On this blog I’ve maintained a number of times that the parables of Jesus invite us to imagine another world, to imagine the kingdom of God, and they do this by creating a world, by inviting us into that world, and then — like an experience in Narnia — depositing us back in this world changed, illuminated and challenged to live out the kingdom in this world. What is your advice for reading the parables of Jesus? What are typical... Read more
From CNN.com: Bobby Johnson’s daughter Kelby came out of the closet at age 14. The reaction from their church, he says, was immediate. “The pastor’s response was, ‘you can come here but you can no longer teach, you can no longer hold any position of authority or power within the church because that’s a part of our bylaws,” says Johnson, adding, “since that day … we have not been back.” It was a defining moment for a man raised in... Read more
From Roger Olson’s blog-published article, the conclusion: We are coming, then, to the conclusion that the controversy over whether Barth was a universalist or not comes down to a matter of semantics. (Which is not to say it’s unimportant.) Apparently, in spite of some confusing ways of expressing it, Barth believed in at least two distinct senses of being “saved.” One is the objective reconciliation with God extended to all people because of Jesus Christ and his life, death and resurrection. In... Read more
American evangelicalism, Randy Balmer observes, is perculiarly American, and emerged out of three P’s: Scots-Irish Presbyterianism, Continental Pietism, and New England Puritanism. But Balmer’s burden is that evangelicalism in America mutates, even if it is connected always to the Bible as inspired, the centrality of a born-again experience, and the impulse to evangelize others. He argues this, and much more, in his small and important book, The Making of Evangelicalism. Those three (he does not have Bebbington’s crucicentrism) connections create substantive... Read more
From Greg Boyd’s blog, a post about his forthcoming book: While most of the Bible exhibits a “God-breathed” quality, reflecting a magnificently beautiful God that is consistent with God’s definitive revelation on the cross, we must honestly acknowledge that some depictions of God in Scripture are simply horrific. They are included in what is sometimes called “the dark side of the Bible.” To give just a small sampling, we find God portrayed as doing things such as: * …causing parents... Read more
Roger Ebert… The morning hour in religion was my favorite class. As we advanced through the grades, it began simply, in memorizing chapters from the Baltimore Catechism, and concluded in eighth grade with the four lives of Christ as told in the New Testament. We made a side tour through Genesis, observing it’s “all the Jews have,” but cautioning that it was written as a fable not to be taken literally. Some Protestants took it as fundamentalist truth, but not... Read more
From Fuller’s press release: Fuller Seminary Announces Mark Labberton as Its New President The Fuller Theological Seminary Board of Trustees has announced that Dr. Mark Labberton has accepted the call to serve as the seminary’s fifth president, beginning July 1, 2013. Labberton has served at Fuller Seminary since 2009 as the Lloyd John Ogilvie Associate Professor of Preaching, and director of the Lloyd John Ogilvie Institute of Preaching. Labberton’s unanimous election by the trustees followed a 10-month search and review... Read more
From Dennis Venema, at BioLogos: It is reasonably well known among evangelical Christians that all living humans trace their mitochondrial DNA back to a single woman (a so-called “mitochondrial Eve”) and that all living males similarly trace their Y-chromosome DNA back to a single male (a so-called “Y-chromosome Adam”). These individuals are commonly assumed by evangelicals to be the Biblical Adam and Eve, the first humans alive and the progenitors of the entire human race. While most young-earth and old-earth... Read more
Part two of The Reason for God begins with a discussion of the reasons for faith. Chapters 8 and 9 deal with clues for the existence of God. These clues are found within nature and within ourselves. There is no logically incontrovertible evidence for the existence of God – but the preponderance of the evidence can be persuasive. N. T. Wright in Simply Christian touches on some of the same ground – the title of this post Echoes of a... Read more
At the heart of the traditional view of same-sex relations is “gender complementarity.” That is, men and women are designed by God physically and constitutionally to complement one another. Often gender complementarity is connected to hierarchy but most often the connection is anatomical. James V. Brownson challenges gender complementarity in his new book, Bible, Gender and Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships. In this Brownson Challenge, we see that Genesis 1 does not teach that adam is not an undifferentiated... Read more
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