Earlier this summer, I was called out as a heretic and accused of “sitting on Satan’s lap” courtesy of the Institute for Religion and Democracy (the fundamentalist think tank behind the schisms of many of our mainline denominations).
“The traditional understanding of life after death in Western Christianity was created on the premise of human uniqueness. Human beings were understood to be a special creation, …
In all probability Jesus was born in Nazareth. That is surely the assumption made in Mark, the first gospel to be written. The names of both of his parents …
On October 31, 1517, so the story goes, a solitary monk named Martin Luther approached the great doors of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on which he planned to post …
Sukkoth is complete. There will be six to eight Sabbaths to engage the synagogue before the next celebration, the festival called Dedication, arrives. In Aramaic the word for “Dedication” …
(The following is the speech delivered in Paris at the launching of the French Translation of Jesus for the Non-Religious.)
How can those of us living in …
In recent columns, we have looked at the origins of what has come to be called “The Doctrine of the Atonement.” We noted that the day, in the calendar …
If it is true, as I have suggested, that Jesus never preached the Sermon on the Mount then we immediately have to face other startling implications. That conclusion would …
Matthew has thus far mined the Hebrew Scriptures for texts that will advance his thesis that Jesus has fulfilled the Jewish messianic expectations. In the opening genealogy, he has …
He was my Professor of Theology, teaching me for two of the three years I was in Seminary. For me he was the major voice on that 1950 …