Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Where does our allegiance lie?

If, with John, we know Jesus as “the ruler of the kings of the earth” and as the “one who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, who made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father,” our primary identity will be rooted in our place in the kingdom of God, which we share with the redeemed from every people, tribe, nation, and language group. It will not be rooted in some national or political body constructed by human beings and their party lines. Our primary allegiance will be to this One Lord and One God in every aspect of our lives, out of gratitude for our costly redemption and in acknowledgement that we have been made part of a very real political entity whose head is Christ.— Unholy Allegiances, page 82

<idle musing>
I've been reading Bonheoffer the Assassin?. This excerpt fits in very well with what they are saying about the transformation of Bonhoeffer's thinking. He began (in 1929) as a typical nationalistic German, but by the mid-1930s he had realized, through an encounter with the Jesus of the gospels, that the church transcends national and political allegiances...
</idle musing>

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