Saved But Not Whole

“What happens when it all becomes about some other life is we end up being very fractured, broken people. I began to discover that you could be a Christian in a nice Christian church and be saved and be singing all the right songs and actually be miserable. And to have [...]

Piper, Keller, Witherington: God Seeks Own Glory?

In 2002 at my Christian college I remember James MacDonald giving a sermon in which he quoted an Isaiah passage about how God seeks his own glory. In 2003 I read John Piper’s book Desiring God and was convinced of it.
In 2008 I read Tim Keller’s The Reason For God in which he talks [...]

Dallas Willard: Jesus’ Message Not Religious

“The strongest impression on my mind has always been the person and teachings of Jesus Christ… I’ve never moved away from the basic project of “knowing Him and making Him known.” This is not a particularly religious project; it’s a human need. It is out of love of my neighbor, as well as [...]

Buechner on the Bible

“The Bible is not first of all a book of moral truth. I would call it instead a book of truth about the way life is. Those strange old scriptures present life as having been ordered in a certain way, with certain laws as inextricably built into it as the law of gravity [...]

Thinking Through the Big Picture

I’ve been thinking through the big picture of the bible and wrote down some stuff from books that I’ve been reading, and also from Adam Ellis’ summary on these blogs. Ellis’ words are in bold.
WHO ARE WE?
We are the people of God, created in his image. That image is distorted by the Fall but is [...]

Are There More Universes?

“Go outside at night in the country, where the sky is very clear. Then look up. Each one of those tiny points in the sky is a flaming sun. We’re a tiny part of an enormous universe, which may be one of many universes. No one [...]

Christians Wrong About Heaven says NT Wright in TIME

“Much of “traditional” Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, [...]

Claudia Discovers God’s Variety

Claudia’s father came into her room early one Saturday morning.  “Wake up, sweetie,” he said softly, and only after standing by her bed for a few minutes, just watching his daughter sleep peacefully.  “I have a surprise for you.”
“Oh daddy, you ruined it.”
“I ruined what?”  He looked around the room, puzzled.  “What, what did I ruin?”
Claudia [...]

God is Silent and He is There

There were some weeks when I was not a Christian because I felt so intimate with God.  There were weeks when I was a Christian because our tradition invites us to remember that sometimes God is hidden.  And even though God is hidden, God is still present.  
–Lauren Winner

“That’s not why I believe in God, Jamie – [...]

Do only Christians know God?

“Indeed, I believe that many people raised in non-Christian religions—such as bhakti (devotional) traditions in Hinduism in which they worship a single supreme God and trust him for their salvation (however badly understood this is from a Christian point of view), or Judaism or Islam, to pick examples closer to home—have a clearer and more [...]