In his book, Scripture and Discernment, Johnson encourages us to take a more midsrashic or rabbinical view of scripture. By midrashic he means “the entire complex process of searching Torah in the light of contemporary circumstance, for insight into either law or life.” He also says that our study and interpretation should be […]

Here are a few of my favorite passages from The Last Word.
Much would-be Christian thought (including much would-be “biblical” Christian thought) in the last two hundred years has tacitly conceded these huge claims, turning “Kingdom of God” into “the hope for heaven after death” and treating Jesus’s death, at the most, as the mechanism whereby […]

Based on the categories in the post below, here’s how my journey with scripture has unfolded up to this point.
Like most who grew up in a conservative church, I started with an “Inerrant/Infallible” view of scripture that might be best described as “The Bible is magic book.” God wrote it and it was […]

At the Emergent Tulsa Cohort last week, I passed out a handout adapted from a post Scot McKnight made several months ago about the way we view the Bible. Our assumptions about what the Bible is and how it works will have a huge impact on the way we read it. That’s sort […]

The second section of McLaren’sThe Secret Message of Jesus is called “Engagement: Grappling with the Meaning of Jesus’s Message.”
In chapter six, McLaren gives a brief introduction to the parables, which he calls the medium of Jesus’s message. He writes, “Human kingdoms advance by force and violence with falling bombs and flying bullets, but God’s […]

Luke 1:5-25
It was Zechariah’s big day. His name was drawn to go into the temple and burn incense at the altar. He would be only one veil away from the Holy of Holies. Geographically speaking, this is as close to God’s Presence as he was ever going to get.
Once inside the temple, […]

In part one of The Secret Message of Jesus McLaren attempts to excavate Jesus’s Kingdom message that he claims has long been buried.
In chapter one, he makes a case for why recovering the essence of Jesus’s message is essential for those who do and don’t follow Jesus. He writes, “In one of my […]

How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Psalm 13:1-2 (NIV)
How long O Lord?
It’s a gut-wrenching question that keeps turning up throughout the Scriptures, […]

This quote from SK brought me up short.
The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be able to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. […]

Tonight our leadership team will continue our study of the gospel and the kingdom of God. Here is the handout I’ll use to start the discussion. It’s extremely oversimplified, but gives us something to work with.
Gospel–an announcement of good news concerning a victory that has been won by God on behalf of his […]