Christian Radicalism!

The kingdom is present whenever people are getting their life from Christ alone and therefore are increasingly looking like Jesus, doing what Jesus did, and obeying what Jesus taught. When people refuse to retaliate, choosing instead to return evil with good as Jesus and Paul taught us, the kingdom of God is present. When people love their enemies rather than fight them, bless those who persecute them rather than curse them, and pray for those who mistreat them rather than trying to get even, the kingdom of God is present. When people choose to serve rather than to be served and to be killed rather than to participate in killing others, the kingdom of God is present. When people choose to put the interests of others before their own, to forgive even after multiple offenses, and to invest their own time and resources in serving others, the kingdom of God is present. When people befriend the friendless, feed the hungry, house the homeless, serve “sinners” rather than judge them, and work to bring healing into people’s lives and relationships, the kingdom of God is present. And when we choose to live in a way that ascribes worth to animals and the earth rather than simply using them as a means of gratifying ourselves, as the Bible commands (Gen. 1:26-28), the kingdom of God is present. This is what God’s LIFE looks like when it is manifested “on earth as it is in heaven,” for this is what Christ looked like when he came down to earth.

Greg Boyd (via azspot)

(via azspot)

Greg Boyd

Consumerism is the death of Christian eschatology. There can be no rupture with the status quo, no in-breaking kingdom of God, but only endless superficial novelty… The witness of the martyrs to living the kingdom of God in the present becomes a curiosity: How could someone be so committed to some particular thing as to lose his life for it? We are moved by the suffering of others, but we can hardly imagine a change radical enough to undermine the paradigm of consumption.

William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed (via invisibleforeigner)

Name change (?)

Fuck Yeah, Christian Radicalism! is now simply Christian Radicalism!

If there is a future to this thing, then it seems appropriate to change the name simply because the prevalence of ‘Fuck Yeah…!’ blogs seems to have faded into Tumblr history.

Got a better suggestion for a name? Hit us up with a reply.

Also, there’s obviously been little activity as of late on FYCR, but hopefully the Browse by person and Browse by tag pages continue to be useful for people hunting for quotes and content.

Jesus is Dead: A Reflection for Holy Saturday

By Jon Hatch

This is Holy Saturday. Jesus is dead.

We spend so much time talking about how Christ ‘died and rose again’ that we fail to meditate on his death.

Jesus died. His heart stopped beating, his brain flatlined and his body started to decay.

And if we do engage with his death, we run the risk of engaging with his death forensically, like the disturbing mania over Mel Gibson’s disgusting gore-fest ‘Passion of the Christ’.

But for the most part, Christ’s death remains for most Christians a theological footnote, an unpleasant necessity that assuages God’s justice and allows them to go to heaven.

But Holy Saturday is when we come face to face with a dead Jesus. Today, Christians worship a corpse. There is no Sunday. Dead bodies don’t come back to life.

To speak of Easter Sunday on Holy Saturday is to not comprehend what happened on Good Friday. It is to understand Christ’s death only on a philosophical or theological level. However, we must experience Christ’s death from the place of the disciples who watched it happen. They did not go home that night saying, ‘O well, no matter. He promised to rise.’

No, they went away dead men, the most dead men ever, for they had lived with Christ for three years and experienced the Kingdom of God in a way no one ever had. And now it was over. Killed. The Empire won. Corruption won. It was all a lie. There was no hope, and no hope of hope ever again.

We will never be able to feel as they felt. But we can take this day to meditate what it means to live without hope;

to be ‘hope-less’;

to touch the reality of those in our world living with no hope:

the sex slave in a back room of an unmarked building in a back alley of a city whose name they don’t know;

the refugee from an African war now living in a refugee camp a thousand miles away from the spot where she was raped as her husband was shot in front of her and was raped by soldiers yesterday and wonders if they’ll be back today;

The detainee in Guantanamo Bay, denied any semblance of universally-recognised judicial rights, who- even if found to be wrongfully detained- will never be released;

the child handcuffed to a sewing machine who will be beaten if they don’t meet their quota of designer handbags.

These are the ‘Holy Saturday people’, the worthless and the hopeless that live in a world where God is dead and will not come back to life.

There is no Easter Sunday without Holy Saturday. It is through the blackness of Holy Saturday that we must see the joy of the women at the tomb, the joy and courage of the disciples.

Easter is about life in the fullest sense. Not theological life or philosophical life, but the life of a man who was dead and then not dead anymore.

The ‘Holy Saturday people’ of this world are looking for ‘Easter people’. The essence of Christianity is not in doctrine or confessions, important as they are. The first Christians, the first ‘Easter people’, had a simple message: ‘Jesus was dead. Now he is alive. We’ve seen him.’

This is what we have to offer the ‘Holy Saturday people’. Nothing is impossible anymore. No system is so evil, so oppressive, so entrenched that we cannot overthrow it. If Jesus is not dead then nothing is impossible.

We await no revolution; Easter was the revolution.

But that’s all for another day. Today is Holy Saturday, and Jesus is dead.

—

Jon Hatch lives in Belfast and is a doctoral candidate at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin, as well as a long-time member of the ikon collective.

Merry Christmas and Happy Incarnation!

‘Heaven and earth are united today, for Christ is born. Today has God come down to earth, and man gone up to heaven.’ from the Festal Menaion

(Happy Western Christmas, at least!)

Last year, Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas. Clean water for the whole world, including every poor person on the planet would cost about $20 billion. Let’s just call that what it is: A material blasphemy of the Christmas season.

Jim Wallis (via azspot)

(via azspot)

The mythology of “state-as-savior” and democratic control do not line up with empirical historical research. Rather than saving people from violence, historians have shown that state-making first and foremost arose out of organizing to fight wars. William Cavanaugh has used these historical studies to argue that the nation-state is not “the keeper of the common good” as social contract theories presuppose. Instead the nation-state usurps group loyalties and fragments attempts at real community.

Andy Alexis-Baker (‘The Myth of the State As Savior and Elections as Confession of Faith’)

Pope Benedict: End the Death Penalty →

The Bible isn’t meant to keep people apart; it isn’t meant to be a badge of honor. The worst sin is pride, and you can have a religious pride that is sinful. I didn’t see that for a long time—the way religion can be used to hurt people. I knew history—all the hate in the name of religion. But in everyday life, even before I became Catholic, I had assumed that people who took the time to read the Bible and pray were going to behave better toward other people, because they would be influenced by all the beauty in that book. But I was naive, maybe blind.

Dorothy Day (via shortbreadsh)

(via kittentroops)

Jesus gave (his followers) a new way of life to live. He gave them a new way to deal with offenders — by forgiving them. He gave them a new way to deal with violence — by suffering. He gave them a new way to deal with money — by sharing it. He gave them a new way to deal with problems of leadership — by drawing upon the gift of every member, even the most humble. He gave them a new way to deal with a corrupt society — by building a new order, not smashing the old. He gave them a new pattern of relationships between man and woman, parent and child, master and slave, in which was made concrete a radical new vision of what it means to be a human person. He gave them a new attitude toward the state and toward the ‘enemy nation.’

John Howard Yoder (via azspot)

(via azspot)