If we ask, “How should we worship God?” a healthy Christian and Protestant instinct will be to respond with another question: “What does the Bible say?” Rightly understood, this is a necessary and indeed a sufficient response. We must not, however, presume that we...
There are three ingredients that must be present in making healthy changes. First, you have to love the people, genuinely be on their side. Second, what you propose has to make sense. Something totally “off the wall” and foreign to a given tradition is not likely to...
Engineering involves more than telling materials what they must do. If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel of the wood or the stone, his failure will go well beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril. The...
The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. “Faking...
As someone has put it, the biblical understanding of human beings is not that they have bodies, but that they are bodies… Those who believe in the immortality of the soul believe that life after death is as natural a human function as waking after sleep. The Bible...
Is my understanding of prayer similar to the “spiritual warfare” practiced by some evangelicals and charismatics? Yes, to the extent that I agree that prayer should be imperative and aggressive. We should be engaged to alter the spirituality of families, corporations,...
Sometimes joy is compounded of many elements: a touch of sadness, a whimper of pain, a harsh word tenderly held until all its arrogance dies, the casting of the eye into the face that understands, the clasp of a hand that holds, then releases, a murmur of tenderness...
Being born-again is a new life, not of perfection but of striving, stretching, and searching—a life of intimacy with God through the Holy Spirit. There must first be an emptying and then refilling. To the extent that we want to know, understand and experience God, we...
Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to...
How are we to experience peace in a world filled with war and destruction, hurricanes and greed? …Prayers are offered for peace and Nobel prizes are awarded for it. But more frequently, peace seems as distant as the moon… The world whizzes by at breakneck speed as its...