It is only to admit that what we have cannot be explained as an early (second-millennium-BC) document written essentially by one person (Moses). Rather, the Pentateuch has a diverse compositional hist...
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...
I feel it is part of the mystery of faith that things normally do not line up entirely, and so when they don’t, it is not a signal to me that the journey is at an end but that I am still on it. As I r...
God adopted Abraham as the forefather of a new people, and in doing so he also adopted the mythic categories within which Abraham—and everyone else—thought. But God did not simply leave Abraham in his...
Dying is the normal mode of Christian existence, a pattern of life, what followers of Jesus are to do not just once but every day, every moment. It is certainly not a problem to be fixed so we can ret...
Doubt signals not God’s death but the need for our own—to die to the theology we hold to with clenched fists. Our first creeping feelings of doubt are like the distant toll of a graveyard chapel, aler...
Doubt is what being cornered by our thinking looks like. Doubt happens when needing to be certain has run its course.
Doubt is powerful. It can do things spiritually that must be done that we would never do on our own. Doubt has a way of forcing our hand and confronting us with the challenge of deeper trust in God, r...
Another dynamic at work here is how friends, family, and church members would handle it if they knew what you were thinking. Feeling judged and banished is a common story among those who take a risk t...
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.
A noncontextual reading of Scripture is not only methodologically arbitrary but also theologically problematic. It fails to grasp in its entirety a foundational principle of theology that informs not...
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...
That trust means letting go of the need to know, of the need to be certain. And a long and honored Christian practice, diverse as it is, already existed that understood that process.
You get the feeling from the Bible that being unsettled is almost a normal part of the process. Not that we should go looking for it-- it will find us soon enough-- but struggling in some way seems li...
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...
Wisdom, in other words, was not an add-on, but was always central for obeying any law in the Bible. Laws, once we begin thinking about what they mean and how they are to be obeyed, actually push us to...
Whether we are aware of it or not, behind our religious deliberations, in one form or another, we are really asking a deeply foundational question, What kind of God do I believe in, really? This is no...
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...