A Fresh Perspective

Children longingly anticipate Christmas day when they can open their presents. They wait with excitement. Not all waiting is filled with excitement. Sometimes our waiting is punctuated with anxiety and fear. Such is often the case with those who are unemployed, waiting for meaningful work. Or with the one waiting for the results of a full body scan after enduring a grueling round of chemotherapy. Or the waiting of a childless couple who so much want to start a family.  When the prophet addresses the covenant people in Isaiah 40, there were those in Israel who had been waiting for the end of the Babylonian Captivity and the return of the glory of the Lord to the land of Israel . Many had died in exile, without seeing that hope realized, but they clung to the promise that one day their suffering would end.  All true waiting is a waiting with a sense of promise . For Christians, it’s a promise that we already, in part, have entered into. The Apostle Paul speaks of the ...

New Testament scholar Marcus Borg tells a wonderful story illustrating two different ways to approach Scripture. For many years Borg taught an introductory-level Bible course at Oregon State University . At the beginning of the class, he always informed the students that the course would be taught from the perspective of the academic discipline of biblical scholarship. Borg would tell them that they didn’t have to change their beliefs, but to do well in the class they would have to be willing to look at the Bible from that viewpoint.  He explained that the Bible is the product of two ancient communities. The Hebrew Bible is the product of ancient Israel , the Christian Testament is the product of the early Christian movement. As such, the Bible tells us not how God sees things, but how those two ancient communities saw their relationship with God.   R oughly 20 percent of the students that took the course believed that the Bible was inerrant (literally the Word of G...