradition as presumptive authority can be both true-and-not-true based upon the decreeing church body announcing this (con)scripted phrase. Mostly, for conservative evangelics, the message of the Bible can be a stricter one than for the non-conservative, progressive, or post-modern evangelic who sees the Bible's message more broadly and less limiting to its gospel message and lively contents.

What Is Theology When Measured in Relational Terms?

Again, at Relevancy22 we have questioned evangelical premises such as these by providing a larger base of reasoning to help the searching reader against the pulpited mantras of the day through basic deconstructions and reconstructions of today's church messages (mostly schizophrenic it would seem to this writer/theologian) of the Gospel of Christ.

That all theology is driven by the gospel's trinitarian mission of evangelism emphasizing relational openness and outreach with a passion for humanity. That God's love must be the primary trajectory of all doctrines, dogmas, and theologies of the Bible upon which hope and truth are built. For without God's love there can ultimately be no hope nor persuasive truth, only a hopelessness measured upon a foundation of certain death and destruction.

R.E. Slater

November 23, 2014

*as reminder to new readers, Relevancy22 is primarily built as a
reference-and-resource site rather than as a daily blog.

* * * * * * * * * *

... Grenz was on the forefront of introducing trinitarian mission to evangelicalism. The fundamental definition that “God is love” is the beginning of seeing that God passionately pursues a relationship with humanity. The eternal life of God is lived out in a set of relationships, including the inner relationship of the Trinity and the relationship between God and humanity. “God is social, not solitary,” was one of Stan’s axioms. - John Franke

I suppose it’s to be expected that a group of evangelical scholars would want to have some control over the legacy of one of their most creative colleagues. But I think that Stan was on a trajectory of openness and relationality that would have made him quite uncomfortable with the current climate of evangelical theology. Maybe he could have stemmed the tide of ideological expulsions and such, but others have tried that here and left instead of continuing to fight. - Tony Jones

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What Happened to Evangelical Theology? [#ETS2014 Liveblog]

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2014/11/20/what-happened-to-evangelical-theology-ets2014-liveblog/

by Tony Jones

November 20, 2014

This weekend I’m attending the Evangelical Theological Society and American Academy of Religion, and I will be liveblogging some of the sessions that I’m attending.

“Assessing Stanley Grenz’s Contribution to Evangelical Theology: 10 Years Later,” that’s the name of the session I’m attending at ETS. But Stan’s death isn’t the only thing that happened ten years ago at ETS. That was also the year that ETS voted against Open Theology, for all intents and purposes expelling people like Greg Boyd, Clark Pinnock, and John Sanders. Now, when you look through the program book, in addition to the annual reaffirmation of inerrancy in the image above, you will see that many sessions are dominated by Southern Baptists.

8:50am Jason Sexton just presented Edna Grenz, Stan’s widow, with a volume of 20 essays in his honor. She implored the gathered scholars to not just continue Stan’s theological rigor, but to also treat one another with humility and respect as they debate one another.

8:54am Sexton continues that many, looking back, do not think that Stan really understood postmodernism. Some also incorrectly believe that he had departed evangelicalism before his death. This would only happen, Sexton says, if we look exclusively at Stan’s academic work and ignore his spiritual and ecclesial life.

Sexton also thinks that Stan is unfairly criticized for his book on homosexuality,Welcoming but Not Affirming: An Evangelical Response to Homosexuality. Instead than being a recalcitrant evangelical, Sexton says, Granz was “ahead of us” on sexuality, women, postmodernity, and the Trinity.

Who’s the real Stan Grenz? That’s what Sexton tried to discover in his dissertation, but he says Stan cannot be found in the secondary literature — the books and articles about Grenz. That’s because, “Maybe we’re afraid of what we might find, how the real Stan Grenz might push us beyond our own boundaries.”

Stanley Grenz

9:05am Derek Tidball takes on the topic of Stan Grenz and Evangelicalism. He says that evangelicalism is virtually impossible to define doctrinally, so others define it historically. But Grenz argued that evangelicalism is a living, mutating organism. By seeing the Bible as the book of the community, Grenz was faithful to his Baptist roots, and that’s something that evangelicalism at large should heed. Stan is wrongfully called the “godfather of the emerging church.”

Comment: Already the tone in the room is to say as loudly as possible, Stan Grenz lived and died as an evangelical! In other words, people who think he was anything short of evangelical when he died are wrong. Implied is that, had he lived, he would have not followed the path of people like McLaren, Pagitt, and me — who were so influenced by him — but he would have stayed firmly within the evangelical camp. Looking around this conference, I cannot affirm the same. I didn’t know Stan well, but from what I knew of him, he would not feel comfortable with the strident conservatism of ETS.

9:20am Gregg Allison, from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is tackling Stan Grenz’s ambiguity, a subject that has been raised in every presentation so far. Allison is “mildly critical of Stan’s vagueness.” Allison lists a litany of doctrines that evangelical’s believe, and he quotes Grenz as saying that tradition has “presumptive authority.” That’s a phrase from the field of law, saying that there are presumptive truths, but they can be overturned by evidence. Scripture has primary authority, tradition has presumptive authority. That, in a nutshell, was Grenz’s theological method.

