Real Bible Rob: Affirming Christianity Podcast Real Bible Rob - Inclusive Christianity Discussions Real Bible Rob | PCUSA Ministry Insights

Send us Fan Mail Christians love Replacement. Replacing Judaism with the New Covenant. Replacing the Jewish people as the Chosen people of God. Replacing Islam in the Holy Land during the Crusades. In America, replacing indigenous people with white Christian people. Replacing native religions around the world with missionaries. Lately, replacing the words of Jesus with nationalism and political tr...

Send us Fan Mail People use the narrow gate metaphor that Jesus used in the Sermon on the Mount to feed their persecution complex and to exclude others. I frequently come across egregious misrepresentations of these passages. Often spoken with cult-like intentions, it is always meant to instill fear. Was this Jesus's intent? Was he using fear to encourage people to follow him instead of the r...

Send us Fan Mail I am delighted to welcome Jeremy Steele to the podcast today. I love his content on TikTok so much. He reached out to creators with podcasts. I jumped at the chance to interview him, and he graciously agreed! Church attendance statistics are notoriously difficult to decipher, but people latch onto the latest reports as signs of a turnaround or that their favorite segment is gainin...

Send us Fan Mail How can you justify cruelty as a Christian? It has a very long tradition, from the Crusades to Slavery and Jim Crow to Mass Deportations today. These were all and are still perpetuated and justified by Bible believing Christians. This justification and hypocrisy is the main critique of Christianity. How can a religion that exhorts love and kindness be so unloving and unkind? Simpl...

Send us Fan Mail The Church is in desperate need of Reform. Which direction should we go? Rediscovering doctrines of the past? Reforming our doctrines for a new era? There is a lot of disagreement about what is needed. I argue that we must do both.   The motto of the Presbyterian Church USA is "Ecclesia Reformata Semper Reformanda" which is Latin for "The Church reformed, always ref...

Send us Fan Mail Whenever you ask whether God changes or that God learns, It is usually met with a resounding "No!" But then you must ask, what is the point of prayer? When you look at scripture, it says explicitly many times that God changes. "But God knows everything" goes the reasoning. So most people have to do logical backflips to make omniscience work with free will and c...

Send us Fan Mail For many Romans 8 is the essential chapter for understanding God’s purpose in the Gospel message. While I don’t think that was necessarily Paul’s purpose to be all-encompassing, it can be a great guide for us. N.T. Wright has said, that if he had only one chapter of the New Testament to take with him, it would be Romans 8. Unfortunately, it is also used for great harm. One comment...

Send us Fan Mail The book of Romans carries so much theological weight that it’s hard to see Paul’s reasoning and technique through it. Fortunately, there’s been a wealth of new scholarship and research on it that it’s freeing the text from its Lutheran and Calvinist shackles. You can spend a lifetime diving into details but I will focus on three areas that highlight the new research:  the contras...

Send us Fan Mail Today I have a special guest Maria Hearing. Maria is a dear friend, classmate, teacher, Hebrew reading partner, and leader. Maria has done deep research on the book of Esther, and she has written scholarly papers on the narrative and genres of the story. The story is foundational to the myth of the Jewish nation, but it also tells us so much about patriarchy and the strength of an...

Send us Fan Mail Do you have an image of a traditional past that was better? Kids respected their parents. People had manners. They respected the law. Neighbors watched out for each other. Not like these wicked times, so the reasoning goes. It seems harkening to a mythical part is an innate part of being human. Since religious people strongly tend toward being traditionalists, this myth is especia...

Send us Fan Mail Slavery drives Christian thought far more than you realize. It has never left us. Imagine for a moment being on a plantation as a child. Slavery requires the crushing of empathy. Much of what we’ve seen in the last 400 years in the west was the use of theology to excuse the massive brutality and hypocrisy of colonialism. Presbyterian history and the divergence of the PCUSA and PCA...

Send us Fan Mail Asking "What is the gospel?" is surprisingly controversial in some quarters. Most people believe the gospel is the radical love of God in the person, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But that’s not enough for many others. They insist that Penal Substitutionary Atonement theory defines the Gospel. This was not true for the majority of Christians for the majority of histo...

