Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Father Richard Rohr considers how the apostle Paul identified within himself the many paradoxes that he taught:
After his conversion experience and in all of his letters, Paul seems to love and understand paradox. He teaches through contrast, comparison, and the overcoming of seeming contradictions. Those who read him superficially have almost always heard one of the sides as bad and the other good, but this is largely to miss his genius as a teacher. If one has not consciously struggled, and partly reconciled, these patterns inside of oneself, I think it is almost impossible to understand Paul.
The “language of the cross” (1 Corinthians 1:18) became Paul’s “philosopher’s stone,” his own template by which to evaluate and critique the meaning of reality. It allowed him to break through what seemed like order and logic to discover a new order, which he called “the hidden wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 2:7). It could never be arrived at by mere study or intelligence, but only by surrender to communion, which he called faith.
He used a juridical word, “justification,” to describe that reunion. Now we might speak of ultimate validation, mirroring, healing, or “salvation.” But Paul knew that the only way this realignment would take place was through an ego-stripping experience that tore away our false and fabricated self and led us into a new self (Ephesians 2:15; Galatians 6:15), where all the contradictions could be absorbed and overcome. It had happened in him, and now he saw his life as “handing on this reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18), which was always through the coincidence of opposites, called the cross.
Let’s just list some of the seeming dualisms that Paul loves to play with and try to reconcile: law and grace, flesh and Spirit, the old self and the new self, Adam and Christ, weakness and strength, foolishness and wisdom, works and mercy, exclusivity and inclusivity. The list goes on. In each case, Paul is describing something that has already been reconciled in him through his life conflicts and by a Larger Love.
It’s almost as if human consciousness was not ready to see this creative tension up to now. Churches have mostly quoted Paul’s letters on the side of structure, unwilling to see his clearly anti-structure opinions, many of which are quite dangerous to a religion that is primarily trying to create order in a disordered world. But neither Jesus nor Paul is especially concerned about order, niceness, or social control. They are concerned about transformation of persons and history and about using the very disorder of people’s lives to bring them to God. That is why both of them called it good news, and why it is a surprising and joyful discovery for any of us who are honest about our state.
What we largely have in Western religion today is bad news, an attempt to superimpose an impossible order on a world that God allows to be disordered, and in which God even uses the disorder to bring us all to Love. How could we miss or avoid such utter good news?
==============
 |
| Does Just Love Silently Endure Abuse? 09/14/2026 Wayne Jacobsen discusses a mis translation of one word that distorts the Gospel and may answer some of your questions………..  You’re never too young to pick up Just Love.A mother from Australia sent me that picture. It made me laugh. No, she isn’t really reading it, but the picture made me wish I had been that old spiritually when I was introduced to a Gospel that had love and justness at its center instead of sin and shame, albeit without the pink pajamas. How much different my life would have been if I’d focused on the transformation that comes from the lived experience of the Father’s love. Yesterday, Tobie and I conducted our fourth class on How Does Love Make this Right. The topic was How Does Love Respond to Injustice? Does loving an offender mean allowing them to keep being the victim of their abuse? Does forgiveness negate the difficult consequences of someone else’s destructive behavior?These are important questions as we learn to live inside of his love, and remind us that Just Love is not a set of principles to apply to any specific situation. It’s a way of entering into the flow of God’s life through relationship, so that he can guide us through the complicated questions that arise in our lives. Of course, love making things right begins by redeeming us through whatever damage we may have suffered. We have to experience that before we can see how his love might lead us on the outside. So, don’t just run out seeking justice from others until God heals the damage done to our hearts and makes up for what others have done. That needs to be very practical and can take some time. There are obvious exceptions here. When someone’s actions are violent, illegal, and harmful to yourself or others, get away immediately. Contact law enforcement to expose the problem and protect those who are in danger. I’m writing here about more interpersonal hurts. Once we see how God is at work in us, we will begin to sense how his love can work outside of us to make things right. That’s what I love about Just Love; it isn’t just about being kind and nice to everyone, but to become part of God’s restorative justice to whatever degree the offending party will allow. It is not resubjecting ourselves to others’ abuse in the name of love, unless God asks it of us as he did Jesus in the week of his passion. But that is extremely rare, and we do it at his leading, not others telling us to, and only for a higher purpose. An eye to redemption, however, frames our love inside the desires of a just God. Love and justice come together in him, and, honestly, principles won’t guide us here. As I wrote at the outset, what we need is the leading of the Spirit. This is an invitation into a journey of love, shaping us on the inside—untwisting justice in our own hearts, so that we can be part of his justice unfolding in the world.It doesn’t just ask what would love lead me to do, but more importantly, how is his Spirit leading me in that love? He may ask you to stay in a relationship that’s painful for a larger redemption, or he might lead you away to safety so you are no longer the victim of someone else’s selfishness or anger. But whatever he asks of you, you will have the strength and courage to follow him, however he may lead. Also, we got a wonderful review a couple of weeks ago at Mike Morell.org. Here are some excerpts I especially appreciated: Tobie realized something seismic had just been confirmed: the very word English-speaking Christianity has used for five centuries to translate the heart of the Gospel is unintelligible — even repellent — to the people the Gospel was meant to reach…It makes a case that is at once scholarly and devastating in its simplicity: the Greek word dikaiosynē, translated as “righteousness” in every major English Bible, is rendered as justice in every other language — German, Afrikaans, Spanish, French, Dutch. Every single one. The English deviation traces directly to the Norman Conquest of 1066, which severed English legal vocabulary from its Germanic roots, creating a religious word — “righteousness” — that conveyed personal moral status instead of right relationship, inner purity instead of just action, individual salvation instead of communal transformation…That’s the register of this book: personal, pastoral, luminous with grace, and quietly revolutionary..Tozer sensed it. N.T. Wright and Nicholas Wolterstorff have written about it in academic papers few will ever read. Just Love brings it home — not to theologians with PhDs, but to the “plain man and woman, the insignificant, the widow and the orphan, the poor and oppressed” for whom the justness of God was always intended…What changes when you read justice instead of righteousness? Everything. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.” “Seek first the justice of God.” “The Golden Rule” becomes the Golden Life — not a rule to follow, but a love to inhabit, overflowing into the world.For the last two years, I’ve enjoyed exploring the connection between living loved and God’s passion for justice in human affairs. I find two or three situations a day that invite me to think differently about what’s going on than I have in the past. |
Two questions for reflection:
What contradiction in our own life — strength and weakness, staying and leaving, law and grace — have we tried to force a resolution to, rather than letting a Larger Love hold it unresolved?
Where have we asked God for a new law, a clear rule to follow, instead of the slower, harder call to let his Spirit lead us one situation at a time?
