As we see our culture move farther and farther from biblical principles, I’d like to recommend Dr. Barry Corey’s book, Love Kindness, (2016, Tyndall House Publishers). Dr. Corey is the president of Biola University.
He notes that Christians, and especially American Christians have become combative in recent years battling the cultural drift. “The ‘culture wars’”, he says, “have done little to change our society, and we’ve lost many if not all these wars. As a result, the church too often is marginalized and mocked, and increasingly people are viewing the Bible as just as intolerable as our aggressive tactics.”
Corey proposes kindness instead. “To be Christian, kindness must shape us and define us. But this powerful virtue seems to be characterizing us less and not more. We have lost an understanding of the power of kindness, mistakenly dismissing it as fluff or flat. Kindness needs to be rediscovered.”
The kindness that he proposes is not to be confused with niceness, which just goes along with the flow with an equally soft core of softness in what it accepts anything that comes along.
“Kindness,” he says, “is fierce, never to be mistaken for niceness.” … “Kindness is the way of firm centers and soft edges.” It’s not the hardness of firm centers and hard edges, or the weakness of spongy centers and soft edges. Corey’s book is “an attempt to explain what this means – not so much to define as to describe it as I’ve seen it in different people in different settings.”
I plan to re-read it as encourage other Christ followers consider it.
Because He lives,
Gary