Calvin's Refugees: Remembering Christ as Fugitive

August 10, 2016 by Julie Canlis

Continued from Page 1

The influx of refugees today is both threat and opportunity, but for Christians in North America in particular, the greater threat is that we forget the context from which we came. We have a power and position that we cannot even begin to understand (but which would have been called idolatry by our Reformation ancestors fleeing the easy power and unacknowledged position of their contemporaries). We hold onto doctrines which served a pastoral crisis five hundred years ago, but which now could be guilty of hardening our hearts.

Calvin is the only reformer known to have painted Christ as a fugitive, traveling with Christians through their own experience of wilderness and exile. Along with the reformers of Geneva, and the Israelites of the Old Testament, we have the opportunity to practice — rather than distort — the command that is our scriptural heritage "love the stranger; for you [yourselves] were strangers."

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8/10/2016 4:00:00 AM

Immigration and Refugees

Public Square

Evangelicalism

Geneva

History

John Calvin

Progressive Christianity

Sacred Texts

Christianity

Roman Catholicism

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