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...
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.
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 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.
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—...
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...
To believe in a person is quite different from believing that a series of statements about the person are true.
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 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...
The Bible’s function as sacrament is familiar to many Christians in its private devotional use. This common Christian practice involves spending time with a passage from the Bible and lingering over i...
Our culture’s secular wisdom does not affirm the reality of the Spirit; the only reality about which it is certain is the visible world of our ordinary experience. Accordingly, it looks to the materia...
Moreover, when you think about it, faith as belief is relatively impotent, relatively powerless. You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage. You can believe all the right things and...
Many have traditionally read Jesus’ sayings about judgment either in terms of the postmortem condemnation of unbelievers or of the eventual destruction of the space-time world. The first-century conte...
Jesus was not attacking Judaism but telling his fellow Jews that their moment had come and that they were in danger of missing it. He was not criticizing Jewish religion and offering a different varie...
In the United States, the central values of our culture are the three A’s: attractiveness, achievement, and affluence. For
A third reason was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter; namely, passages from letters attributed to Paul endorse slavery, subordinate women, and condemn homosexual behavior. They have been used...