In case you are wondering, my decision to follow a plant-based diet comes down to how I treat God’s creation—animals, humans, and the earth. I am a plant based vegetarian because of my belief in the Bible.
We talk about coming to faith in Jesus and individually becoming a new creation, but we rarely take this “whole creation” commission seriously by becoming activists for God’s new creation.
Every day, we vote for the world we want to live in through the choices we make. Picking up the fragments and living within our means are good choices.
I vividly remember the day my father became a committed Christian. I helped him remove all the bottles of alcohol from the entertainment bar in our basement, and then we dumped them onto the ground in the backyard. I was a young boy, but that moment with him made a deep impression on me.
I long for a theology of divine compassion and love in this world. God cares for us deeply, but His compassion isn’t for us alone.
As a vegetarian, what do I eat for Thanksgiving? Our family table is spread with a variety of delicious and flavorful dishes
Before terms such as social justice existed, God laid down the Sabbath texts that include green ecology laws as well as commands to care for the poor, not oppress the sojourner, and treat animals equally on the Sabbath. You don’t have to accept liberal theology to validate these ideas. God wants us to be known for our acts of kindness and healing, not our individual politics.
“Do no harm. Do all the good you can. Stay in love with God.” — John Wesley
As Wendell Berry says, “Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation” (The Body and the Earth, p. 99).
For centuries, Protestants have championed Martin Luther’s legacy of justification by grace through faith, not works. Habakkuk is the prophetic context from which Paul speaks in Romans of the right-making initiative that comes from God, yet it is often proclaimed from weekly pulpits in unbalanced ways that fail to connect to God’s work of justifying and righting all creation.
Theological InTents 