Readers who come to the Bible expecting something more like an accurate textbook, a more-or-less objective recalling of the past—because, surely, God wouldn’t have it any other way—are in for an uncom...
Sticking to the Bible at every turn, like it’s an owner’s manual or book of instruction, as the way to know God misses what Paul and the rest of the New Testament writers show us again and again: the...
Struggling with faith is normal. Journey and pilgrimage have become powerful words for me for describing the life of faith. I have come to expect periods of unsettledness, uncertainty, and fear to rem...
That’s what Paul is after. Dying leads to real living—Christ who lives in me, a life so deeply connected to the divine that we no longer live, but our lives are hidden with Christ in God. Dying with J...
The Bible shows us that obedience to God is not about cutting and pasting the Bible over our lives, but seeking the path of wisdom—holding the sacred book in one hand and ourselves, our communities of...
The Bible—from back to front—is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time.
The Creator is being reimagined all the time and can be reimagined through the lens of any culture, of any time and place. No one culture, and certainly not the (largely white male affluent) Western c...
The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012. *Goldingay, John. Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids:...
The Gospels are also anonymous, and the names attached to them come to us from early church tradition. Likely none was an eyewitness. The writers relied on stories of Jesus that were circulating orall...
The Pentateuch was not authored out of whole cloth by a second-millennium Moses but is the end product of a complex literary process—written, oral, or both—that did not come to a close until the poste...
The findings of the past 150 years have made extrabiblical evidence an unavoidable conversation partner. The result is that, as perhaps never before in the history of the church, we can see how truly...
The root of the conflict for many Christians is not scientific or even theological, but group identity and fear of losing what it offers.
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...
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...
Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude.
To feel that our faith is threatened can easily turn to fear. But, judging from the long and varied history of thinking within Christianity, being right is elusive, and the Bible is never something we...
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,...
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...
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 might be accustomed to thinking of our faith as a castle—where we go to be safe and protected. That’s a good place to be, and we all need that experience now and then. But what if God isn’t a helic...
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