When we speak of Jesus as the ‘Lord’, we do more than honour Him. [1] To call Jesus ‘Lord’ is also to acknowledge that He exercises divine roles and authority. One of these is that the Lord is the Creator. Another is that the Lord is exclusively the Lord Jesus Christ. Also, the Almighty is the Lord mighty to save us. We therefore acknowledge that Jesus is God, participating in divine identity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. I would like to show how the first Christians related certain Old Testament passages to their confession that Jesus is Lord and then show how this interpretation came from Jesus Himself. In the use of the Old Testament, we can find implications about Jesus’ Lordship that the title alone does not reveal. Think about the full meaning of saying, ‘Jesus is Lord’. This seems to have been a succinct way confession in the early Church that indicated someone was a Christian. In 1 Corinthians 12.3, P...
Antisemitism has become the hallmark of the tribalism of late postmodernity in the West. Christians should never be Antisemitic. They should accept Jews not on the West's new virtues of diversity, equity, and inclusion--which are actually the virtues out of which tribalism has emerged, and from this tribalism has emerged its Antisemitism. The Christian attitude toward the Jews is, instead, stated in Romans 9-11, to which I shall briefly return at the end of this essay. In the first chapter of my e-book, The Church and Western Tribalism (available on my blog’s bookshop), I describe Western tribalism in the following ways. · It vilifies and shames its enemies. · It holds to conclusions, anecdotally supported, about groups and is unwilling to reexamine them in light of other evidence. In this, it opposes racism while being itself racist. · It is n...