A Fresh Perspective

Spiritual teacher Richard Rohr likes to say that our tendency is to see things, not as they are, but as we are. The point he makes is that many things in our lives prevent us from seeing what really is. Our capacity to see reality is shaped by many factors: our upbringing and the ways we are socialized into adulthood, our education, our social and community networks, our physiology and genetics, our religious faith and the ways we are indoctrinated into that faith. All kinds of influences affect how we see. Thus, the truism: We see as we are, rather than what really is. In his wonderful piece on love in his first letter to the Corinthians Paul makes the point that we all see a “poor reflection as in a mirror.” The NRSV says, we see “dimly.” We are all limited and biased in what and how we see. That’s part of the human condition. However, I believe, that we will see truth and reality more clearly if we see through the lens of Jesus. Everything in our scriptural text today is focu...

A good number of evangelical Christians self-identify as Bible believers. It’s a peculiar way for a Christian to self-identify when you think about it. A Christian is someone who has some kind of relationship to Christ. After all Christ is part of the word  Christian . And yet for a good number of evangelical Christians Bible believer is the term of choice. It’s not accurate though, because no self-identified Bible believer actually believes the whole Bible — at least not in the way they claim to. Read post at Baptist News Global .

While Southern Baptists have been vocally repenting of their support for slavery and Jim Crow since 1995, they have done virtually nothing to actually make amends. One of their own members, an African American pastor,  noted  that if the SBC was serious they would champion policies that would actually make a difference, such as criminal justice reform, education reform, and the alleviation of child poverty (and we could add others like immigration reform and confronting voter suppression laws). So, did Southern Baptists make any attempt to bring forth fruits worthy of repentance when they met in Columbus for their annual meeting (the hate killing of the Emanuel Nine took place after their convention)? Oh no, it was oppositional energy that fueled the fire, not a vision for the common good. Instead they passed a  resolution  against same-sex marriage asserting that traditional marriage is the clear teaching of Scripture. In  a statement supporting the re...

I recently wrote two pieces published at Baptist News Global (“ A Scripture Lesson on Fundamentalism ” and “ What does a progressive Christian statement of faith look like ?) that ignited a response I repeatedly hear from conservatives. Their claim is that progressive Christian faith is based on subjective criteria not rooted in any objective reality. Of course, their objective reality is their inerrant Bible. One frequent commenter on my articles said: “The authority for what is written begins and ends with those that wrote it. . . . These so-called progressives don’t use the term infallible but in reality they see what they wrote [the reference here is to  the Phoenix Affirmations ] as correct without any authority except themselves.” Another who is also a frequent contributor of articles on the website said: “I fail to see how on the progressive worldview any of these [ the Phoenix Affirmations ] can really be taken as more than mere expressions of personal pre...

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...