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...
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...
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 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.
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.
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...
Eschatology is not, of course, about the destruction of the earth, but about its transfiguration, not about the end of the world, but about the end of evil, injustice, violence—and imperialism.
Christians in this country (and elsewhere) are deeply divided by different understandings of a shared language. About half (maybe more) of American Christians believe that biblical language is to be u...
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...
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...
As swimmers dare to lie face to the sky and water bears them, as hawks rest upon air and air sustains them; so would I learn to attain free fall and float into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace, knowing n...
As an epiphany of God, Jesus discloses that at the center of everything is a reality that is in love with us and wills our well-being, both as individuals and as individuals within society. As an imag...
All this means that we can add a fourth stroke to our historical portrait of Jesus. He was a first-century Jewish prophet, announcing God’s kingdom, believing that the kingdom was breaking in through...
To do Christian theology within the framework of religious pluralism and the cross-cultural study of religion. Given its Christian focus and audience, it is written primarily for Christians but also f...
Metaphor means to see as. Metaphorical language is a way of seeing. To apply this to the Bible: the Bible not only includes metaphorical language and metaphorical narratives, but may itself be thought...
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...
Thus Jesus is a metaphor of God. Indeed, for us as Christians, he is the metaphor of God. Of course, he was also a real person. As metaphor of God, Jesus discloses what God is like. We see God through...
This vision of life is deeply centered in God, the sacred. So it was for Jesus. So it is in all of the enduring religions of the world. What makes Christianity Christian is centering in God as known i...