Who Do You Say I Am

"WHAT ARE THEY saying about me? What do you think about me?" Everybody has asked these questions but when Jesus of Nazareth posed them to his friends at Caesarea-Philippi, an ancient Roman cosmopolitan city on the edge of the Sea of Galilee, he started a discussion that continues to baffle, enrage and inspire people two millennia later. I have always wondered if these were real or trick questions. Was Jesus cornering Peter into giving the right dogmatic answer, later to be included in sacred writings, or was this an open question addressed to all people? I don't want

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Resurrection: Beyond Ghosts and Ghouls

MORE THAN A fact or doctrine, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth embodies personal and historical hope. While reading a variety of viewpoints on the resurrection, I have been alternatively confused, comforted, restored and unexpectedly devastated by this theme. Internally and subjectively the resurrection is an encounter with the epicenter of meaning and significance. Without a living encounter and reliance on the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, spirituality amounts to little more than armchair speculation. This strikes at the root of my fears because my intellect hesitates to believe that a person whose bodily functions had ceased, whose tether to

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A Review Of Introduction Psalms

The four major types of psalms (community hymns, thanksgiving hymns of individuals, laments of both individual and community), four minor types (royal, creation, wisdom, and enthronement), and poetic idioms (Hebrew acrostic and parallelism) are clearly introduced through representative passages. Helpful as this introduction is, it is the flow and history of an ever-changing relationship to God that rivets the reader to the book. Getting a taste of how traditions unfolded in the original storytelling sessions and how later retellings move beyond the original intentions of the writers toward the needs of

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An Unmerited Unity

I began my current exploration of the life and theology of Martin Luther by reading Richard Marius' Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death. I am glad I did. Marius doesn't idealize Luther in the least. His meticulously reed biography raises a raft of doubts about Luther's place in history. Marius interprets Luther more as a schismatic than a reformer. Luther comes off as a character-disordered individual. While creative, brilliant and earnest, Luther nonetheless displayed a boorish and pugnacious attitude toward all who disagreed with him, a fawning dependency on political 'father-substitutes', and a life-long morbid fear of death

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Journey into Modern Culture: The Spiritual Theology of Richard Niebuhr

I selected Richard Niebuhr as an exemplar and trailblazer into modern culture because he combined the cataphatic (with image) and apophatic (without image) modes of spiritual life and thought. These technical terms from spiritual theology were not used by Niebuhr nor are they normally used by moral theologians, especially those practicing fifty years ago. Nonetheless, applying these terms from spiritual theology may revitalize Niebuhr's thought and position it in the context of spiritual theology.

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The Return of Christ Transcript

I find myself caught between seeing the Return of Christ as symbolic and seeing it as a literal historical occurrence. The ideas of time and history are so difficult to get our heads around. Time seems a human construct based on our awareness of mortality. Aging and progress seems like byproducts. I feel like our fear of the end of the world is analogous to the end of our personal lives. Lately there have been other ways to understand time in history -- that all that exists continues to exist and merely changes form. So when our bodies die we

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