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...
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...
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...
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 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 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...
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...
Jesus was telling his contemporaries that the kingdom was indeed breaking into history, but that it did not look like what they had expected.
Its meanings include: The risen Christ journeys with us, is with us, whether we know it or not. Sometimes there are moments when we do recognize this.
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...
Images of Jesus give content to what loyalty to him means. The popular picture of Jesus as one whose purpose was to proclaim truths about himself most often construes loyalty to him as insistence on t...
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...
For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in community. To put it boldly: compassion for Jesus was political.
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...