When we think of strong faith as something that should be free of uncertainty or crises, I believe we have gotten wrong an important part of who God is and how the Christian life really works.
When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey. That journey was recorded over a thousand-year span of time, by different writers, with different personalitie...
Whatever we do, let’s not imagine that the Israelites were ancient versions of ourselves, maybe less well groomed, who were nice, read their Bibles daily, the kind you could invite to church and want...
What makes the Bible God’s Word isn’t its uncanny historical accuracy, as some insist, but the sacred experiences these stories point to, beyond the words themselves. Watching these ancient pilgrims w...
What could be more normal than for different people, living at different times, in different places, who wrote about the past for different reasons and to different audiences, to produce different ver...
We should linger here for a moment, for it summarizes a main theme of Paul’s letters: God’s unexpected move—Jesus’s death and resurrection—places Jews and Gentiles on equal footing with God.
We might be accustomed to thinking of our faith as a castle—where we go to be safe and protected. That’s a good place to be, and we all need that experience now and then. But what if God isn’t a helic...
To feel that our faith is threatened can easily turn to fear. But, judging from the long and varied history of thinking within Christianity, being right is elusive, and the Bible is never something we...
The root of the conflict for many Christians is not scientific or even theological, but group identity and fear of losing what it offers.
The findings of the past 150 years have made extrabiblical evidence an unavoidable conversation partner. The result is that, as perhaps never before in the history of the church, we can see how truly...
The Pentateuch was not authored out of whole cloth by a second-millennium Moses but is the end product of a complex literary process—written, oral, or both—that did not come to a close until the poste...
The Gospels are also anonymous, and the names attached to them come to us from early church tradition. Likely none was an eyewitness. The writers relied on stories of Jesus that were circulating orall...
That’s what Paul is after. Dying leads to real living—Christ who lives in me, a life so deeply connected to the divine that we no longer live, but our lives are hidden with Christ in God. Dying with J...
Struggling with faith is normal. Journey and pilgrimage have become powerful words for me for describing the life of faith. I have come to expect periods of unsettledness, uncertainty, and fear to rem...
Sticking to the Bible at every turn, like it’s an owner’s manual or book of instruction, as the way to know God misses what Paul and the rest of the New Testament writers show us again and again: the...
Readers who come to the Bible expecting something more like an accurate textbook, a more-or-less objective recalling of the past—because, surely, God wouldn’t have it any other way—are in for an uncom...
Rather than defending the Gospels against their (self-evident) diversity, we should be asking ourselves why they are different at all. Why are there four versions of Jesus’s life out there? I can thin...
Physical death is the final letting go that we all experience with loved ones and that we will ourselves experience one day. Dying now the way Jesus says to means letting go already of every comfort,...
Paul doesn’t call followers of Jesus Christians. He calls them in Christ. That isn’t the easiest thing to understand, let alone explain, but it suggests an intimacy with Jesus that defies words. That...
One cannot read Genesis literally—meaning as a literally accurate description of physical, historical reality—in view of the state of scientific knowledge today and our knowledge of ancient Near Easte...