My biggest problem with the focus in Christianity on getting people saved for the afterlife is how often it results in arrested development. It falls prey to the same mistake Adam and Eve made: assuming we can skip the hard work of growing up and just go straight to...
When the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that God is dead, he was not making an ontological point. He was making an existential point. He was not announcing that God had died, but that our experience of God had died. This was due, in part, to...
The claim of John 14:6-7 becomes problematic when it is used to speak to questions that were never in the Fourth Gospel's purview. To use these verses in a battle over the relative merits of the world's religions is to distort their theological heart. It is a...
While Christianity does not give specific answers to specific social problems, it does shed light on these problems, and we all must try as best we can to carry our Christian insights out into the streets and byways of life.
So what, then, does Christianity have to offer in the midst of hardships and heartache? The answer, I think, is consolation, including the consolation that comes from being part of a Christian community--people who walk alongside us as we journey through grief,...
Mother Teresa spent forty years ministering to the poor and dying of Calcutta. Though she never directly challenged orthodox Catholic theology, her willingness to care for Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims brought her criticism, especially since she never insisted on...
Twenty-five years ago one of my mentors told me that the truth that I was loved all the way through was the “brute fact of the universe.” I am now just beginning to believe it. Christianity is a love affair beginning with the gasp of astonishment with which all love...
Christianity is…a religion of resistance and a religion of hope. The point of the cross is not finally suffering and death; it is, rather, that a relationship holds. There is a love stronger than death, that can withstand whatever the forces of evil do against it, and...
The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.
I have become convinced that Christianity is fundamentally an experience in losing the lives of our dreams in order to receive the lives that Jesus died to give us. from When God Interrupts: Finding New Life through Unwanted Change