51% Christian: Finding Faith after Certainty

I can’t remember how it was that I acquired a small “World’s Greatest Christian” trophy—a Precious Moments atrocity: little girl on her knees in prayer, the ridiculous title engraved on a brass plate attached to the wooden block beneath her. But I do remember when I lost her. She was left on a windowsill in an Embassy Suites hotel room in Dallas the summer of 2009. I remember because I was devastated by the loss. She had come in remarkably handy in the two short years she was mine.

I had developed a practice, while out with friends, of...

“So you’re aChristian?” She said it like I had just told her I was radioactive or invisible or from the galaxy Andromeda. She explained: “I went to Mass a few times as a kid. But now I’m a Buddhist. It’s just so less judgmental. It’s a better fit for me.”

“I can definitely understand the appeal,” I confessed, “what with the crazy, violent, and competitive world we live in. What a gift it is to be able to detach and let go of this false self that craves attention and these empty possessions at which we clutch and grab.”...

The thing about us is that we like information. We like it a lot—more so than probably any other culture that has ever existed on the face of the earth. This is both a blessing and a curse. Information can be a good thing. I am grateful for the right information whenever my cell phone works, or I take off on an airplane, or I listen to the song I just downloaded on my iPod, Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” In other words, information is good and useful as aninstrument. But is information enough?

As people who...

Welcome to our trinity chapter. This chapter will unfold like a play in three acts. Our first act will identify an error the contemporary church has fallen into, namely forcing an event of history into explanatory models (analogies) that obscure the passionate intensity of the greatest love story every told. Act two will trace the history of three monotheisms of modernity that, again, obscure the deep intimate passion of the story by making it all about a great big giant god who is the master, theGrand Divine Subject, the controller of all things. Finally, in act three, the author...

Dear Christians,

Please quit thinking about me.

Love,

God

Warning:In this chapter I will not be trying to prove that God exists. I’m just trying to tell you that something happened.

Let’s begin withthinking. What are you thinking about right now? Are you thinking about God? I mean, it couldn’t hurt, right? After all, you are reading a book about theology.

Is God thinking about us? At the same time? Dude! Wouldn’t that be weird? Does God have a brain—a really, really big brain? Like, if you collected up all the thoughts that humans are thinking right...

Who do you say that I am?”¹ It’s a question that Jesus of Nazareth put to his followers. And now it is a question that this writer will put to you: WhoisJesus?²

Most readers of this book will recognize that Jesus was a good guy, areallygood guy. Whoever the historical Jesus was, there is ample evidence that his teachings and actions and parables were downright revolutionary. Jesus had a passion for turning the tables, for loving the unlovely, for touching the untouchables, and for teaching his followers to love and forgive even their worst enemies. And...

So i sent this e-mail. To God. I know that sounds really corny and cliché, but I really did it, just for the heck of it. I sent it to god@gmail.com. I also tried god@canada.com (because I have a hunch that God might be Canadian). Here’s what I wrote:

Dear God:

Why couldn’t Jesus have been a girl? Quite frankly, it would have solved a lot of problems.

See, God, I’ll tell you how it is around here. Women are leaving the church. Good women. Smart women. Strong women. And we don’t know what to do about it.

We’ve got...

How does it all work? In chapter 4, we looked at the person of Christ and tried to make some sense out of the question “Who is Jesus?” As a counterpart to this question, we now examine what Jesusdoes. Jesus saves, but how? What does it mean that two thousand years ago, this homeless Palestinian Jew was put to death in a very public show of torture by the Roman Empire? How does that event reconcile us—make us one—with God?

“Atonement” is actually a sixteenth-century English word that was put together from the wordsat, one, and...

Look, let’s be honest. We’ve done an appalling job teaching about the Holy Spirit in the contemporary church. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is all fuzzy and spooky and ghosty. Or it is simply ignored. Or it is used as a question of doctrine, as a tool for attacking our opponents, rather than a living word that can reveal the self-giving nature of God.

