The stories of the Resurrection, as hard as they are for modern ears to comprehend, mean that the life Jesus lived and the project he pursued (the Kingdom of God) did not perish at the crucifixion, but continued in the lives of those who carried on what he had begun....
Christians have spent enormous energy over the years debating and decreeing truth; every church defends its particular version. But what about grace? How rare to find a church competing to "out-grace" its rivals. Grace is Christianity's best gift to the world, a...
To have faith is to explore--and go on exploring--the life of the spirit on the only journey that matters: that of becoming a more rounded and authentic human being. It is to expose yourself to what has been thought of most value by past generations and test it in the...
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...
There is not a syllable in the Pauline letters that can be cited in support of Christians employing violence. Paul's occasional uses of military imagery (e.g., 2 Cor. 10:3-6, Phil. 1:27-30) actually have the opposite effect: the warfare imagery is drafted into the...
Christians began as a politically unimportant offshoot of Judaism in the Roman Empire. The early Christians found ways to live faithfully from one Caesar to another. If your faith is shattered by the politics of the moment, it may be your faith that needs some...
We need some Christians who are as crazy as the Lord. Crazy enough to love like Jesus, to give like Jesus, to forgive like Jesus, to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God--like Jesus. Crazy enough to dare to change the world from the nightmare it often is into...
Rules at best are signposts, never hitching posts. Personally, I doubt whether there is such a thing as a Christian rule. There are probably only acts that are more or less Christian depending on the motives prompting them. But if we say, "Down with rules," we must at...
That the zeal for God's honor is also a dangerous passion, that the Christian must bring with him the courage to swim against the tide instead of with it...accept a good deal of loneliness, will perhaps be nowhere so clear and palpable as in the church, where he would...
The name bestowed upon Jesus is Lord, acknowledged in what may be the earliest form of the confession of faith among gentile Christians: Jesus is Lord (Rom. 10:9; Acts 2:36). Submission to the lordship of Christ, however, is not confined to the human realm; Christ is...