It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so...
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...
I definitely get where these questions are coming from, and remember: I don’t think knowing or seeking to think correctly about God is wrong. Not at all. The problem is preoccupation with correct thin...
I am not trying to offer a cheap apologetic for the resurrection of Christ; accepting the resurrection of Christ is truly a matter of faith.
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...
Judging by how the Bible actually behaves—God did not design scripture to be a hushed afternoon in an oak-paneled library. Instead, God has invited us to participate in a wrestling match, a forum for...
With all due respect to Israel’s primo king, David and I are not on the same page here. I’m more with the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, who lived when modern science was coming into i...
Trust does not cancel our mind but circumscribes it and tames it—and so we do not succumb to fretting or anxious thoughts of being unsure.
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...
In 1975 the Jesuit philosopher John Kavanaugh . . . For the dialogue between Kavanaugh and Mother Teresa, see Brennan Manning’s Ruthless Trust. An account of Mother Teresa’s journey in a collection of...
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...
I think of Christians who, having been raised to read the Genesis creation story as literal science and history, leave for college, watch the History Channel, or log onto the internet, and find out th...
Faith like this does not come easily for many of us, and often it can only emerge at the tail end of difficult and trying experiences. For it is in those moments that we come to realize how little we...
Doubt is God’s way of helping us not go there, though the road may be very hard and long.
Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.
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...
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.
One cannot have contentment in the Christian life without the darkness. Dying is the only path to resurrection, and that is the only way of knowing God. There is no shortcut. Jesus himself is our mode...
Of course, we all know that dying, rising again, Christ in me, hidden in God, seated in heaven are metaphors—the use of common language to grasp the uncommon, a reality too deep and thick for conventi...
Doubt is God’s instrument, will arrive in God’s time, and will come from unexpected places—places out of your control. And when it does, resist the fight-or-flight impulse. Pass through it—patiently,...