Michael Hardin – författare

For close to two thousand years, Christian theology has been captivated by a sacrificial rendering of the Gospel that renders God as retributive, arbitrary, and Janus-faced. In the past fifty years a non-sacrificial way of perceiving the Gospel, God, and the mission and message of Jesus has challenged this sacrificial hegemony. Now what began as a trickle in the 1960s has burst the dam and the Gospel is on a collision course with Christianity. What are some of the implications of this moment? What is the integral cohesion in a non-sacrificial theology, ethics, and spirituality? What does Christian doctrine look like if one removes retributive economies of exchange?

Knowing God? is an indictment of Protestant American Christianity in its failure to follow Jesus of Nazareth. Consumer Christianity is laid bare before the gospel and found wanting. After exposing the superstition of American Christianity, Hardin examines the gospel narrative and demonstrates that a truly Jesus-oriented approach must be non-sacrificial in all its ways. Like Jeremiah, Kierkegaard, or the early Barth, Knowing God? rings with a clarion call for followers of Jesus to ask what the Christian life looks like and is all about.

Do eschatology and peace go together? Is eschatology mostly about retribution and fear--or compassion and hope?Compassionate Eschatology brings together a group of international scholars representing a wide range of Christian traditions to address these questions. Together they make the case that Christianity''s teaching about the end times should and can center on Jesus''s message of peace and reconciliation. Offering a peace-oriented reading of the Book of Revelation and other biblical materials relevant to Christian eschatology, this book breaks new ground in its consistent message that compassion not retribution stands at the heart of the doctrine of the last things.Besides its creative treatment of biblical materials, Compassionate Eschatology also makes a distinctive contribution in how several essays engage the thought of Rene Girard and his mimetic theory. Girard''s project is shown to reinforce the biblical message of eschatological peace.