Peace on Earth: Finding the Peace in the Birth Narratives

If you prefer podcasts, this is also available on The Fourth Way podcast. Merry Christmas, everyone! We’re almost done with the Shalom series and we’ll have a bit of an interlude this week with a post about Christmas. The closest we generally get to contemplating peace during Christmastime is through singing songs such as “Silent …

Love of Enemies, Nonretaliation and Righteous Suffering as Peace

This is part of a series on Shalom The texts and keywords in this section are probably the most obvious to us as peace texts of some kind, though even then the emphasis is less on peace per se, and more on the nonviolent actions. This is all well and good, but I want to …

Jubilee and Social Justice as Peace

Before we start on this section, we need a brief recap of what jubilee was. The jubilee laws come from Leviticus 25 and were meant to keep in check power’s natural tendency to continually grow and sap from all around it. In essence, every 50 years, debts were forgiven and property was returned. Before any …

Justification and Reconciliation as Peace

Paul's letters are saturated with peace. He mentions the phrase, God of peace six times, calls Christ our peace, refers to the peace of Christ, the peace of God and peace from God. He does more than just use peace as with a theological dimension though. At least as often, he speaks of peace as …

The Kingdom of God Means Peace

For the blog I've broken the New Testament section into several parts, but the entire New Testament section is also available to listen to at The Fourth Way Podcast Throughout the gospels, in particular the synoptics, the Kingdom of God is a prominent theme. The Kingdom of God, with all its complexity and differences between …

Peace in the New Testament

For the blog I've broken the New Testament section into several parts, but the entire New Testament section is also available to listen to at The Fourth Way Podcast. For more in the Shalom series click here. In the last post we discussed what peace, or shalom, means in the Hebrew Bible. It is a …