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...
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...
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 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 heaven-and-hell framework has four central elements: the afterlife, sin and forgiveness, Jesus’s dying for our sins, and believing.
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...
Salvation Is More About This Life than an Afterlife
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...
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...
But having dominion over meant something very different from what it has often been understood to mean. It refers to the relationship between shepherd and sheep.
But believing something to be true has nothing to do with whether it is true.
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...
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...
American Christians need especially to see the political meanings of these stories, for we live in a time of the American empire.
A perception of empire is found in an early Christian acrostic. An acrostic is a word made up of the first letters of each word in a phrase or sentence. In this case, the phrase is an early Christian...