Friday, February 22, 2008

Forgive

I just noticed that the Lord’s prayer has only two commands. Implicitly, we’re commanded to pray it. Explicitly, it tells us to forgive our “debtors” or “those who have trespassed against us.” The rest of the prayer mostly asks God to do things.

It seems to me more and more that the Christian faith is by-and-large about what God does and only minimally about what we do.

2 comments:

Jeff said...

The whole Jesus thing notwithstanding, that's pretty much the main difference between Christianity and Judaism.

Though Catholics might disagree with you.

Ρωμανός ~ Romanós said...

Cleverly put, Jeff!

Still, the Abrahamic faith of both Jews and Christians is still built on a partnership between God and man, that is, on the covenant. As we move from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity to Roman Catholicism and finally to Evangelical Christianity in all its forms, the border between what God does and what we do in response moves decidedly towards us humans, till in some extreme forms like Monergism, man is said to be completely incapable of doing anything good at all.

Sometimes I wonder if it matters at all what we think. In the end will it be possible to divide between us who did what in the process of the redemption of the world?