Jesus at 2AM - A Humorous, Intelligent Look at the Bible, Church History & the Life of Faith

Why is God so relentlessly committed to the project of salvation?  Why does YHWH persevere in covenant faithfulness when Israel has proven so unable to fulfill her calling? In this installment of our introduction to the Bible, God declares his answer:  love. God loves so dearly that he cannot abide humanity's suffering.  "For my sake…," […]

Waiting is profoundly difficult; all the more so when you know the one you are waiting one is capable of acting immediately.  Yet this is God's call to exiled Israel – to wait upon the Lord for the day of salvation (in this case release from captivity). But this waiting is not to be passive […]

How do we reconcile the wrath and love of God???  The images of gentle shepherd seem so at odds with those of a punishing judge we are tempted to imagine they describe different deities.  And yet both wrath and grace are such inextricable dimensions of the God of the Bible that neither be dismissed.  One […]

What is prophecy in the Bible? And what is a prophet?  And why do I feel I want little to do with either? My personal allergy to the word "prophecy" stems from the fact that most contemporary discussion thereof involve a vast departure from the biblical understanding. From Harold Camping's dating of the end of […]

Great poetry generally makes for difficult reading.  The words and phrases may be simple enough,  even simplistic. But the very nature of poetry is to pick up where language fails – to articulate the ineffable.  And thus readers of poetry face the dual challenge of interpretation and introspection. We must simultaneously examine words and ourselves to find […]

In the polytheistic culture of the Ancient Near East, deities were worshipped by means of sacrifices made in particular places.  Most gods were considered to have what we might consider "regional" power (the Babylonians having a few patron deities vs. those of say the Assyrians); and within those regions to have particular locations in which […]

David is a central protagonist in the biblical story.  And though his triumph over Goliath and his moral failings with Bathsheba are the stuff of great art, it is his establishment of the monarchy in Israel that both shapes and foreshadows future events. David is born in Bethlehem (c. 1040 BCE).  He spends his childhood […]

Honest answers to sincere questions are essential to the work of love.  Indeed the lessons that have been most formative in my spiritual life have not come from books and lectures (important though they are!), but from the candid conversations that came at the cafe or in the parking lot after the formal lesson was […]

Understanding the Bible requires a constant return to the covenant with Abraham (see part 3 of this series).  It is that promise of salvation that drives the rest of the biblical narrative and which guides our interpretation of scripture.  And central to Abrahamic covenant is the pledge that Israel will come to possess the land […]

"Thou shalt not…" is not a phrase we typically associate with love.   For most of us, the language of commandments or "the Law of God" conjures images of dispassionate judge at best, and a wrathful tyrant at worst. But in the biblical story, Torah (the Hebrew word for Law) was understood at a gift […]

The promise of salvation is not merely a promise to deliver souls to a blissful afterlife, but rather the rescue of every aspect of creation from the curse of sin. Salvation is about restoring this world (unto eternity).  And thus the Project of Salvation begins not with images of harps and clouds, but of God […]

  What will become of this broken world in light of the curse of sin???  – that is the driving question of the biblical story. Will creation unravel entirely, like a cloth that has been torn inexorably apart?  Is the cosmos destined to a fate of death and dissolution?  Or can thing yet be set […]

Central to the biblical story is the conviction that something has gone terribly wrong.  The world as we experience it is not the world as God intended. In this episode we turn to the biblical explanation why – how humanity moved from the Garden of Eden to a cosmos in which "thorns and thistles" are […]

Understanding the Bible in its various chapters and verses requires that we first understand the story as a whole.  (Hard to make sense of the details when you don't know much about the big picture.) So for the next 40 weeks or so, I will do my best to trace the outline of the biblical […]

There is probably no aspect of Christianity more difficult to accept intellectually than the bodily resurrection of Jesus.  And one could hardly be blamed for approaching the idea with complete skepticism.  It seems so much more plausible that the gospel accounts are speaking either metaphorically or just plain mistakenly.  Perhaps the authors desired to have […]

One pastor's not-so-creepy look at the God who is in the empty tomb business.  The short version:  Where there is God, there is life.  And the message not merely of Easter, but of the whole biblical story, is that God is everywhere and always about his work.  The empty tomb of Jesus was simply the […]

As we conclude this series in modern church history, we examine the intellectual challenges that confronted the church in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Perhaps the most obvious of these was the rapid progress of scientific discovery – things like James Hutton's work in geology (radically redefining the age of the universe) and […]

It would be nearly impossible to overestimate the impact of John and Charles Wesley on contemporary American Protestantism.  From the hymns we sing, to the small groups we attend, to the empowerment of the laity to teach and preach, to the eventual ordination of women into professional ministry, the Wesleys – and the Methodist tradition […]

The religious zeal that marked the first Puritan colonies was destined to wane.  As new generations were born, and new waves of settlers arrived, new priorities and visions of the good life began to take shape.  Many professed a Christian faith and had connection to the church, but not with the same rigor as those […]

Why I hate Ash Wednesday, the illegality of death in Irvine, and the comfort of Psalm 23.  

The Reformation gave birth not to a solitary Protestantism, but to a wide variety of Protestantisms.  (The Reformers came to quick agreement that the Bible – and not the traditions or authorities of the Catholic Church – was the ultimate arbiter of truth.  What they could not agree upon was what the Bible intended to […]

When Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses outside the door of the campus church in Wittenberg, he had no intention of dividing the Catholic Church.  But within a decade of that event, such acts of protest had gained irreversible momentum, and  "Protestantism" was officially born. Throughout the 16th century new church governments were formed, new […]

One of the greatest challenges to understanding the message of Jesus is knowing how to categorize him as a speaker.  When those first audiences gathered, who did they think they were going to hear?   A teacher?  A philosopher?  A political leader?  Or something else? In this fifth installment in the Next Steps into the Gospels course […]

Few elements of the biblical story cause contemporary readers more difficulty than talk of demons and devils.  To our (post-?)modern sensibilities, they seem, at best, misdiagnoses of psychiatric conditions, and, at worst, conjure images of the church at its most misguided (witch trial, anyone?).  And yet, Jesus' confrontation with demonic powers is a fundamental dimension […]

Much of Jesus' ministry – and the Gospel descriptions thereof – revolve around his "miracles" (the Gk. word is best translated "works of power").  But what was their purpose?  Did they simply serve to impress his audience, to demonstrate his might or authority?  Or are they part and parcel of the declaration that "the kingdom […]