Toxic Faith

I follow several blogs from some great thinkers in Christianity.  I am extremely grateful to them for expressing thoughts I find difficult to verbalize.  Today was a great example.  Derek Flood writes on Red Letter Christian the following:

Here’s a simple rule of thumb: if your theory of the cross completely contradicts everything Jesus stood for and taught… it’s probably wrong. It’s sad that I need to say this, but the gospel is rooted in love of enemies, not in retribution. Retribution is the opposite of forgiveness. So the idea that the entire work of Jesus was to fulfill the demands of retribution is simply absurd. It’s high time we went back to the focus of Jesus, which was not on violent demands for so-called justice, but on restoring broken lives, and showing enemy love. That’s what the cross is really about.
However, centuries of reading the assumptions of punitive justice into the Bible won’t be easy for us to shake off. It’s become so ingrained, so indoctrinated into our religious imagination that it seems almost self-evident to us now. Therefore, we will need to take a fresh look at Scripture in order to recognize that the model of restorative justice is indeed at the heart of the biblical narrative.

In another post, Derek writes about healing toxic faith. Both of these posts address the issue of how we, as Christians, are to treat the LGBT population.  For many years, I have struggled with the reaction of those around me to LGBTs and the hatred and rejection they exhibit.  It does not make sense to me.  It makes me want to reject Christians!  I am ashamed of how Christianity has treated LGBTs, especially my LGBT friends.  These posts I read today by Derek express many of my thoughts and I encourage you to read them.  Thanks Derek!