And all this talk of dying and being crucified and hidden doesn’t describe a one-time moment of conversion when we become Christians, as if that’s final. If things were only that easy—a one-time trans...
Burridge, Richard A. Four Gospels, One Jesus? A Symbolic Reading. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. *Campbell, Anthony F., and Mark A. O’Brien. Unfolding the Deuteronomistic History: Origins, Upgrades, Pr...
But doubt is not the enemy of faith, a solely destructive force that rips us away from God, a dark cloud that blocks the bright warm sun of faith. Doubt is only the enemy of faith when we equate faith...
God seems uncomfortably touchy. It doesn’t take much to set him off to kill, plague, or otherwise physically punish these frail human vessels God has created. Swift physical retribution seems to be th...
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...
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 like a prayer book and liturgy to guide me in my faith rather than falling back into my comfort zone of controlling reality with my learned and carefully chosen words, and without leaving it up to m...
I need Sunday morning centered on what is transrational, the fundamental Christian mysteries of incarnation and resurrection, the very heartbeat of Christian faith. Not irrational or unworthy of discu...
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...
If, in full conversation with the biblical and extrabiblical evidence, we can adjust our expectations about how the Bible should behave, we can begin to move beyond the impasse of the liberal/conserva...
In Hebrew Exodus 24:10 says rather casually that Moses and a party of more than seventy Israelites saw the God of Israel, which is a problem because no one is actually supposed to be able to see God....
It is only to admit that what we have cannot be explained as an early (second-millennium-BC) document written essentially by one person (Moses). Rather, the Pentateuch has a diverse compositional hist...
More than anything, studying the Bible with Jews dislodged my parochial thinking about God, and it’s had a lasting impact. Over time, I came to appreciate firsthand the richness and depth of that trad...
My commitment to follow through on my choice came with a cost. I tried very hard, for years, with complete transparency, to blend together old and new—the particular Christian tradition that birthed m...
One cannot read Genesis literally—meaning as a literally accurate description of physical, historical reality—in view of the state of scientific knowledge today and our knowledge of ancient Near Easte...
One of the great comforts of Israel’s epic is that it contains raw expressions of fierce doubt and lack of trust in God embraced by the ancient Israelites as part of their faith. I am thankful to God...
Paul doesn’t call followers of Jesus Christians. He calls them in Christ. That isn’t the easiest thing to understand, let alone explain, but it suggests an intimacy with Jesus that defies words. That...
Physical death is the final letting go that we all experience with loved ones and that we will ourselves experience one day. Dying now the way Jesus says to means letting go already of every comfort,...
Protestant church tradition developed over several centuries when Christians were not yet forced, by virtue of the culminating evidence, to see the Bible in its ancient context.
Rather than defending the Gospels against their (self-evident) diversity, we should be asking ourselves why they are different at all. Why are there four versions of Jesus’s life out there? I can thin...
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