A poem by Billy Collins, poet laureate of the United States, captures the ache of loss at the end of childhood. Its title is significant: On Turning Ten: The whole idea of it makes me feel like I’m co...
If, when you think of the word God, you are thinking of a reality that may or may not exist, you are not thinking of God. Tillich’s point is that the word God does not refer to a particular existing b...
Being Christian is about a relationship to the God who is mediated by the Christian tradition as sacrament. To be Christian is to live within the Christian tradition as a sacrament and let it do its t...
[S]in in popular Christianity is often understood individualistically, obscuring the reality of social sin. An emphasis upon sin most often leads to introspection about what I have done wrong. Of cour...
To shift to a voice metaphor, the gospels contain two voices: the voice of Jesus and the voice of the community. Both layers and voices are important. The former tell us about the pre-Easter Jesus; th...
Thus, in a narrower sense, the dream of God is a social and political vision of a world of justice and peace in which human beings do not hurt or destroy, oppress or exploit one another.
Thus Paul has been used to support systems of cultural conventions oppressive to more than half of the human race. No wonder slaves, women, gays and lesbians, and those who care about them have often...
The sacrifice that Christianity asks of us is not ultimately a sacrifice of the intellect.
The foundation of this way of seeing the Bible begins with the conviction that it is not the inerrant and infallible revelation of God, but the product of our religious ancestors in two ancient commun...
The emerging paradigm sees the Christian life as a life of relationship and transformation. Being Christian is not about meeting requirements for a future reward in an afterlife, and not very much abo...
So when Paul and other early Christians proclaimed Jesus is Lord (and the Son of God and the savior who brings true peace on earth), he and they were directly challenging Roman imperial theology and t...
My answer, the answer pointed to by this chapter, is that our product is salvation as the twofold transformation of ourselves and the world. Moreover, I think most people yearn for this. We yearn for...
Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart (Deut. 6:6). Serve the Lord your God with all your heart (Deut. 10:12). Incline your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel (Josh. 24:23)....
In the modern period, the alliance between Christianity and the political order continues to some extent. But even more so, the dream of God has been submerged by the individualism that characterizes...
Imagine that Christianity is about loving God. Imagine that it’s not about the self and its concerns, about what’s in it for me, whether that be a blessed afterlife or prosperity in this life. Imagine...
Humanity’s universal sin is far, far worse than those traditional vice lists cited for Greeks and Jews by Paul in Romans 1–3. It is this: we have accepted violence as civilization’s drug of choice, an...
God’s dream for us is not simply peace of mind, but peace on earth.
Faith does not mean believing in the literal-factuality of the stories regardless of how improbable they seem. Rather, faith is about something far more important. It is about our relationship with Go...
Days pass, and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. Fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightning, illumines the dark...
But prior to about the year 1600, the verb believe had a very different meaning within Christianity as well as in popular usage. It did not mean believing statements to be true; the object of the verb...