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.
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 focus of a politics of compassion is the alleviation of suffering caused by social structures.
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...
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...
Biblical inerrancy and the absolute authority of the Bible are thus a post-Reformation Protestant development. The first time the Bible was described as inerrant and infallible was in a book of Protes...
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...
The Bible is a human product: it tells us how our religious ancestors saw things, not how God sees things.
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...
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 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 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...
Roman imperial theology is the oppositional context for much of early Christian language about Jesus. The gospels, Paul’s letters, and the other New Testament writings use the language of imperial the...
In the United States, the central values of our culture are the three A’s: attractiveness, achievement, and affluence. For
But believing something to be true has nothing to do with whether it is true.
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...