Don’t want to beat a dead lamb, but let me say again that contradictions between Old Testament laws aren’t exactly an industry secret. Jewish tradition has wrestled with them since before Christianity...
Walter Brueggemann calls these parts of the Bible Israel’s countertestimony . . . This spot-on term to name the dark side of the Bible, and which calls into question Israel’s main storyline, comes fro...
Walking the path of faith means trusting God enough to let our uh-oh moments expose how we create God to fit in our thinking.
To love as God loves means loving not just others like us, but those who are not.
Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude.
Rather than simply protecting the past, our faith communities have a sacred responsibility to protect the future by actively and intentionally creating a culture of trust in God, in order to deliver t...
Rather than being quick to settle on final answers to puzzling questions, a trust-centered faith will find time to formulate wise questions that respect the mystery of God and call upon God for the co...
Paul is our guy, and we Protestants continue to expect from him clear direction about what to believe and what to do. And Paul certainly seems to oblige. He has that alluring black-and-white, decisive...
I’VE BEEN ON A JOURNEY of rediscovering the Bible and the God behind it for over thirty years and I don’t see that journey ending any time soon.
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...
Following Jesus isn’t like a burden we carry on our shoulders. It’s an internal process so radical and painful that the best way to describe it for people of that day is as the act of being bound and...
Doubting God is painful and frightening because we think we are leaving God behind, when in fact we are only leaving behind ideas about God that we are used to surrounding ourselves with—the small God...
Doubt can certainly leave us empty and frightened, but that is precisely the benefit of doubt: it exposes the folly that strong faith means you need to know what you believe, that the more faith you h...
Christ is the ultimate example of how God enters the messiness of history to save his people.
And as I write this, Romans 13:1 recently made the rounds on the American political scene to shield the administration from criticism for separating illegal immigrants from their children at the borde...
A Bible that does things like this is not a disappointing problem that has to be explained away or made excuses for, but something to be embraced with thanksgiving as a divine gift of love, as we, in...
The challenges of our day-to-day existence are sustained reminders that our life of faith simply must have its center somewhere other than in our ability to hold it together in our minds. Life is a po...
You might find yourself wondering whether all this detail is really necessary, that God could really have stopped after the Ten Commandments and not gotten into leprosy, eating pork, or how to dress a...
Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.
We can well imagine Jews feeling a bit out of their element—maybe intimidated and shamed by their own story, which began in slavery, ended in exile, and with absolutely zero contributions to philosoph...