For those who hold to traditional Christian theology, explaining what happened to Jesus on the cross doesn’t take long: Humans are sinful…sin makes God angry…God requires a sacrifice to quell God’s anger…God sent his son Jesus to be that sacrifice. So, on the cross, God killed (or perhaps just permitted) the execution of Jesus in order to satisfy God’s anger against sinful humanity. Got it? Good. That settles it.

Actually, that doesn’t settle it if you’re Tony Jones, a theologian and author of “Did God Kill Jesus? Searching for Love in History’s Most Famous Execution.” He argues that notions of a God who demanded and perhaps participated in the gruesome execution of an innocent Jesus is largely an invention of the medieval church that became enshrined in orthodox Christianity, and is not what the Bible actually teaches. Here we discuss what he thinks Christians have gotten wrong and how he understands the cross event differently.

RNS: You critique the notion that humans are “sinners in the hands of an angry God” because it is “not what the Bible teaches.” What do you think we’ve gotten wrong?

TJ: The beautiful thing about the cross is that it has always been the answer. It’s the question that has changed. So I’m not necessarily saying that Jonathan Edwards was wrong when he preached that to his congregation. To his people, in that time and place, the problem of guilt from Adam and Eve’s sin weighed heavily. But centuries before that, the problem wasn’t sin as much as it was Satan and demons—nevertheless, the cross was still the solution.

If we’ve gotten something wrong about the cross in the modern church, it’s that we’ve thought there’s only one way to explain how Jesus’ death saves us. There have been many versions of the doctrine we call the “atonement”: Payment, Victory, Magnet, Divinity, and Mirror. 

RNS: You argue against the notion that God demanded the death of his son to quell his wrath, but don’t you admit that there are at least some Bible passages that seem to teach this?

TJ: The Bible is not univocal when it comes to the cross. Every view of the crucifixion has verses and passages that support it. That’s probably why the early church never convened a council to decide once-and-for-all how to understand the cross, as it did for the natures of Christ, the Trinity, and the books of the Bible. There actually are not any passages that explicitly say that God’s wrath could only be satisfied by his perfect son’s death, but you can string together a few verses from various places to make that argument.

RNS: How does the traditional understanding make us fearful of God?

CONTINUE READING…

Because Jews and Christians believe that God is something different than what we know and experience in this world, the biblical authors used metaphor to paint pictures of what God was like. Some of these are familiar to many–God as shepherd or God as father. But others are less familiar, such as God as midwife. So Lauren Winner, a bestselling author and professor of Christian Spirituality at Duke Divinity School, decided to explore the lesser known divine metaphors in Scripture.

In “Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God,” Winner explores many surprising and provocative images for God that help us experience and understand God in fresh ways. Here she gives us a sneak peek into the book, which releases next week, and the metaphors she explores.

RNS: Some have said that we can’t directly speak of God but can only “get at” God through metaphor. Is this correct?

LW: We can, without metaphor, say some formal things about God: God is the One who is what God has, and so forth. But Scripture seems to like to speak of God in very ordinary figurative language. God is bread. God is clothing. This suggests that what you wear, what you eat, and how you experience the weather has something to offer you about God. God chose to reveal who God is through language of the ordinary everyday. This choice tells us, I think, of God’s desire to be intimately related to us.

RNS: Most people limit their God-talk to three or four images–shepherd, king, Father. How does this limit our understanding of the Divine?

CONTINUE READING…

It’s been more than two years since the controversial preacher Rob Bell upset conservative Christians by questioning the existence of hell in his book Love Wins. Now Bell is back, with a television talk show premiering this month on Oprah’s OWN Network and a new book on marriage. Rob has co-authored The Zimzum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage with his wife, Kristen. Here, we talk about the book, why they wrote it, and what it says that may surprise readers.

RNS: Rob, the title of this book, “The ZimZum of Love,” sounds very “Rob Bell-ish.” Where did it come from, and what does it mean?

