Christianity
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In his review of Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God, Luke Timothy Johnson readily concedes that neither the empty-tomb stories nor the accounts of Jesus’ appearing to the disciples after his crucifixion prove–or could prove–the Christian confession that Jesus is divine. Rather, Johnson says, this confession was rooted in the early Christians’ experience of being Read more
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According to Walter Brueggemann, in his essay “The Counter-World of the Psalms,”* the Psalms mediate to us a “counter-world” that subverts our “closely held world”–that is, the narrative or worldview we commonly live by. What is this “closely held” world like? For Brueggemann, it is a picture of the world characterized by anxiety and scarcity, Read more
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Peter Enns recounts a conversation he had with a Jewish colleague in graduate school about the story of Adam and Eve: So my classmate and I were having lunch talking about this story and I mentioned casually the “fall” of humanity. “The what?” “The fall of humanity. You know, Adam and Eve’s sin plunged all Read more
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Reading 20th-century Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel’s important work God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism recently, I was struck by this passage: There are only three ways of judging the prophets: they told the truth, deliberately invented a tale, or were victims of an illusion. In other words, revelation is either a Read more
A Thinking Reed 