Christianity is not about “right beliefs.” It is about a change of heart. It is about the transformation of ourselves at that deep level that shapes our vision,... our commitment,... and our values.
Compassion and justice are the primary ethical fruits of the Christian life. from The Heart of Christianity
I think Jesus would have said, "It's not about me." During his lifetime, he deflected attention from himself. In an illuminating passage in our earliest gospel, when a man addressed him as "Good Teacher," Jesus responded with, "Why do you call me good? No one is good...
The metaphor of rebirth, being born of the Spirit, is an image of radical transformation. An old life has been left behind, and a new life has begun. It has a number of metaphorical equivalents in the New Testament. In Paul, dying and rising with Christ, being...
To paraphrase William Sloane Coffin, a contemporary author and activist for us as Christians, God is defined by Jesus, but not confined to Jesus. To paraphrase Krister Stendahl, a New Testament scholar, former dean of Harvard Divinity School, and bishop of the Church...
Salvation is personal, but this hardly needs emphasis... What does need emphasis is that Salvation in the Bible is also social. Ancient Israel's story is a story of the creation of a new people, a nation, a community. Salvation is about life together. Salvation is...
The metaphor of blindness and seeing is not only prominent in the teaching of Jesus, but also found in stories about his giving sight to blind people. There are three, two in Mark and one in John. They clearly have a metaphorical meaning, even as one or more may well...
For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue [though it was indeed that]: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in the community. To put it boldly: Jesus was political. He directly and repeatedly challenged the dominant...
Life is short and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. So be swift to love. Make haste to be kind.
So there is a powerful personal meaning to Good Friday and Easter. The followers of Jesus are invited into the journey that leads through death to new life. Personal transformation is utterly important. Without it, we remain within the world of our socialization, a...