RB: Marriage is about creating space in your life for another to thrive–full of life and energy and love–while they’re doing the same for you. The ancient sages had a way of talking about the divine energies that brought the universe into being, about God creating space for all of what we know to be everything to exist as it does. The word they used for this contraction of the divine to create space is “zimzum.” We came across the word more than a decade ago and thought, “That sounds like what happens when you’re married…we should write a book about that.” So we did.

RNS: Kristen, this book promotes the idea that both partners should flourish. We’ve heard a lot about Rob while you’ve been more behind the scenes. How have you two worked to make sure you too are flourishing on your own? 

KB: Yes, I have always liked being behind the scenes, keeping things running. I like to say that I’m the rudder–you don’t necessarily see me, but I’m steering the ship. Rob and I have always had a sense of mission about our life and marriage. We are in this adventure together, which means we make all our decisions together about which direction to go, what to say yes and no to. For us, the zimzum happens with the daily decisions as well as the big picture. We are always having conversations about our own individual lives.

It is very important to me to give my best to my kids during this season, to pursue my own spiritual growth and to keep asking questions and then taking steps towards my calling. My calling has been intertwined with the work that Rob is doing in the world, and I have found great satisfaction and joy in that work. With the release of this book my work is changing and I’m enjoying this new season as well.

CONTINUE READING…

A battle over the Bible always seems to be brewing among Christians. From what the Bible is to what it says to how to interpret, they can’t seem to stop squabbling over the Scriptures. Peter Enns is on the front lines of this conversation with a new message: stop defending the Bible….

RNS: Summarize for me what the Bible is and isn’t in a handful of words.

PE: The Bible is holy scripture, not because it achieves some standard of perfection driven by alien theological requirements, but because God in his wisdom—which is inscrutable and no one can question—has given the church a collection of diverse, ancient writings. These writings span as much as 2000 years, arise out of many different contexts, and address a multitude of diverse, concrete concerns of the time. This is the inspired text we have, and we respect it and God when we refrain from imposing upon it modern expectations of systematic coherence and historical accuracy.

[tweetable]The Bible isn’t like an owner’s manual or legal contract[/tweetable], where we follow clearly a set of rules and if we deviate from them we risk spiritual disaster. Neither is it a depository of historical or theological information that conforms to modern alien standards of “perfection,” accuracy, or consistency. I believe that perpetuating these expectations sells the Bible (and God) short, for it spends so much time scurrying about explaining why the Bible doesn’t seem to behave as we “know” it should—which suggests, ironically, that God is not a good communicator.

RNS: What is the biggest misconception about the Bible held by Christians who believe differently than you?

PE: The biggest misconception is in expecting of the Bible something it simply doesn’t deliver—or can only deliver through an ingenious array of “defenses” and “explanations.” These tactics are not intentionally deceptive or destructive, but are driven by fear of losing a hold on the only Bible they know, which then threatens their faith in God. The logic is that divine inspiration must necessarily yield an inerrant Bible, and so to speak of inaccuracies and contradictions is seen not only as an affront to God, but in some cases casts doubt on God’s very existence.

The Bible cannot bear the weight of inerrantist thinking. Expecting it to is the true cause of disquiet and despair for those who have read the Bible and see the cracks in the inerrantist logic.

CONTINUE READING…

Few religious voices need no introduction. Desmond Tutu is one of them.

As the former Archbishop of Cape Town, Tutu became a leading human rights advocate who has championed causes such as poverty, racism, homophobia, sexism, HIV/AIDS and war. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. In his newest work, The Book of Forgiving (co-authored with his daughter, Mpho Tutu), he offers four steps to forgiving and healing:

1. Telling the Story
2. Naming the Hurt
3. Granting Forgiveness
4. Renewing or Releasing the Relationship

Here, we discuss this process, how his experiences with apartheid relate to it, and how he answers those who’ve criticized it.

RNS: Your first step to forgiveness and healing is to “admit the wrong and acknowledge the harm.” Doesn’t that just dredge up old pain?

DT: For both the offender and the victim, the pain is there, often unacknowledged and that is when it can cause harm through festering. When I ignore a physical wound, it does not go away. No, it festers and goes bad. [tweetable]It may be initially painful to open up a wound, but then it can be cleaned out and cauterized.[/tweetable] And you can pour a healing balm.

