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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
To affirm Jesus is the sacrifice for sin was to deny the temple’s claim to have a monopoly on forgiveness and access to God. It was an antitemple statement. Using the metaphor of sacrifice, it subvert...
The spirit of industrial society—a way of living organized around production and consumption.7 Our modern preoccupation with producing and consuming leads us to live on the surface level of reality an...
Recognize that labels risk becoming stereotypes and caricatures; indeed, the difference between label and libel is a single letter. Yet they can be useful and even necessary shorthand for naming diffe...
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...
A worldwide flood destroyed all life on earth about five thousand years ago requires denying an immense amount of generally accepted knowledge—from astronomy, physics, geology, paleontology, anthropol...
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...
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.
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.
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 contemporary author Frederick Buechner writes powerfully about the way God speaks to us in the events of our lives: Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what ha...
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)....