Send us Fan Mail "If you know Jeremiah, you know the Old Testament" is something I like to say. Because it is the most political book of the Bible. It is the backdrop of King Josiah's huge political blunder in fighting against Pharaoh Neco in 2 Chronicles 35 that shows us why. King Josiah was the beginning of the distinctively Jewish state. The Deuteronomists come from this period,...

Send us Fan Mail I said "Apologetics is Circular Reasoning" in a video last year. It garnered a lot of hate, cheers, and hundreds of thousands of views on Instagram. The response was fascinating because what should have been a philosophical argument turned into a test of faithfulness. Modern Apologetics, meaning the use of the scientific method to prove the existence and sovereignty of G...

Send us Fan Mail There is no more painful label for women than being called a Jezebel. It contains all the condemning, cursing, and slut shaming you can imagine. "Jezebel Spirit" is a frequently used racial slur in some churches. Jezebel was a foreign woman, likely forced into a royal marriage with a weak husband, which was bad enough. Still, she became the scapegoat for a whole nation;...

Send us Fan Mail The answer is neither. Economics is all over the Bible, but modern labels have so much historical and cultural meaning that it is dishonest to label anyone in scripture as capitalist or socialist or communist. Instead, we must talk about commerce and the common good. The Bible has a lot to say about fair measures and honest business dealings. It condemns cheating and repression un...

Send us Fan Mail Many people, especially in America, are waking up to the fact that our freedom is on the line. While this has been the norm for most people in most of history, it is a surprising development for many privileged white people. Our views often mask how radical the Gospels really are. There was provocative, yet non-violent, resistance throughout Jesus's ministry. Many see the com...

Send us Fan Mail If you are a woman, you have likely heard the story of Martha and Mary. Martha is hurried and busy in the kitchen at the big party she threw for Jesus. But Mary sits down at Jesus's feet, anointing him with ointment. Martha complains to Jesus, saying that he should tell Mary to get busy and help her sister. But Jesus says Mary chose the better way. This is usually told to sha...

Send us Fan Mail Have you been puzzled by the dissonance of Palm Sunday? How can people seem so happy at the start of the worst week of Jesus's life? Why do we think Hosanna is offering praise? What made the people throw their cloaks down and wave branches? These are pivotal questions. Looking at the volatile political and cultural dynamics at play, you can see the astonishing insight and bra...

Send us Fan Mail Correction! Jezreel Valley goes from Haifa to the Jordan River. Kidron Valley is next to Jerusalem. I am sorry for the error! No word is more polarizing than "woke" but the people who get really angry about usually can't define it. To them, it just means anything liberal they don't like. Instead, the term arose in the black community in the mid-20th century and...

Send us Fan Mail Pastors always walk a fine line when it comes to politics and current events. Healthy congregations have people with a variety of political persuasions. Being a true pastor means you should never abuse the privilege of power to push partisan political positions. But we are also compelled to preach the gospel, so we should not be complicit or quiet in the face of political cruelty...

Send us Fan Mail What does Newton and Darwin have to do with God? A whole lot. Newton represents the height and triumph of determinism, the idea that all things have a cause and effect. If you know all the inputs and processes of a system, you can determine every outcome. Calvin's writings underpinned this by saying that God has absolute control of the entire universe, which Newton used to ge...

Send us Fan Mail What is Biblical Marriage? That is a hard question to answer because there are many biblical marriages. There is Israelite marriage in the time of the Patriarchs, there is Judean marriage in the Second Temple period, there is New Testament Jewish marriage, there is New Testament gentile marriage, there is sacramental marriage as the Catholic Church defines it and there is Protesta...

Send us Fan Mail I welcome special guest Gabe Gordon who is the author of his recent book "The Fundamentals of a Recovering Fundamentalist." We went to seminary together and he was my TA for a historical theology class. Now he is a grad student at Marquette University specializing in historical theology. His interests are early Greek and Syriac speaking Christianity and post-supersession...

Send us Fan Mail "Born Again Christian" is a label you wear proudly or are very leery about it. This dichotomy is intentional and says a lot about how you see scripture and salvation. Most people think of evangelical Christians being Born Again. So why do some Christians, like myself, bristle at the label. It all has to do with a pun, that you only really see in Greek. It gets to the pla...