At the very heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of reconciliation. In the broken world we live in, nothing could be more relevant and more necessary than this Christian message of reconciliation. This course introduces students to the significance of the concept of reconciliation to enable them grasp the force, the form, and the fruits of God’s saving action for human beings in Christ. It deals with the issue of reconciliation as a new way of life for the world.
Christians are called to be a healing and reconciling community. This course benefits students in terms of the knowledge they gain which exposes them to the reality that in their future ministry of reconciliation they need to remember that reconciliation is theologically broad extending between God and human, among human beings and of the cosmos.
This course is important in that it helps students understand both reconciliation as central concerns for Christian believers and various sources of theological reflection on various concerns ranging from, but not limited to, judgment and forgiveness to reconciliation and restoration, and how this can be applied in the modern world.
Within the biblical framework, where believers are expressly summoned to forego retribution or retaliation in favor of forgiveness and reconciliation and to leave issues of ultimate justice to God, by reflecting on some selected biblical passages like 2 Corinthians 5:16-6:13, Matthew 18 and Ephesians 2, this course is founded on a Biblical larger vision of God’s reconciliation in Christ, that is Jesus’ life, death and resurrection ground.
The course prepares students to become ambassadors of reconciliation as they join the practice of following the crucified Christ, where the central image is God in Jesus on the cross, opening God’s arms to embrace sinful humanity.
Given the fact that we now live in a violent society, this course enables students to apply the various principles found in diverse approaches to reconciliation in a wider contextual Christian discourse of reconciliation.
This course helps students understand God and his reconciliation mission in today’s environment of complexity of cultures, their fragility as well as their resilient character. They also discover the richness of profound sharing of the lives of people and it helps them make their faith come together with culture for in their community, people are not understood aside from their cultural locations informed by Jesus’ life and teaching, drawing on the traditions and practices of radical Christian discipleship.
This course gives students the practical tools and insights to understand and faithfully engage in practical implications of Jesus’ life and death in the work of reconciliation by sharing God’s unchanging desire for reconciliation, a constitutive of being a true disciple of Jesus and being sincere members as they enter into the field of bringing reconciliation to the communities they will serve.
Students studying this course taste the goodness of God and know that He is at work in our world transforming, turning hopeless and evil situations into good. They discover that reconciliation is not our achievement but the work of God.
