I too had noticed that our prayers for others flow more easily than those we offer on our own behalf. And it would be nice to accept your view that this just shows we are made to live by charity. I’m afraid, however, I detect two much less attractive reasons for the...
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...
So, it was you all along. Everyone I ever loved, it was you. Everything decent or fine that ever happened to me, everything that made me reach out and try to be better, it was you all along.
We cannot discover our failure to keep God’s law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say, there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that, if we try harder next time, we shall succeed in being completely...
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 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...
The Bible is a means of divine self-disclosure. The traditional theological phrase for this is “the Bible is the revelation of God.” In the Bible, as the foundation of the Christian cultural-linguistic world, Christians find the disclosure of God—not because the Bible...
Advent is about relationships. The three-way relationship of loving God and neighbor and self is what makes us a “hallelujah from head to toe.”