Comment: It seems that since Stan’s death, evangelical scholars have worried about where Stan would have ended up, especially because his theological proposals were not as settled and definite as they would have liked. But it’s the very “presumptive authority” that would have allowed Stan to change his mind on something like homosexuality. For so many of us, Stan opened up the beauty of postmodern philosophy. The epic talk in which he compared the original Star Trek to Star Trek: The Next Generation, put the most complex of ideas in a common, vernacular language. 

Indeed, I would argue that when you read Brian McLaren’s writings on homosexuality, for instance, you find the very kind of theological reasoning that Grenz taught us. The very vagueness that makes evangelical theologians uneasy is what made Stan so compelling as a theologian to us in the late-90s and early 2000s.

9:45am John Franke, who co-wrote an excellent book with Stan, knew Stan for 10 years before he died. When John thinks about Stan now, he always thinks about the man, not necessarily ideas. The ideas matter, Stan taught John, but what really matters about theology is whether it makes you a better person. When John first attended ETS, he was very put off by how competitive the environment was. But Stan was immediately hospitable to John, and even came to Biblical at John’s invitation to lecture — for free.

Franke says that Grenz was on the forefront of introducing trinitarian mission to evangelicalism. The fundamental definition that “God is love” is the beginning of seeing that God passionately pursues a relationship with humanity. The eternal life of God is lived out in a set of relationships, including the inner relationship of the Trinity and the relationship between God and humanity. “God is social, not solitary,” was one of Stan’s axioms.

“He was a beautiful man, who lived out his theology, and invites us to do the same.” That’s Franke’s final word on Grenz.

[Final] comment: I suppose it’s to be expected that a group of evangelical scholars would want to have some control over the legacy of one of their most creative colleagues. But I think that Stan was on a trajectory of openness and relationality that would have made him quite uncomfortable with the current climate of evangelical theology. Maybe he could have stemmed the tide of ideological expulsions and such, but others have tried that here and left instead of continuing to fight.

- Tony Jones

related articles -

Index to past articles on "An Open Faith and Open Theology"

When Christians Love Theology More Than People

Holding hands, Mats Bergström / Shutterstock.com

When Christians Love Theology More Than People

http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/01/22/when-christians-love-theology-more-people

by Stephen Mattson

January 22, 2014

Beyond the realm of churches, religious blogs, and bible colleges, nobody really cares about theology. What does matter is the way you treat other people.

Within Christendom, we’re often taught the exact opposite: that doctrines, traditions, theologies, and distinct beliefs are the only things that do matter. It’s what separates churches, denominations, theologians, and those who are “saved” and “unsaved.”

Historically, Christians have been tempted to categorize the Bible into numerous sets of beliefs that are either inspired or heretical, good or bad, right or wrong — with no room for doubt or questioning or uncertainty.

It’s easy to get caught up in theorizing about God, but within our everyday lives reality is what matters most to the people around us. Theorizing only becomes important once it becomes relevant and practical and applicable to our lives.

When I'm sick, and you bring me a meal, I don't care whether you're a Calvinist or Arminian.

When I'm poor, and you give me some food and money, I don't care if you're pre-millennial or post-millennial.

When I'm in the hospital, and you send me a get-well basket, I don't care what your church denomination is.

When you visit my grandparents in the nursing home, I don't care what style of worship music you listen to.

When you're kind enough to shovel my parent's driveway, I don't care what translation of the Bible you read.

When you give my friend a lift when their car breaks down, I don't care if you’re Baptist or Catholic.

When you help my grandmother carry a heavy load of groceries, I don't care what you believe about evolution.

When you protect my kids from getting hit by a car when they're running across the street, I don't care who your favorite theologian is.

When you’re celebrating my birthday with me, I don’t care about your views related to baptism.

When you grieve alongside me during the death of a family member, I don’t care if you tithe or not.

When you love me in deep and meaningful and authentic ways — nothing else really matters.

But when you idolize belief systems and turn theology into an agenda, it poisons the very idea of selfless love. 

The gospel message turns into propaganda, friends turn into customers, and your relationship with God turns into a religion.

You may have the most intellectually sound theology, but if it's not delivered with love, respect, and kindness — it's worthless.

The practical application of your love is just as important as the theology behind it. Our faith is evidenced by how we treat others. Does the reality of your life reflect the theory behind your spiritual beliefs?

We should never give up on theology, academic study, or the pursuit of understanding God, the Bible, and the history and traditions of the church, but these things should inspire us to emulate Christ — to selflessly, sacrificially, and holistically love others. Theology should reinforce our motivation for doing things to make the world a better place — not serve as platforms to berate, criticize, and attack others.

But too often, we’re guilty of failing to practically apply our beliefs in tangible ways that actually help others. 

In the end, this is what matters most to the world around us: that we simply love as Christ loved.

Stephen Mattson has contributed for Relevant Magazine and the Burnside Writer's Collective,and studied Youth Ministry at the Moody Bible Institute. He is now on staff at Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minn. Follow him on Twitter @mikta.

Image: Holding hands, Mats Bergström / Shutterstock.com