There are some Christian beliefs that through the centuries the Church has left broadly open for debate. For example, there is no single canonical doctrine of atonement. Rather, Christians through the centuries have affirmed that while Christ did atone for our sins, we have a range of options for understanding this truth. We have remained…
This is the first of a few posts (I hope) on Advent, Christmas, and the miraculous. To get at the these topics, though, I have to lay down a basic framework for discussion. So… if you can make your way through this geeky first post, you might find it helpful in thinking about the miracles…
After a brief hiatus, we’re back with season 2 of the podcast. During the Merging the Streams conference at United (a celebration of 50 years of the UMC), we had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Ted Campbell of Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. The result was a conversation that I think…
The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book with Seedbed, Scripture and the Life of God: Reading the Bible to Grow in Faith. Several years ago I had the privilege of meeting Randy Clark. Randy was the principal preacher during the Toronto Blessing, a massive revival that began in 1994 and launched him into international…
There was a time when many mainline Protestants would simply not have been open to the idea of “miracles,” or God’s direct intervention into the matrix of events in our lives. These days that seems to have changed. Many westerners today seem more willing than ever to acknowledge the existence and activity of an “unseen…
No, I’m not talking about Millennials or Baby Boomers, though if I were it would certainly increase the number of hits on this post. I’m a member of that rather ill-defined group that we call Generation X. I recently read a post by a good friend of mine on a site called Waltbox. It wasn’t…
Much mainline Christian theology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been a response to the problem of evil. For liberal Christian theologians of the mid-twentieth century, two world wars and the Holocaust made any strong notion of divine action unbelievable. Unlike evangelical cessationists, who believe that miracles ceased after the biblical period, liberal theologians,…
Marcus Borg has made inroads into popular mainline Protestantism in a way that few other writers have in recent decades. I remember when Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time came out. I was fascinated by this book. It was actually an important book in my spiritual development, not because of the conclusions that Borg draws, but because…