I was surprised when last week’s diversion brought even more comments about heaven. After sharing them in conversation with friends, I‘ve decided this is a bigger issue than I thought. I was chided good-naturedly for not realizing there are plenty of Christians who do believe in a pre-Copernican concept of heaven. At least, they think […]
This one is late because I was caught off guard. I thought it would be easy to dash something off quickly, then I sent last week’s short essay to a list of people with a paragraph that included “Remember all four (gospels) were written before the Copernican revolution. Let me look next week at ways […]
Remember I am looking at the four gospels, one at a time. Doing that with John, you quickly see quite a difference from the other three. John offers intellectual reflection. If the others express Jesus’ oneness with God by proclaiming him God’s Son, John portrays him as the incarnation of the Word. Usually, I would […]
If Matthew adds mercy to Mark’s power, Luke goes a step further and presents the Gospel as grace. Right from the beginning, the message is a gift to those regarded at the far end of God’s care. It is good news to the poor, not the poor in spirit. It is addressed to women as […]
If you only read Mark, you would think that the Gospel is primarily about God purifying his creation. That’s good news for people who unjustly suffer. However, from this perspective, it is easy to think God is a judge whose goal is to separate good from bad in order to cast out and destroy evil. […]
I set out to examine what a community built around the Gospel would be like in our time and place. It made sense to begin by defining what the Gospel is. Last week I looked at Paul’s description. This week I want to see what Mark, the first of the four evangelists, says. I decided […]
I’ve been messing around for days trying to come up with an academic key to what Paul means by the Gospel. I tried all the usual ones, like our Lutheran understanding that he is all about justification by faith. Each time I ended up conditioning my ideas with “yes, but…” Then I realized that everything […]
The Gospel is like the breath we Christians draw into our bodies. It gives us life. It permeates everything we do, every decision we make, every word we speak. Yet, it is difficult to grasp. I am writing this series as I have written every series— to discover who I am, what I believe, and […]
There has always been some controversy about the nature of the church. When I entered the ministry about 60 years ago, an Evangelical pastor friend of mine described the controversy as a tension between those who see the mission as calling people to accept Jesus’ offer of eternal life against those who try to provide […]
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