It seems to me that it is a minority that ever gets the true and full Gospel. We just keep worshiping Jesus and arguing over the exact right way to do it. The amazing thing is that Jesus never once says, "worship me!", but he often says, "follow me" (Matt.4:19)....
Good religion, however, is always about seeing rightly: "The lamp of the body is the eye; if your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light," as Jesus says in Matthew 6:22. How you see is what you see. And to see rightly is to be able to be fully...
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...
If we were to set out to establish a religion in polar opposition to the Beatitudes Jesus taught, it would look strikingly similar to the pop Christianity that has taken over the airwaves of North America.
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...
There is a tendency in the West to absolutize our religion. Instead of viewing it as a road sign that points beyond itself, we consider it a stop sign. It becomes the destination, the end. When that happens it becomes confused with the Ultimate Reality that is always...
Judging by the polls of modern Americans' beliefs and practices, there is a much greater diversity of opinion about salvation even among the adherents of evangelicalism and fundamentalism than is evident rom the confident, insistent voices of their leaders and...
Jesus' parable, therefore, shatters the stereotypes of social boundaries and class division and renders void any system of religious quid pro quo. Neighbors do not recognize social class. Neither is mercy the conduct of a calculating heart, nor eternal life the reward...
If we really believe what we say, that our faith should inform the whole of our lives, then we cannot leave our values and beliefs at the door when it comes to public discourse. While the separation of church and state is critically important to the freedoms we...
Harvard religion professor Diana Eck told about being asked once by an elderly friend in India: "Do you really believe that God came only once, so very long ago and only to one people?" She said, "The very idea that God could be so stingy as to show up only once, to...