Although taking the risk of openness to new experiences with God can be scary, we will find the resulting growth in faith rewarding and exhilarating. The commandment against worshiping idols includes more than physical statues. We create an idol when we become set in...
I think we are experiencing a divine reckoning in America. I don’t think the reckoning is over our having simply sinned… I think it’s over the fact that we have used God and the Bible to do it.
In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other...
To be biblical is not simply to quote the Bible. We need to tell that to the fundamentalists. To be biblical is not to quote Moses; it’s to do what Moses did. To be biblical is to do what Abraham did; it’s not to quote the Abraham story. It’s to do what Jesus did;...
The Bible is far more than a doctrinal guidebook. God’s Word generates life, creates faith, produces change, frightens the Devil, causes miracles, heals hurts, builds character, transforms circumstances, imparts joy, overcomes adversity, defeats temptation, infuses...
If the people are not themselves seeking to determine the Word of God in the tangle of their individual and shared lives, how can they discern the accuracy and adequacy of the theologian’s interpretation of that Word for the group? The church as a group, as a...
For the Christian, Jesus Christ is always our contemporary and the present is always a day of judgment and of opportunity. Our task is not to go back to him but to catch up with him. It is not “back to the Bible.” It is forward until we can grasp the wisdom and...
If the bulletin makes it clear that Scripture is an important part of Christian worship, then we can be sure people will get the message that the Bible is crucial in shaping their lives as Christians. But when the role of Scripture in worship is negligible, when...
The temptations to misread the Bible on our own behalf and to domesticate it for our own purposes are many and dangerous, and in America, devoted as we are to the Bible, we have tried them all. Bibliolatry, the worship of the Bible and the making of it an object of...
I love the Bible. I have spent more than half of my life reading it, studying it, teaching and preaching it. While I do not find every word of it as inspiring (or inspired) as some of my fellow Christians do, I encounter God in it reliably enough to commit myself on a...