RNS: Another step you list is “asking for…and granting forgiveness.” How do you forgive someone who doesn’t think they’ve done anything wrong?

CONTINUE READING…

I’m typing these words from Beirut, Lebanon after spending the day at refugee tent settlements about 10 minutes from the Syrian border. My trip has me pondering the importance of the Middle East for my faith and its history. The Rev. James Martin knows how I feel.

A Jesuit priest and editor-at-large of America magazine, Martin also recently visited this region, which he documents in a fascinating new book, Jesus: A Pilgrimage. Martin brings his journey through the Holy Land to life by moving beyond mere to stories to telling us what it taught him about a Jesus who can often seem distant. Here, we discuss what he learned about Christ while traveling through the cradle of Christianity.

RNS: You begin the story of your trek through the Holy Land to rediscover Jesus with the classic question Christ asked his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” How do you answer that question?

JM: For me, Jesus is everything! But to answer more directly, Jesus is the fully human, fully divine Son of God. That’s why one of the goals of the book is to underline the importance of both his humanity and divinity. The same person who walked the dusty landscape of first-century Palestine also rose from the dead. To put it in more theological terms, the Jesus of history is the Christ of faith. Otherwise, the Resurrection is meaningless.

Moreover, Jesus is always fully human and fully divine. Whenever I give talks on the book, I like to invite people to think of him as human at times when he “seems” more divine, and divine when he “seems” more human. So I say: He’s divine when he’s sawing a piece of wood in the carpentry workshop. And he’s human when he’s raising Lazarus from the dead. That usually shakes people up!

RNS: You say, “Jesus’ humanity is a stumbling block for many people, including a few Christians.” What do you mean?

JM: Many of us have a hard time with a Jesus who shows what you might call “difficult” emotions, especially anger and frustration. One example is his interaction with the “Syrophoenician woman,” who in the Gospel of Mark asks Jesus to heal her sick daughter. Jesus responds by saying something that New Testament scholars note was “highly insulting” at the time: “It’s not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” In my book, I offer explanations of why he might have been harsh—he was testing her faith, or he initially wasn’t expecting to deal with someone who wasn’t Jewish, and so on.

Any way you look at it, it’s a sharp remark, at odds with the Jesus most of us expect to meet in the Gospels. So we have to grapple with his real humanity, as it is presented in the Gospels. Otherwise we’re missing an important side of him.

RNS: You note that there are some variations in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth. What do you make of this?

CONTINUE READING…

(Note: This is part two of my interview with NT Wright. The first part addresses the Bible and why he doesn’t call himself an inerrantist.)

TIME Magazine called him “one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought.” Newsweek once labeled him “the world’s leading New Testament scholar.” His name is N.T. Wright, and he has just written a controversial book on the Bible.

In “Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues,” Wright comes out swinging on theological hot buttons such as Darwinian evolution, whether Adam was a historical figure, and why he thinks the Bible makes space for women pastors. Here, we discuss the issues of homosexuality, science and gender.

RNS: Many American evangelicals believe that the Bible requires the rejection of Darwinian evolution. You dedicated your book to Francis Collins and address science right out of the gate. Do you think American evangelicals have created a false choice between what they believe the Bible says and the dominant views of modern science?

NTW: Some have, some haven’t. Sadly, many have been taught that there is a straight choice: either biblical Christianity or Darwinian evolution. Actually, some of the great conservative American theologians in the late 19th century—I’m thinking of B. B. Warfield and others—didn’t see it like that at all.

The problem is that Darwin’s findings were “heard” by the wider community within the popular Enlightenment “Epicureanism” (Jeffersonm etc.) in which God—if there is a God—is a long way away, so the world just does its own thing. That is a modern version of an ancient philosophy which Jews and Christians always rejected. The trouble is that much “conservative” Christianity in America has bought into the same split-level worldview and simply emphasizes the “God” side of it. The false “either-or” of “Bible or Darwin” is thus itself a dangerous symptom of a sub-Christian culture. I explain all this in that first chapter, of course. But yes, it is a false choice. We urgently need to take a couple of steps back in order to see the issues more clearly and go forward with confidence.

