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...
When you read the Bible on its own terms, you discover that it doesn’t behave itself like a holy rulebook should.
We get something out of them only by wrestling with their historical particularity (as some put it) and then doing the hard work of accepting the sacred responsibility of discerning how all of that wo...
We do not honor the Lord nor do we uphold the gospel by playing make-believe. Neither are those who engage the kinds of issues discussed in this book necessarily on the slippery slope to unbelief. Our...
We can’t get our minds around God. I don’t think the Christian faith is fundamentally rational, by which I mean it cannot be captured fully by our rational faculties—and in fact, more often than not,...
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...
Watching how the biblical writers looked at faith as trust rather than certainty helps us through our inevitable uh-oh moments from a different perspective. These moments are not proof that faith does...
Trusting God even when we can’t or don’t want to because nothing makes sense—especially then—is freedom, freedom from the pressure of needing to be certain when certainty has left us. Choosing to trus...
Trust your experiences, your God moments. They don’t work as intellectual arguments for God, but that’s exactly the point: intellectual arguments aren’t enough, and wanting them to be so sooner or lat...
To love as God loves means loving not just others like us, but those who are not.
This is extremely significant. Knowing something of when the Pentateuch came to be, even generally, affects our understanding of why it was produced in the first place—which is the entire reason why w...
Thinking of the Bible as shifting and moving may feel spiritually risky, bordering on heretical, but it isn’t. Sermons, Bible study materials, prayer books, and the like adapt the ancient words for mo...
These first seven books are Israel’s stories of their deep past, or origins stories as they are sometimes called. They don’t exist for entertainment or for idle curiosities about the past (and definit...
These ancient writers had an adequate understanding of God for them in their time, but not for all time—and if we take that to heart, we will actually be in a better position to respect these ancient...
So let me say it in a way that the ancient Israelites couldn’t: when we are in despair or fear and God is as far away from us as the most distant star in the universe, we are at that moment with Chris...
Perhaps her long dark night fueled her life, where she kept moving anyway, as an act of trust so deep it cannot be rationally explained—and indeed would look foolish if anyone tried. And the result wa...
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.
If we toss about the idea of God in the flesh as if it were just that thing we believe, we are not tuned in to the shock and even offense that John’s opening lines would have generated. Christianity i...
I feel that if we do not engage Scripture with future believers in mind, we will unwittingly erect unnecessary and tragic obstacles to belief. Part of what drives this book is my concern to help preve...
I believe that the Bible does not model a faith that depends on certainty for the simple fact that the Bible does not provide that kind of certainty. Rather, in all its messy diversity, the Bible mode...