Doing the best as we can to figure out life, to discern how or if a certain proverb applies right here and now, is not an act of disloyalty toward God, rebellion against God’s clear rulebook for life....
Doubt is sacred. Doubt is God’s instrument, will arrive in God’s time, and will come from unexpected places—places out of your control. And when it does, resist the fight-or-flight impulse. Pass throu...
Doubt strips away distraction so we can see more clearly the inadequacies of whom we think God is and move us from the foolishness of thinking that our god is the God.
I find it strangely comforting that walking the path of Christian faith means being confronted moment by moment with what is counterintuitive and ultimately beyond my comprehension to understand or ar...
I will use the conventional Christian term Old Testament when talking about the sacred writings of the ancient Israelites—a. k.a. the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, an acronym for the three sections of the J...
It is so easy to slip into right thinking mode—that we have arrived at full faith. We know what church God goes to, what Bible translation God prefers, how God votes, what movies God watches, and what...
I’ve learned to be fine with not knowing.
The deeper problem here is the unspoken need for our thinking about God to be right in order to have a joyful, freeing, healing, and meaningful faith. The problem is trusting our beliefs rather than t...
Two great critiques of modernity by biblical scholars are Walter Brueggemann’s Texts Under Negotiation and Walter Wink’s The Bible in Human Transformation.
We have practically been conditioned to expect God to be our helicopter parent. And if for some reason we don’t run to God to solve every little problem, from finding our car keys to deciding on color...
We’re so crucified, in fact, that we read elsewhere, You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). Our lives are hidden—strong language, like we’re not even in the pictur...
What is true of the Law is also true of the Bible generally. The Bible (both Old and New Testaments) exhibits this same characteristic of the sacred past being changed, adapted, rethought, and rewritt...
Without its unwavering commitment to adaptation over time, the Bible would have died a quick death over two thousand years ago. Its existence as a source of spiritual truth that transcends specific ti...
Zehr, Paul M. Biblical Criticism in the Life of the Church. Harrisonburg, VA: Herald, 1986.
A common burden so many Christians have unwittingly carried, namely, that watching over us is God, an unstable parent, who is right off the bat harsh, vindictive, at best begrudgingly merciful, and ma...
Looking for fights—encouraging and even creating controversy thinking that God wills it—is pathological.
The passionate defense of the Bible as a history book among the more conservative wings of Christianity, despite intentions, isn’t really an act of submission to God; it is making God submit to us. In...
They introduced me to extended communities of faith through writers I had never heard of before . . . Along with the writings of Gerald May and Thomas Keating, whom I had not known before, I was encou...
A faith that rests on knowing, where you have to know what you believe in order to have faith, is disaster upon disaster waiting to happen. It values too highly our mental abilities. All it takes to r...
All attempts to put the past into words are interpretations of the past, not straight history. There is no such thing. Anywhere. Including the Bible.
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