I’ll admit I’m no expert here. In fact, I’m convinced that there are people who know a lot more about the Holy Spirit than I do.¹ So please temper what I say with your own...

We now turn our attention to what theologians call “the doctrine of creation.” You and I have somehow appeared on this planet, at this time, in this place. And though we can acknowledge that our Earth is only a tiny part of a vast cosmos, we cannot help but ask questions, the big questions, questions that shape our understanding of and our attitude toward our physical bodies and the body of the earth, questions about the world as we know it.

The beauty is all around. If and when you happen to notice, your senses are bathing you in beauty:...

Confusing and difficult bible the find you do? Backward it reading try.

That Bible? Those two testaments? They were not written from the beginning to the end. Imagine these two testaments as a twin pack of delicious Hostess Twinkies. Two cream-filled treats wrapped in sponge cake that can sometimes taste kind of stale. People, go for the frosty cream filling inside! It’s OK! Suck the middle out of it first!¹

Let’snotstart at the very beginning. It’snota very good place to start. When you read, you begin with A-B-C. When you sing, you begin with do-re-mi. When...

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s this little three-letter word, a highly religious word, that some pastors and theologians often avoid. It’s a word that has to do, roughly, with transgression, waywardness, distortion, missing the mark, erring, indiscretion, the shadow side. That three-letter word we so love to avoid? S-I-N. Sin. There. I said it. And I feel better.

But let me explain. Some of you might think that those of us who are careful about using this word simply don’t believe in sin, that we avoid talking about sin because we consider it irrelevant, uncouth, tasteless—an antiquated notion...

Have you heard of Saint Brendan—the saint from County Kerry, in Ireland—and his voyage? I was doing some research on the subject of heaven, hell, and the last judgment, and I came across these writings:The Voyage of St. Brendan, otherwise known asThe Navagatio.

Born in 486 c.e., Brendan was intrigued by tales of the afterlife—specifically by tales of “a land promised to the saints.” He became obsessed with a singular vision, to see if he could find that land, this side of the grave. And so he built a coracle of wattle (a frame made...

I do not take lightly the title to this chapter. I mean it. Only grace can confront us in the right way. Only by first hearing that we are loved, madly and unconditionally, can we then hear the truth about us—including the ugly truths that we are not able to otherwise hear. In this chapter, we’ll wrestle with a couple of meaty biblical texts about this ethics of butt-kickin’ grace. But first, we’ll have some fun with words, inspired by my twenty-five-year infatuation with the writings of Karl Barth.¹

Get to know the greatIbehind theI, the...

I am not going to tell you everything there is to know about the church here. In countless books on historical theology, you can look up the history of the etymology ofekklesia(Greek for “gathering”), and you can look up the Constantinopolitan Supplement to the Nicene Creed (381), which attempted to set forth the four marks of the church: the church is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” But beware. There are generous readings of these attempts, and there are stingy ones.

But if there is a “people of God” through-line running through both testaments and played out in the...

Thomas aquinas (1226–1274) WAS one of the great theologians of all time. His epic workSumma Theologica(The sum of theological knowledge) was nine years in the making and in current translations spans over thirty-five hundred pages. Yet three months before his death, Thomas received a revelation from God that summoned him to put down his pen and forever surrender his theological writing. “The end of all my labors has come,” he confessed. “All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.”

So much straw? All those...

Today, as i’m thinking about my friend Mark Stenberg and the book you’ve just read, I am reminded of our days at Bethel College, where Mark and I were roommates in 1979. The year 1979 wasthetime to get a Christian liberal-arts education, when it meant something. And by that I mean there was a lot of time to hang out and listen to music.

The year 1979 was also a great time to be listening to music. In the mid-’70s, we had just witnessed a major principality, the Top 40, lose ground to the plucky upstart, “album-oriented rock.”...