Breaking God’s Heart
Sin basically consists not in breaking a set of rules but in breaking the heart of God – Anna Mow
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I got this quote from Donald Bloesch’s Theological Notebook. What I like about it is that it provides a profoundly Gospel understanding of sin, which is to say that it defines sin with respect to an immanently personal God, as opposed to a distant lawgiver.
Wrote the following comment on March 18th, 2012 at 2:26 am #
I think it speaks to a more relatable God, Which I consider a good thing.
Wrote the following comment on March 18th, 2012 at 1:26 pm #
Roger – Exactly! Having said this, however, I always want to push for some kind of synthesis (I am a synthetic kind of guy, er, uh, scratch that) and a more comprehensive vision of what I am trying to get at. So, as I see it, the Law is an expression of God’s heart, which is to say that the enduring part of the Law expresses what it is to be genuinely human, and the provisional part of the Law is about God’s redemptive economy, which finds its completion in the ministry of Jesus. So, sin is a breaking of the Law, which is itself an expression of God’s heart. But as the quote indicates, most essentially, sin is breaking God’s heart.
Wrote the following comment on March 18th, 2012 at 10:33 pm #
“The kingdom of God is within you.”