You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage. You can believe all the right things and still be miserable. You can believe all the right things and still be relatively unchanged. Belie...
Our images of God matter. Just as how we conceptualize God affects what we think the Christian life is about, so do our images of God.
The political vision of the religious right is for the most part an individualistic politics of righteousness, not a communal politics of compassion.
God wills our liberation, our exodus from Egypt. God wills our reconciliation, our return from exile. God wills our enlightenment, our seeing. God wills our forgiveness, our release from sin and guilt...
Our central problem is not sin and guilt, as it is within the monarchical model. For the Spirit model, our central problem is estrangement, whose specific meaning of separated from that to which one b...
We are to participate with God in bringing about the world promised by Christmas.
The point is not that Jesus was a good guy who accepted everybody, and thus we should do the same (though that would be good). Rather, his teachings and behavior reflect an alternative social vision....
So, is there an afterlife, and if so, what will it be like? I don't have a clue. But I am confident that the one who has buoyed us up in life will also buoy us up through death. We die into God. What...
One must die to an old way of being in order to enter a new way of being... salvation is resurrection to a new way of being here and now.
The spoken word has come to dominate many Protestant forms of worship: the words of prayers, responsive readings, Scripture, the sermon, and so forth. Yet the spoken word is perhaps the least effectiv...
The book of Proverbs makes the same point: Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor him. (14.31)
In a number of workshops, I have asked people whether they have had one or more experiences that they would identify as an experience of God and, if so, to share them in small groups. On average, 80 p...
God will not change us as individuals without our participation, and God will not change the world without our participation.
How can women be in the image of God if God cannot be imaged in female form?
For some people, the central life issue is not sin and guilt, but bondage to or victimization by one Pharaoh or another. For them, what does the message of sin and forgiveness mean? Unfortunately, it...
When I was a young college teacher in my mid-twenties, an older colleague delighted in characterizing post-Enlightenment theology as flat-tire theology—All the pneuma has gone out of it.
The image of Jesus I have sketched in the preceding chapters is quite different from the popular image of Jesus, the Jesus many of us have met before. His own self-understanding did not include thinki...
Being Christian doesn’t mean being anti-American, but it does mean that Christian identity and loyalty matter more than national identity and loyalty. When there is a conflict, Jesus is Lord.
Cumulatively, taking the pre-Easter Jesus seriously as an epiphany of God suggests a massive subversion of the monarchical model of God and the way of life (individually and socially) to which it lead...
As the biblical vision of a domination-free order, the dream of God, the kingdom of God on earth, what does a politics of compassion imply for Christian perception of and relationship to the social or...