The domination system, understood as something much larger than the Roman governor and the temple aristocracy, is responsible for the death of Jesus. In words attributed to Paul, God through Jesus dis...
The Bible—human in origin, sacred in status and function—is both metaphor and sacrament. As metaphor, it is a way of seeing—a way of seeing God and our life with God. As sacrament, it is a way that Go...
[W]e pray that [this domination-free order] - God’s kingdom - might come on earth every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. But we often mis...
So the issue is not character flaws among the elites. The issue, rather, is a system in which some people sleep on beds made of ivory while others end up being sold for the price of a pair of sandals.
Salvation Is More About This Life than an Afterlife
Other prophets, other messiahs, came and went in Jesus’ day. Routinely, they died violently at the hands of the pagan enemy. Their movements either died with them, sometimes literally, or transformed...
One scenario begins by imagining that Jesus heals somebody in a village. What is the likely response, beyond amazement and gratitude? He (and those with him) would be invited to a meal. It is the clas...
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...
I propose, then, a no-holds-barred history on the one hand and a no-holds-barred faith on the other. This, I believe, is to live in the uncomfortable real world, where such things do not shout challen...
I have been told that the German novelist Thomas Mann defined a myth (a particular kind of metaphorical narrative) as a story about the way things never were, but always are. So, is a myth true? Liter...
Growth in faith as trust casts out anxiety. Who of us would not want a life with less anxiety, to say nothing of an anxiety-free life? If we were not anxious, can you imagine how free we would be, how...
Fundamentalism itself—whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim—is modern. It is a reaction to modern culture.7 Christian fundamentalism as an identifiable religious movement originated early in the twenti...
Do you mean, do I believe that Jesus died for our sins? She said, Yes. I then explained, as I have here, that historically, no, I don’t think that Jesus literally died for our sins. I don’t think he t...
But Easter means that the powers of this world do not have the last word.
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...
52. See Sandra M. Schneiders’s interview on the multiplicity and metaphoricity of images for God in the Bible: God Is More than Two Men and a Bird, U.S. Catholic, May 1990, pp. 20-27. I find her titl...
To use language from Frederick Buechner, we live our lives from the outside in rather than from the inside out.24 Our fall into exile is very deep. The biblical picture of the human condition is bleak...
The Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as God, the risen living Christ, or the Spirit. And a Christian is on...
It is important that children not be taught in such a way that they will later need to unlearn many things. We
An introduction to Christian pluralism and the intellectual riches of the Christian tradition, but also to intellectual pluralism. I realized that there were no definitely settled ways of seeing life—...