I’ve learned to be fine with not knowing.
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 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...
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...
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...
Doubt is divine tough love. God means to have all of us, not just the surface, going-to-church, volunteering part. Not just the part people see, but the parts so buried no one sees them. Not even us.
Anyway, we don’t need to get into all that. My point is simply, no, King David, the heavens are not telling the glory of God (Ps. 19:1)—at least not without a lot of heavy theological lifting and perh...
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...
And taking seriously the historically shaped biblical portrayal of a violent God drives us to ask for ourselves, Is this what God is like?
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...
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...
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.
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 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...
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...
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...