A faith that eats its own not only drives people out but also sends up a red flare to the rest of humanity that Christianity is just another exclusive members-only club, and that Jesus is a lingering...
Whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn’t mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers.
Looking for fights—encouraging and even creating controversy thinking that God wills it—is pathological.
In Solitude; also James Martin’s introduction to Merton and others, Becoming Who You Are), Henri Nouwen (The Inner Voice of Love), Gregory Mayers (Listen to the Desert), Rowan Williams (Tokens of Trus...
A common burden so many Christians have unwittingly carried, namely, that watching over us is God, an unstable parent, who is right off the bat harsh, vindictive, at best begrudgingly merciful, and ma...
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,...
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...
Trust like this is an affront to reason, the control our egos crave. Which is precisely the point. Trust does not work because we have captured God in our minds. It works regardless of the fact that,...
Today we don’t have a heavenly realm full of gods, but we do have a lot of banks, which means we have loads of banking options. Banks vie for our business by comparing themselves to other banks—We are...
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...
Then we have the Gospel of John, the odd man out. John’s story of Jesus is so out of step with the others that it is sometimes hard to see how he could be talking about the same person.
The period of the monarchy is not only the meat of the Old Testament narrative of Israel. It’s also the period when Israel’s grand narrative was written.
The life of Christian faith is more than agreeing with a set of beliefs about Christ, morality, or how to read the Bible. It means being so intimately connected to Christ that his crucifixion is ours,...