This book might also be seen as a Christian primer. A primer teaches us how to read. Reading is not just about learning to recognize and pronounce words, but also about how to hear and understand them...
These two visions of Christianity—one emphasizing the next world and what we must believe and do in order to get there, the other emphasizing God’s passion for the transformation of this world—are ver...
These questions can be used by individual readers and also in reading groups in which participants are invited to share their memories and thoughts. Many of them invite reflection on previous or curre...
The bad news version is the saving of some from the devouring fire that will consume the rest. The good news version is a vision of transformed people and a transformed earth filled with the glory of...
The word sacrament also has a broader meaning. In the study of religion, a sacrament is commonly defined as a mediator of the sacred, a vehicle by which God becomes present, a means through which the...
The way of Jesus is thus not a set of beliefs about Jesus. That people ever thought it was is strange, when we think about it — as if one entered new life by believing certain things to be true, or as...
The term evangelist is based on the Greek word for gospel, which means news. As evangelists, the authors of the gospels proclaimed the news about Jesus in and for their time and place. The word news s...
The sacrifice that Christianity asks of us is not ultimately a sacrifice of the intellect.
The Roman vision incarnated in the divine Augustus was peace through victory. The Christian vision incarnated in the divine Jesus was peace through justice. It is those alternatives that are at stake...
So when Paul and other early Christians proclaimed Jesus is Lord (and the Son of God and the savior who brings true peace on earth), he and they were directly challenging Roman imperial theology and t...
Rather than God being the lawgiver and judge whose requirements must be met and whose justice must be satisfied, God is the lover who yearns to be in relationship to us. Rather than sin and guilt bein...
Participatory eschatology involves a twofold affirmation: we are to do it with God, and we cannot do it without God. In St. Augustine’s brilliant aphorism, God without us will not; we without God cann...
Many Christians basically accept the modern worldview’s image of reality and then add God onto it. God is the one who created the space-time world of matter and energy as a self-contained system, set...
Jesus was telling his contemporaries that the kingdom was indeed breaking into history, but that it did not look like what they had expected.
Its meanings include: The risen Christ journeys with us, is with us, whether we know it or not. Sometimes there are moments when we do recognize this.
It had never occurred to me that what we call God could be experienced. For me, the word had referred to a being who might or might not exist, and in whom one could believe or disbelieve or about whom...
Indeed, for Christians, the unending conversation about Jesus is the most important conversation there is. He is for us the decisive revelation of God—of what can be seen of God’s character and passio...
In particular, Jesus’ clash with the Pharisees came about not because he was an antinomian, or because he believed in justification by faith while they believed in justification by works, but because...
I conclude this section with a possibly puzzling postscript on the meaning of the word literal. What is the literal meaning of a parable? Its literal meaning is its parabolic meaning. What is the lite...
Days pass, and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. Fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightning, illumines the dark...