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 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...
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’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 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...
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...
The spiritual disconnection many feel today stems precisely from expecting (or being told to expect) the Bible to be holy, perfect, and clear, when in fact after reading it they find it to be morally...
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...
The darkness does us a favor by exposing control as an illusion. When everything is removed, Where can I take back some control here? eventually ceases being the active question and is replaced with a...
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...
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...
I’ve learned to accept this paradox: a holy book that more often than not doesn’t act very much like you’d expect it, but more like a book written two thousand to three thousand years ago would act. I...
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...
In the New Testament, God's steadfast love and faithfulness are seen, not in an act of deliverance from foreign enemies, but in sending the Son and raising Him from the dead to enact a global rescue m...
Here is another strategy for the sentence completion exercise: Sure, Jesus talks about loving your enemies, but Jesus also talks about throwing sinners into hell to burn forever. Since eternal damnati...
Getting there is all about dying, and each cycle of dying and rising we come to in our lives brings us, I believe, to greater insight into our deep selves, where Christ lives in us and our lives are h...