Critical thinking is an unavoidable part of growing up. We do not become adults without it. But in the modern world, this stage often corrodes religious belief. Modern Western ways of thinking are ver...
Christians also speak of the Bible as the revelation of God, indeed as the Word of God. Yet orthodox Christian theology from ancient times has affirmed that the decisive revelation of God is Jesus. Th...
Because modern critical thinking is corrosive of conventional religious beliefs, some Christians reject applying it to the Bible and Christianity. The result is fundamentalism and much of conservative...
When we emphasize his divinity at the expense of his humanity, we lose track of the utterly remarkable human being he was.
Taking the God of love and justice and the God of grace seriously has immediate implications for the Christian message. It becomes: God loves us already and has from our very beginning. The Christian...
More than half described Christians as literalistic, anti-intellectual, judgmental, self-righteous, and bigoted.
Jesus courageously kept doing what he was doing even though he knew it could have fatal consequences. So we do not think Jesus saw his purpose as dying for the sins of the world. Rather, this interpre...
In this life, a radical centering in God leads to a deepening trust that transforms the way we see and live our lives. Seeing, living, trusting, and centering are all related in complex ways. They are...
In its Lutheran form, despite the emphasis upon God’s grace, justification by grace through faith was heard as justification by faith and thus as involving a fearful form of works righteousness: the w...
In function, Jesus’s aphorisms are very much like his parables—provocative and invitational forms of speech. They provoke thought, lead people to reconsider their taken-for-granted assumptions, and in...
How can it be that God is known in only one religion—and then perhaps only in the right form of that religion?7
Christmas is not about tinsel and mistletoe or even ornaments and presents, but about what means will we use toward the end of a peace from heaven upon our earth. Or is peace on earth but a Christmas...
By the time I began college, anxiety about hell had disappeared—not because I was confident that I was saved, but because the whole package had become sufficiently uncertain that I didn’t worry about...
But Christian illiteracy is only the first part of the crisis. Even more seriously, even for those who think they speak Christian fluently, the faith itself is often misunderstood and distorted by man...
Righteous people are those who do what is right.