Jason Porterfield invites us all to fight like Jesus. I’m signing up!
I actually signed up for this many years ago. I think I had already signed up when I read Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus. In fact, I’m pretty sure I signed up after, or while, reading Stanley Hauerwas’s The Peaceable Kingdom.
That’s why I felt uncomfortable serving the First United Methodist Church in Killeen. I was fresh out of undergrad at Southwestern and landed my first “real” job in youth ministry in Killeen. Having grown up on and around military bases (my dad was career Navy), one might think I would feel like I was home again in a city that is almost literally surrounded by Fort Hood.
Having read Yoder and Hauerwas for years now, Perterfield’s perspective wasn’t new to me, but he presents it in a way that kept my attention through every chapter. Fight Like Jesus lays Jesus’ pacifism on Holy Week. Or, rather, pulls much of the basis of reading Jesus as a pacifist from a day-by-day walk from Palm Sunday through the resurrection.
Read this book. I don’t know if I have ever read a more helpful book than “Fight Like Jesus.” If you aren’t sure yet, try the 1st chapter here.
everyday theology 