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...
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...
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,...
God’s dream for us is not simply peace of mind, but peace on earth.
God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being.6 Notice how the language works. Where are we in relation to God? We are in God; we live in God, move in God, have our being in God. God is n...
God has always been in relationship to us, journeying with us, and yearning to be known by us.
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...
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...
Being born again is not a single intense experience, but a gradual and incremental process. Dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, dying to an old way of being and living into a...
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...
When one of the Jewish Sibylline Oracles imagines what God’s perfect world will look like on its arrival, it claims: The earth will belong equally to all, undivided by walls or fences…. Lives will be...
Two transformations are at the center of this life. For want of better language, I call them the personal and the political. The Christian life is about personal transformation into the likeness of Ch...
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 bad news version is the saving of some from the devouring fire that will consume the rest. The good news version is a vision of transformed people and a transformed earth filled with the glory of...
The way of Jesus is thus not a set of beliefs about Jesus. That people ever thought it was is strange, when we think about it — as if one entered new life by believing certain things to be true, or as...
The term evangelist is based on the Greek word for gospel, which means news. As evangelists, the authors of the gospels proclaimed the news about Jesus in and for their time and place. The word news s...
The notion that there was one right way of seeing things disappeared. This was enormously liberating, even if a bit alarming. But my curiosity was greater than my fear.