Category Archives: Jesus

Poor Happens

covenant, deuteronomy/deuteronomism, ethics, Jesus, Job, poverty, sin, wisdom literature

And His disciples asked Him, saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?” (John 9:2 NAS)

Poverty is not (proof of) sin.  Poverty is not a character flaw.  Poverty happens to people.

John’s Gospel records an episode in Jesus’ ministry in which his disciples revealed their sadly respectable conventionality.  Two prominent strands of theological tradition running throughout the Old Testament converged in their question concerning the identity of the sinner responsible for an unfortunate man’s blindness.

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The Sovereignty of God and the Sears Catalog

free will, Jesus, sovereignty, , , , ,

On Genesis 17

Some years ago, Dennis came to my office to talk about how his study of the Bible had reshaped his understanding of God.  He related an episode in his life just a few years earlier involving the purchase of a swing set for his young daughter.  His church background had emphasized the sovereignty of God, including the notion that God’s

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“Outside Agitators”

church, interpretation, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jesus, Matthew, Pauline epistles, poverty, prophecy, racism

In the previous entry in this blog, I argued that the most profitable approach to reading prophetic literature involves a variety of “pattern recognition.”  Yesterday, the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, I took the opportunity to re-read Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” his famed “I Have a Dream” speech, and the concluding chapter of his

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Let us make God in our image and according to our likeness

atheism, Christmas, imago Dei, Jesus

“The chief end of [humankind] is to glorify God.”

The Westminster Shorter Catechism

Readers of the Bible will recognize the title of this entry as a paraphrase of Genesis 1:26, the statement of God’s intention to create humankind.  The paraphrase echoes a position often taken by critics of religion (Sigmund Freud, and more recently Christopher Kitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others), namely, that human beings simply project a super-human

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Christmas Prophecy

Christmas, Isaiah, Jesus, Matthew, poverty, prophecy, refugees

Christmas disturbs me this year.  Usually, I hear in the Christmas story the announcement that the prophetic insight encapsulated in the phrase “Immanu-el (Hebrew, “God is with us”; Isa 7:14; Matt 1:23) has found ultimate expression in the birth of a child. Christmas usually reminds me that God wants communion with human beings, created in God’s image, to such a degree that God was willing come to us as an infant child.  Christmas usually reminds me that we do not have to speculate about the character of the God, mysterious and majestic, who created the universe.  Instead, God so desires to reveal

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