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...
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...
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...
Righteous people are those who do what is right.
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...
Many Christians basically accept the modern worldview’s image of reality and then add God onto it. God is the one who created the space-time world of matter and energy as a self-contained system, set...
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)....
Jewish mystic and Christian messiah describe how I see Jesus before and after Easter. To use language from my previous chapter, I see the pre-Easter Jesus as the former and the post-Easter Jesus as th...
It is a life of deep commitment and gentle certitude. Deep commitment, because it involves one’s whole being. Gentle certitude, because it is gentle, soft, regarding particular verbal formulations of...
It had never occurred to me that what we call God could be experienced. For me, the word had referred to a being who might or might not exist, and in whom one could believe or disbelieve or about whom...
Indeed, for Christians, the unending conversation about Jesus is the most important conversation there is. He is for us the decisive revelation of God—of what can be seen of God’s character and passio...
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...
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...
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...
Critical thinking is an unavoidable part of growing up. We do not become adults without it. But in the modern world, this stage often corrodes religious belief. Modern Western ways of thinking are ver...
But then something went terribly, terribly wrong. Athens had invented a democracy, but learned that you could have a democracy or an empire, but not both at the same time for long. Rome was now about...
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...
These two visions of Christianity—one emphasizing the next world and what we must believe and do in order to get there, the other emphasizing God’s passion for the transformation of this world—are ver...
These questions can be used by individual readers and also in reading groups in which participants are invited to share their memories and thoughts. Many of them invite reflection on previous or curre...