Abstract
In the middle of her wonderful, difficult book, By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine,1 Ellen Charry works through the Sermon on the Mount. After a blessed beginning with the Beatitudes, Jesus launches into a list of seemingly extravagant ethical demands on such matters as divorce, vengeance, and retaliation. Any sense of blessedness that we might feel at the beginning of his sermon dissipates as Jesus condemns lust of the heart, evil in the eye, anger, and other perfectly normal human emotions. I take some satisfaction in having steered clear of divorce, but the roving eye and the lustful heart is me all over. What does Charry make of such searing divine scrutiny? She concludes, “The rhetoric aims at making the hearers uncomfortable.”
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Notes
Ellen Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 ).
Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity ( New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003 ), 5.
Richard John Neuhaus, “In Time of War,” First Things 118 (December 2001): 11–17.
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© 2007 Michael G. Long and Tracy Wenger Sadd
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Willimon, W.H. (2007). Can Christians Be Patriots?. In: Long, M.G., Sadd, T.W. (eds) God and Country?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07203-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07203-0_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-73682-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-07203-0
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