A Christian nation? No. To be Christian is to transcend nationality. The Christian community is formed from every tribe, tongue, and nation.

God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. There's never been a time when God was not like Jesus. We haven't always know this... But now we do.

If your doctrine of God doesn't look like Jesus, start over...you've made a mistake somewhere along the way.

The cleverest way to domesticate Jesus is to commandeer the gospel to endorse a nationalistic agenda.

We've organized civilization around power enforced by violence since the Bronze Age...and paid the price for it. Meanwhile Jesus waits for us to take him seriously.

The real you is calm, content, wise, and unafraid. It is only the false self that is agitated, grasping, foolish, and fearful. Jesus leads us in the way of losing our false self and finding our true self.

The cross exposes the use of violent force as a shameful practice to be renounced. Yes, Jesus has abolished war. The King of Kings won his kingdom without war. Jesus proved there is another way.

The kingdom of Christ is without coercion. (And certainly without violence!) As Christians we persuade by love, witness, Spirit, reason, rhetoric, and if need be, martyrdom, but never by force. Christ followers are called to embody the peaceable kingdom of the Lamb.

This is the problem with reading the Bible as a flat text where every passage carries the same weight of authority. In such a reading the Bible can be used to justify every kind of violence including genocide. It’s been done before.

If your theological system does not allow you to condemn genocide as always morally wrong, please pitch it and embrace the revelation of God found in Jesus Christ!