Should we be the least bit surprised when we, along with some biblical writers, find ourselves wandering beyond the words in the Bible as we think about what God is like, sensing that the God we see t...
There’s an irony: 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 Go...
The Adam story, then, is not simply about the past. It’s about Israel’s present brought into the past—even as far past as the beginning of the human drama itself.
BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS are about as certain as you can be about these things that the conquest of Canaan as the Bible describes did not happen: no mass invasion from the outside by an Israelite army,...
The Bible isn’t a cookbook—deviate from the recipe and the soufflé falls flat. It’s not an owner’s manual—with detailed and complicated step-by-step instructions for using your brand-new all-in-one ph...
The Bible isn’t a book that reflects one point of view. It is a collection of books that records a conversation—even a debate—over time.
Rounding out our list of early Christian writers is Augustine (354–430), especially his work The Literal Meaning of Genesis, where he shows, among other things, how much intellectual effort is require...
That is the lesson we learn from the Old Testament, Israel’s story. God meets the ancient Israelites as they are able to understand him—as a warrior who slays his enemies, human and divine; a deity wh...
For Christians, then, the question is not Who gets the Bible right? The question is and has always been, Who gets Jesus right? The Gospel writers and Paul couldn’t have made that any clearer.
When Christians feel crushed by such people of God, faith is exposed as something that just doesn’t work here and now. And if something doesn’t work, intellectual arguments for staying in the faith lo...
I mean, if we try to explain Jesus’s handling of his Bible in terms of how many Christians today feel the Bible ought to be read, Jesus will look like one of my college Bible students, playing free as...
Think of the resurrection as God unexpectedly going off script and bringing into the present time a bit of the future.
Rather than focusing on the badges that define our tribal identity (our church, denomination, subdenomination, doctrinal convictions, side of the aisle, whatever), a trust-centered faith will see the...
Doubt signals that this process of dying and rising is underway. Though God feels far away, at that moment God may be closer than we realize—especially if know what you believe is how we’re used to th...
If we let the Bible be the Bible, on its own terms—on God’s terms—we will see this in-fleshing God at work, not despite the challenges, the unevenness, and ancient strangeness of the Bible, but precis...
The need to explain Jesus as both surprise ending and deeply connected to Israel’s story drove the Gospel writers to do some creative reading. Sticking to what the Bible says wasn’t their goal. Talkin...
We have to die, and the choice is ours. If we don’t, we are still holding on to something. And if we are holding on, we aren’t really following. Just sort of following. Standing around. [Oh God, what...
These diverse stories of the past that we find in the Bible are not a problem to be solved. They model for us the spiritual immediacy of the present.
What drove the Bible’s storytellers to recall the past the way they did was the quest to experience God in the present, a sometimes volatile and catastrophic present. What makes the Bible God’s Word i...
Trust—not clarity, not certainty, but trust in God. And all of that poured out to the people around her.
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