My commitment to follow through on my choice came with a cost. I tried very hard, for years, with complete transparency, to blend together old and new—the particular Christian tradition that birthed m...
More than anything, studying the Bible with Jews dislodged my parochial thinking about God, and it’s had a lasting impact. Over time, I came to appreciate firsthand the richness and depth of that trad...
In Hebrew Exodus 24:10 says rather casually that Moses and a party of more than seventy Israelites saw the God of Israel, which is a problem because no one is actually supposed to be able to see God....
If we toss about the idea of God in the flesh as if it were just that thing we believe, we are not tuned in to the shock and even offense that John’s opening lines would have generated. Christianity i...
I need Sunday morning centered on what is transrational, the fundamental Christian mysteries of incarnation and resurrection, the very heartbeat of Christian faith. Not irrational or unworthy of discu...
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...
God seems uncomfortably touchy. It doesn’t take much to set him off to kill, plague, or otherwise physically punish these frail human vessels God has created. Swift physical retribution seems to be th...
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...
Doubt tears down the castle walls we have built, with the false security and permanence they give, and forces us outside to walk a lonely, trying, yet cleansing road. In those times, it definitely fee...
Doubt means spiritual relocation is happening. It’s God’s way of saying, Time to move on.
Christians today have more in common with the Israelites wandering through a lonely and threatening desert or exiled to a hostile land than with Paul and most other New Testament writers. The Old Test...
Belief and faith always have content—a what. But a faith that looks like what the Bible describes is rooted deeply in trust in God (rather than ourselves) and in faithfulness to God by being humbly fa...
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...
Zehr, Paul M. Biblical Criticism in the Life of the Church. Harrisonburg, VA: Herald, 1986.
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...
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...
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...
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...
Two great critiques of modernity by biblical scholars are Walter Brueggemann’s Texts Under Negotiation and Walter Wink’s The Bible in Human Transformation.
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...