May 29, 2014
Why was Jesus crucified? Was the cross an act of God (to satisfy the divine wrath)? Was it simply the inevitable result of Jesus’s challenge to the Sadducees and Pharisees? Was he betrayed by followers who felt he had failed his promises to deliver a political kingdom? Or was this an act of sin itself...
May 22, 2014
No symbol is more associated with Christianity than the cross. And for good reason. As we will see, the cross is indeed where God’s salvation is accomplished. But too often the cross has been interpreted mainly in terms of Jesus’s physical suffering – as though the means of salvation is the physical torture of...
May 16, 2014
One of the most troubling images in Jesus’s teaching is the sorting of the sheep and the goats (the “sheep” being the “righteous” who are rewarded with eternal life, the goats the “unrighteous” condemned to punishment). At first glance the stakes appear to be “heaven” and “hell,” with our human...
May 14, 2014
While Jesus certainly gave some famous speeches, most of Jesus’s public teaching was done by means of parables. These short, fictional stories were intended as both calls to action and as a means of offering a vision of an alternative reality- the kingdom of God. Yet they are more than illustrations, stories to be...