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...
One reason that the world finds the New Testament's message of peacemaking and love of enemies incredible is that the church is so massively faithless. On the question of violence, the church is deeply compromised and committed to nationalism, violence, and idolatry....
I am absolutely amazed that Joseph is the first person in the New Testament who learned how to read the Bible. Like Joseph, we are to read it through the spectacles of the grace and the goodness and the love of God. If in reading the Bible you find justification for...
The New Testament is filled with evidence that God never intended to confine the outpouring of the Spirit to one historic day.
Jesus is not telling us to submit to evil, but to refuse to oppose it on its own terms. We are not to let the opponent dictate the methods of our opposition. He is urging us to transcend both passivity and violence by finding a third way, one that is at once assertive...
The New Testament offers a wealth of images of God. God is not only like a forgiving father, but also like a mother hen longing for her straying offspring and a woman searching until she finds one lost coin. God in Christ is Lady Wisdom, divine Word, the Light of the...
The most significant affirmation of women in the New Testament may well be found in the tradition made prominent in all four Gospels that women were the ones to find the tomb of Jesus empty; that according to Mark and Luke the announcement of Jesus’ resurrection was...
The New Testament churches were made up of people of different ages, genders, races and socio-economic levels, who came together because of their common belief in Jesus. Christ gave them their identity and, consequently, their unity. In an era of marketing...
Make no mistake about it: the most important musical group in the church is the congregation. Worship is for all of God’s people; the New Testament doctrine of the priesthood of all believers calls for the saints to lift up their voices (whether musically gifted or...