In his talk Your Teacher Eats with Tax Collectors and Sinners: You, Cornerstone and the Mission of ACU, Dr. Richard Beck explores the tensions we face when we live out the “missional impulse.” How are we to be “in but not of” the world? His Spotlight investigates Jesus’ command that we should “desire mercy, not sacrifice” using various “ways of knowing”–from the Bible to Shakespeare to science–illustrating the skills at the heart of the Cornerstone experience: the multi-disciplinary exploration of truth and our mission in the world.
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LISTEN to Dr. Vic McCracken’s interview with Dr. Beck
Exploring Spotlight Resources
Cornerstone is a class created to introduce you to “ways of knowing,” the different strategies we use to determine what is “true.”
In his Spotlight lecture, Dr. Beck compares three “ways of knowing”:
- Faith: Using Scripture, the church and the Holy Spirit to understand God’s truth.
- Human Experience: The collective witness of the human spirit, captured in history, art, literature, and the social sciences.
- Science: The systematic use of observation used to explore the cosmos.
This list is certainly broad and incomplete but serves to introduce various approaches to the question of “truth” and how these truths might be discovered.
One of the goals we want to accomplish this semester is to demonstrate that sometimes these various “ways of knowing” are reinforcing and complementary. Dr. Beck illustrates this approach in his Spotlight, showing how the Bible, science, and the humanities might help us understand the challenge of our mission to be “in but not of” the world.
To encourage further exploration in class discussion or on the blog, dive into one of the Spotlight Resources modules before our next meeting.
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Join the Conversation
If you have a question for this week’s speaker or would like to share a conclusion of your own, please post it as a comment below. We welcome off-campus voices to the public Cornerstone dialogue as long as they are respectful and contribute meaningfully to these curricular discussions. See the ACU Blogs Terms of Use or About Cornerstone for more information.
Spotlight Resources
The Morality of Liberals and Conservatives
Biography
Dr. Richard Beck is a professor of psychology, a researcher in the psychology of religion, and a blogger whose wide-ranging interests include Orthodox Iconography and the Theology of Calvin and Hobbes.
7 responses to “Cornerstone and the ACU Mission”
I think it is possible that hate the sin but love the sinner. if the sinner is our family, we must love them. And the bible said love our neighbor as ourselves, so we can do it. But as we all know, it will be really hard. it is difficult to separate their action and the people.
Hating the sin but loving the sinner is usually a pretty complicated topic. In some situations when the sinner is a person you don’t know, it is easy to critisize their actions and tell them they are wrong. However, when the sinner becomes someone close to us it is hard to accept their wrong-doing and it is hard to love them just as much as we did before.
I hate the sin but most certainly not the sinner because that would and could be like hating yourself or being a hypocrite without knowing if you reason it out, because we all sin everyday, whether it is lying, or judging peoples actions. It is possible to hate the sin and love the sinner, after all christ did the same and still does the same for us
hate the sin, but love the sinner, it is hard to do, but i think this is what we are supposed to do. i think this includes the meaning of ”love your neighbor”.
Even if there is sin in someone, we should not forget keep loving someone. I think this is not easy,but what we can do for the first time is just understanding what someone did. Even though what he did is sin, we still need to know about it.
In my idea, I think every sinner is often sympathy,they have their personal reason to be a sinner, the sin is hard to be inextinguishable,every country has sinners, because it is hard to make everybody satisfied with the society. If the world have make everyone is equal. The crime will be disappear.So we need
understand sinners.
Great presentation from Dr. Beck. It helped me understand on a more spiritual level to why Jesus was condemned and mocked. It also helped me understand why some people seem to show no mercy to others. I agree with John Kearn’s response to the fact that we are all sinners and we all fall short of the glory of God. And we should not judge a person solely by their actions. Just as we were forgiven by grace and mercy, we must forgive others.