Reverend Peter Gomes – author, minister, theologian and Harvard Divinity School professor – passed away yestereday at the age of 68. In his 2007 book The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, he gave voice to the danger to religion that can come from accepting worldly power and authority.
To some, the temporal triumph of the Christian community in the world is a sign of God's favor and the essential righteousness of the Christian position. The irony of the matter, though, is that whenever the Christian community gains worldly power, it nearly always looses its capacity to be the critic of the power and influence it so readily brokers.
