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...
Theological objections to an emphasis on an afterlife are about how such an emphasis affects Christianity. Note the word emphasis. My claim is not that believing in an afterlife intrinsically produces...
Stories can be true without being literally and factually true.
The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the prese...
Rather than God being out there in the heights, God is known in the depths of personal experience.
To state the obvious, how we see is to a large extent the product of what we have seen.
The sixth stroke of my sketch is therefore as follows: Jesus was a first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the kingdom of God, summoning others to join him, warning of the consequence...
The guild of New Testament studies has become so used to operating with a hermeneutic of suspicion that we find ourselves trapped in our own subtleties. If two ancient writers agree about something, t...
Resurrection does not mean resumption of previous existence but entry into a different kind of existence.
How we think about God matters. It affects the credibility of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. Our concept of God can make God seem real or unreal, just as it can also make God s...
Christianity's goal is not escape from this world. It loves this world and seeks to change it for the better.
As I follow this path, I discover a Jesus who was not simply an example, even the supreme example, of a mystic or Spirit person, such as one might meet, in principle, in other cultures. I find, rather...
Empire is not intrinsically about geographical expansion and territorial acquisition. As a nation, that is not our aim. Rather, empire is about the use of superior power—military, political, and econo...
When tradition is thought to state the way things really are, it becomes the director and judge of our lives; we are, in effect, imprisoned by it. On the other hand, tradition can be understood as a p...
To see Paul positively does not mean endorsing everything he ever wrote.
The biblical vision of our amazing contradiction is that we are created in the image of God, but we live our lives outside of paradise, east of Eden, in a world of estrangement and self-preoccupation....
Jesus died for our sins has been understood. Among some Christians, it is seen as an essential doctrinal element in the Christian belief system. Seen this way, it becomes a doctrinal requirement: we a...
It is a way of being Christian in which beliefs are secondary, not primary. Christianity is a way to be followed more than it is about a set of beliefs to be believed. Practice is more important than...
God may or may not be the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but the cultural context in which we speak about God does change.
Finally, then, I conclude with an iconic image of that foundational reconciliation from the later fourth century. It is a bronze hanging lamp from the villa of the aristocratic Valerii on the Celian H...