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...
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...
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...
How can it be that God is known in only one religion—and then perhaps only in the right form of that religion?7
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...
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...
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...
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...
Righteous people are those who do what is right.