[The Lord's Supper teaches that] Rituals are good, and they are instituted and used by God to 'connect' his people with him. We learn through ritual that the church is not just made up of individuals,...
No attempt should be made to reconcile Yahweh's hardening of Pharaoh's heart (plagues 6,8,9,10) with statements in the other plagues that Pharaoh hardened his own heart.The tension cannot be resolved...
Grace grows best in winter.
If there is any cure for thinking of the Bible as a once-told-forever-binding source of information about God and his people, Paul is it. For
•a faith that remains open to the ever-moving Spirit and new possibilities, rather than chaining the Spirit to our past •a faith that welcomes opportunities to think critically and reflectively on h...
If this Jesus is God’s answer, what is the question? Paul eventually came to the conclusion that God was answering a question that gets at the core of not simply the Jewish drama, but the human drama,...
I can choose to trust God with childlike trust regardless of how certain I might feel.
The bottom line is that for Wellhausen and many other biblical scholars before and since, the Pentateuch as we know it (an important qualification) was not completed until the postexilic period (after...
Lord, help me let go of control. Help me die. Help me trust.
When we grab hold of correct thinking for dear life, when we refuse to let go because we think that doing so means letting go of God, when we dig in our heels and stay firmly planted even when we sens...
A relationship based on trust means not walking on eggshells, but talking openly, honestly, with no hint of passive-aggressiveness or any of the other dysfunctional manipulative tactics we tend to imp...
When knowing what you believe is the nonnegotiable center of true faith, questions and critical self-examination pose a threat.
None of these modern adaptations is in the Bible, and yet even the most committed rulebook Bible readers out there wind up adapting what the Bible says, because we have to—if we want that ancient text...
Seeing the similarities between these two stories should discourage us from expecting the Adam story to contribute to contemporary scientific debates about human origins (let alone guide those debates...
I still think and talk about what I think God is like, but I’ve hopefully learned (feel free to keep me honest here, people) that being right and winning isn’t the endgame here. Loving as God loves is...
Being saved by God is an ongoing process of growth and transformation, of dying and rising, of being conformed to the image of his [God’s] Son, as Paul puts it (Romans 8:29). Following Jesus means exp...
Our experiences of God matter—those sacred moments that defy the very rational capabilities we are so keen to rely on.
Think of it this way: the same wisdom that was with God when God ordered creation (Gen. 1) is available to us as we seek to order the chaos of our lives.
God doesn’t change, but God—being God—is never fully captured by our perceptions. As people continue to live and breathe and experience life, how they see God changes too.
We are all culturally embedded creatures—we can never untangle ourselves from our here and now. We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and...
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