For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
What is the most significant biblical discovery of the last century? For Bart Ehrman, it isn't the Dead Sea Scrolls. It isn't the textual variations that reveal scribal errors or theological amendments. It isn't even the lack of archaeological evidence for the Exodus. The most important ‘discovery’ about the Bible might seem obvious, even banal,... Continue Reading →
Your God is a lie. A sincerely held one, a soothing and useful one, but a lie nonetheless. I don’t mean that to come across as accusatory or judgmental. After all, mine is a lie too. Our god‑concepts – mine included – are stories we tell ourselves in order to make life feel manageable. They... Continue Reading →
When we talk about God we reach instinctively for royal imagery because it feels weighty and majestic. Kingship promises order in a world fraying at the edges. And goodness knows we need that hope. Yet the startling claim at the heart of Christmas is not that God arrives as a king, but that God arrives... Continue Reading →
The world feels as if it is holding its breath. The headlines sound like history clearing its throat: invasions, posturing, populist righteousness, tribal resentment, and the slow encroachment of another global bloodletting. You can feel it in the fear people carry, simmering just beneath casual conversation, in the desperate attempts to find who is to... Continue Reading →
There’s a kind of spiritual theatre that I grew up around—a world where the Holy Spirit arrived with fireworks: tongues and trembling, declarations and deliverance, prophecy and power. You were supposed to feel it. To be moved. To be filled with something electric, uncontainable, divine. And sometimes, people were. I never was. And there were... Continue Reading →
I want to share a thought with you – a sort of hypothesis I am exploring. It is the kind of thought that in certain churches will guarantee excommunication – or at the very least ensure that your name is only ever mentioned in hushed tones – but it is too important not to share.... Continue Reading →
One of the problematic consequences of adopting a doctrine of the infallibility and/or inerrancy of Scripture is that we are blinded to the fact that what we read in a text is what we bring to it. We always read ourselves and our assumptions and contexts into texts. We cannot do otherwise. As a result,... Continue Reading →
If you insist that the Bible is inerrant or infallible, the question you need to answer is “Which Bible?” Even without the complications we explored in the last post – that human engagements with texts are always interpretive and subjective and that what we read in a text is what we bring to it, so... Continue Reading →
Two of the most common critiques of Christianity today come from very different directions. The first—hypocrisy—is not a critique of Christianity itself but of its failure to live up to its own vision. The second, however, strikes at the heart of what many have come to believe Christianity is: the doctrines of biblical inerrancy and... Continue Reading →
Reading is exhausting. That is because all good writing – indeed, all good art – is, to quote Jeanette Winterson, “conscious, and its effect on its audience is to stimulate consciousness”. In other words, the writer as artist seeks to bring a certain dissonance into the consciousness of the reader. Wrestling with the discomfort that... Continue Reading →
Vapors In The Wind 