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
I am convinced that salvation in the biblical tradition has to do primarily with this life.
His own self-understanding did not include thinking and speaking of himself as the Son of God whose historical intention or purpose was to die for the sins of the world, and his message was not about...
Compassion in the Bible has rich resonances of meaning. It is linguistically related to the Hebrew and Aramaic word for womb and sometimes refers to what a mother feels for the children of her womb.5...
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...
The Bible is a human product: it tells us how our religious ancestors saw things, not how God sees things.
A new teaching appointment required that I become familiar with mysticism in Christianity and other religions. That’s when I realized that these were mystical experiences. Especially important was Wil...
[I]n addition to being a Spirit person, healer, and wisdom teacher, Jesus was a social prophet. There was passion in his language. Many of his sayings (as well as actions) challenged the domination sy...
When we read Paul, we are reading somebody else’s mail—and unless we know the situation being addressed, his letters can be quite opaque...It is wise to remember that when we are reading letters never...
We can now see that the fundamental difference between those divergent visions of earth’s final kingdom is not about ends, but about means. The imperial kingdom of Rome—and this may indeed apply to an...
The pre-Easter Jesus is dead and gone; he’s nowhere anymore. This statement does not deny Easter in any way, but simply recognizes that the corpuscular Jesus, the flesh-and-blood Jesus, is a figure of...
The phrase kingdom of God (and such similar reverential phrases as kingdom of heaven) denoted, not a place where God ruled, but rather the fact that God ruled—or, rather, that he soon would rule, beca...
The notions of biblical infallibility and inerrancy first appeared in the 1600s, and became insistently affirmed by some Protestants only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The United States over the last thirty years has seen a growing gap - indeed, a deepening gulf - between rich and poor. The gap is significantly greater than in any other developed nation. Moreover, t...
The Politics of the Bible The key to seeing the political passion of the Bible is hearing and understanding its primary voices in their ancient historical contexts. These contexts are not only literar...