Images of Jesus give content to what loyalty to him means. The popular picture of Jesus as one whose purpose was to proclaim truths about himself most often construes loyalty to him as insistence on t...
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...
Christians in this country (and elsewhere) are deeply divided by different understandings of a shared language. About half (maybe more) of American Christians believe that biblical language is to be u...
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...
As swimmers dare to lie face to the sky and water bears them, as hawks rest upon air and air sustains them; so would I learn to attain free fall and float into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace, knowing n...
All this means that we can add a fourth stroke to our historical portrait of Jesus. He was a first-century Jewish prophet, announcing God’s kingdom, believing that the kingdom was breaking in through...
To do Christian theology within the framework of religious pluralism and the cross-cultural study of religion. Given its Christian focus and audience, it is written primarily for Christians but also f...
When we emphasize his divinity at the expense of his humanity, we lose track of the utterly remarkable human being he was.
This vision of life is deeply centered in God, the sacred. So it was for Jesus. So it is in all of the enduring religions of the world. What makes Christianity Christian is centering in God as known i...
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...
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...
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...