About? What’s salvation all about? My answer to that question now, my conviction now: it—Christianity and salvation—is about transformation this side of death. The natural effect of growing up, beginn...
We do not need to choose between them. Our understanding of Jesus’ significance is richer if we see and affirm both the historical Jesus and the canonical Jesus. Both the pre-Easter Jesus and the post...
To believe in a person is quite different from believing that a series of statements about the person are true.
Theological controversies over the centuries have sometimes been treated as if they were really important even though they were also often arcane. For instance, a Trinitarian conflict split the Wester...
The terrible truth is that our world has never established peace through victory. Victory establishes not peace, but lull. Thereafter, violence returns once again, and always worse than before. And it...
The relationship among faith, knowledge, and belief is suggested by a story involving the famous depth psychologist Carl Jung. In the last year of his life, he was interviewed for a BBC television doc...
The passion for social justice that we see in the prophets is a protest against systemic evil. Systemic evil is an important notion: it refers to the injustice built into the structures of the system...
The heaven-and-hell framework has four central elements: the afterlife, sin and forgiveness, Jesus’s dying for our sins, and believing.
That Christian faith is about belief is a rather odd notion, when you think about it. It suggests that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads— as if believing the right things is what...
Progressive Christianity is about both negation and affirmation. It rejects biblical inerrancy, literal interpretation, and the beliefs that Jesus died to pay for our sins and that Christianity is the...
Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive revelation of what a life full of God looks like. Radically centered in God and filled with the Spirit, he is the decisive disclosure and epiphany of what...
Are we among those who yearn for the coming of the kingdom of justice and peace, who seek peace through justice? Or do we, like advocates of imperial theology, seek peace through victory? Where do we...
The story of Jesus is thus a story of God and us. This does not mean, of course, that the historical Jesus was God. But because the completed story affirms that God was present in and through Jesus, t...
Individual responsibility matters, but none of us is really self-made. We are also the product of many factors beyond our control. These include genetic inheritance, affecting both health and intellig...
How we see reality and our ability to trust are connected to each other.
We learned, in the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer, that God is in heaven. But we also learned that God is everywhere—that is, omnipresent. When one combines the two, the result is panentheism. It...
Thus growth in love, growth in compassion, is the primary quality of life in the Spirit. It is also the primary criterion for distinguishing a genuine born-again experience from one that only appears...
The pre-Easter Jesus is the historical Jesus. This Jesus is a figure of the past, a finite mortal human being born around the year 4 B.C.E. In his early thirties, after one to three years of public ac...
The focus of a politics of compassion is the alleviation of suffering caused by social structures.
The first phrase affirms God so loved the world—not Christians in particular, or the elect, or the church, but the world. God’s passion is the world. Christians have often been fearful of loving the w...