John C. Nugent

“If we’re not careful, we may gain the world and lose the church—and then, ultimately, we’ll lose the world, too. When Christians begin substituting activism for discipleship, it’s not the world that becomes endangered, but the gospel.”
― John C. Nugent, Endangered Gospel: How Fixing the World is Killing the Church

“This biblical warrant for “capital punishment” is also the grounds for its abolition in Christ. It naturally follows for Yoder that those whose faith centers on the conviction that Christ shed his own blood in the place of all capital offenders (“for the wages of sin is death,” Rom 6:23) must actively oppose the practice of capital punishment. In Yoder’s words, “Life is God’s peculiar possession, which man may not profane with impunity. Thus, the function of capital punishment in Genesis 9 is not the defense of society but the expiation of an offense against the image of God. If this be the case—and both exegetical and anthropological studies confirm strongly that it is—then the central events of the New Testament, the cross and the resurrection, are overwhelmingly relevant to this issue. The sacrifice of Christ is the end of all expiatory killing.”20”
― John C. Nugent, The Politics of Yahweh: John Howard Yoder, the Old Testament, and the People of God