Probably for the first time in my life I was beginning to comprehend that trust was a habit I would need to cultivate.
Rather than counting on the acquisition of knowledge to support and defend the faith, a trust-centered faith values and honors the wise—those who through experience and mature spiritual habits have ea...
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...
Testament Can Teach Us. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011. Kugel, James L. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. New York: Free Press, 2008. *———. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to...
The biblical writers were human like us, and nothing is gained by thinking otherwise. Someone might say, Well, okay, sure they were human, obviously, but the biblical writers were also inspired, direc...
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,...
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.
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.
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...
To love as God loves means loving not just others like us, but those who are not.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
When you read the Bible on its own terms, you discover that it doesn’t behave itself like a holy rulebook should.
Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.
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.
A story like the exodus story is what happens when, as I said previously, God lets his children tell the story—in ways they understand and that is packed with meaning for them.
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