This picture, I believe, makes very good sense historically. Jesus’ critique of his contemporaries was critique from within; his summons was not to abandon Judaism and try something else, but to becom...
The risen Jesus opens up the meaning of scripture. The risen Jesus is known in the sharing of bread. The risen Jesus journeys with us, whether we know it or not. There are moments in which we do come...
The point: only a small minority of Christians and for only a brief period of time have taught biblical inerrancy and the sole authority of the Bible. So how and why has it become orthodox Christianit...
The human products of bread and wine become a means of grace, earthen vessels whereby the sacred becomes present to us. So also the Bible is sacrament, a human product whereby God becomes present to u...
The four-week period of Advent before Christmas—and the six-week period of Lent before Easter—are times of penance and life change for Christians. In our book The Last Week, we suggested that Lent was...
The coming kingdom of God was not, then, a matter of abstract ideas or timeless truths. It was not about a new sort of religion, a new spiritual experience, a new moral code (or new strength to observ...
Rather than imagining God as a personlike being out there, this concept imagines God as the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is. The universe is not separate from God, but in God. Indee...
Moreover, the longer I studied the Christian tradition, the more transparent its human origins became. Religions in general (including Christianity), it seemed to me, were manifestly cultural products...
Jesus, then, was not just a prophet announcing the kingdom. He believed that the kingdom was breaking in to Israel’s history in and through his own presence and work. This is the third layer of my his...
Jesus was offering forgiveness to all and sundry, out there on the street, without requiring that they go through the normal channels. That was his real offense.
Jesus was killed. This is one of those facts that everybody knows, but whose significance is often overlooked. He didn’t simply die; he was executed. We as Christians participate in the only major rel...
Jesus was challenging his contemporaries to live as the new covenant people, the returned-from-exile people, the people whose hearts were renewed by the word and work of the living God. Call Jesus a s...
Jesus (as well as the authors of the gospels) would have known about Rome’s policy of sending reinforcements to the city at Passover. His decision to enter the city as he did was what we would call a...
Importantly, the issue as we describe the wealthy and powerful is not whether they—in our case, the Jerusalem authorities centered in the temple—were corrupt, if by that we mean an individual failing....
I think Jesus would have said, It’s not about me. During his lifetime, he deflected attention from himself. In an illuminating passage in our earliest gospel, when a man addressed him as Good Teacher,...
Even more striking and revealing is how he interweaves sons of God twice in Romans 8:14, 19 with children of God twice in Romans 8:16, 21—and again in Romans 9:8. It is, for Paul, all about family val...
Eschatology is not, of course, about the destruction of the earth, but about its transfiguration, not about the end of the world, but about the end of evil, injustice, violence—and imperialism.
But redemption in the Bible and in Paul is not about the forgiveness of sins. Rather, it is a metaphor of liberation from bondage—from life in Egypt, from a life of slavery. The redemption that is in...
And to belove God, to center in God, has an additional crucial meaning. To belove God means to love what God loves. What does God love? The answer is in one of the most familiar Bible verses, John 3.1...
Advent and Christmas are about a new world. They are thus intrinsically about eschatology. Recall what we said about this word in Chapter 3: eschatology is about the divine transformation of our earth...