RNS: There’s a chapter in your book about natural disasters and the problem of evil. I’ve heard some theologians outright declare that God “caused” an earthquake or flood or tsunami. Is this wrongheaded in your view?

CONTINUE READING…

Note: This is the first in a two-part interview. Part two centers on the topics of science, sexuality, natural disasters and gender.)

TIME Magazine called him “one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought.” Newsweek once labeled him “the world’s leading New Testament scholar.” His name is N.T. Wright, and he has just written a controversial book on the Bible.

In “Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues,” Wright comes out swinging on theological hot buttons such as Darwinian evolution, whether Adam was a historical figure, and why he thinks the Bible makes space for women pastors. Here, we discuss his ideas about what the Bible is and isn’t, and why he doesn’t call him a Biblical “inerrantist.”

RNS: No matter where a Christian falls on the spectrum, you’ll find something in this book to love and something to ruffle your feathers. Why did you decide to pen a book that touches on so many contentious issues? Do you expect pushback?

NTW: The book emerged from many different situations over a period of a few years. I didn’t set out to ruffle feathers, but to try to bring some biblical clarity to areas in which many Christians today, in the UK as well as the USA, are genuinely confused. So much of what people take to be “Christianity” is in fact an odd combination of things that really are in the Bible with things that are part of western culture from the last two or three hundred years. Figuring out which is which and how it all works is bound to be puzzling to some people if they’ve been firmly taught something else.

A lifetime of working in some very different churches has taught me that people come with all kinds of odd ideas and that a little clear biblical teaching goes a long way, and also that sometimes people resist it nervously because “it’s not what they said in Sunday School.” I’m all for Sunday schools, but there is a time for people to grow up and see things differently.

CONTINUE READING…

As pastor of Church of the Resurrection, Adam Hamilton has the honor of leading the largest United Methodist congregation in the United States. More than 8,600 attend services each week, and the Kansas congregation is considered by many to be America’s most influential mainline Protestant church. But with the release of his provocative new book, “Making Sense of the Bible: Rediscovering the Power of Scripture Today,” Hamilton is becoming known as someone who is challenging traditional understandings the Bible.

Here we discuss the message of his book and how he navigates the most difficult and debated passages.

RNS: You believe the Bible is divinely “inspired.” Can you explain what you mean exactly?

AH: The biblical authors were people like us. Christians do not hold, as Muslims do, that our holy book was dictated by God. The biblical authors wrote in particular times, for particular audiences, out of a particular context. Part of rightly interpreting Scripture is reading it in the light of what we can know about its historical and cultural context, the author’s purposes in writing and knowing something about the people they were writing to.

In 2 Timothy 3:16 Paul writes, “All Scripture is inspired by God…” Christians often assume they know what this means, but Paul seems to have created the word “inspired.” It does not appear in the Greek language before this and is used nowhere else in the Bible. It literally means “God-breathed” but Paul doesn’t go on to explain precisely what he means. It is a metaphor, and metaphors are not precise. Push them too far and they break down.

When I think of inspired, I think of God-influenced. This leaves open a variety of ways in which the biblical authors were influenced by God.

RNS: A lot of critics reject the Bible because of the violence in the Old Testament. What say you?

CONTINUE READING…

Religion students at Yale Divinity School blame Dr. Joel Baden for “ruining” King David for them. Baden insists this was not his intention.

But in his new book, The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero, the Old Testament professor digs into the past of this hero of the faith and argues the iconic Biblical character has been misunderstood. He says that he found someone more animated than the glorified felt-board action hero many have come to know. Here we talk about his controversial findings and why he thinks we should ignore his critics to believe what he says.

JM: What is the false caricature of King David which you believe needs to be dissembled?

JB: In the New Testament, David is described with a brief and powerful phrase: “a man after God’s own heart.” It’s hard to imagine a more positive description–after all, this is what every person of faith strives to be. The most famous story from the Bible about David provides plenty of support for this image of him. Almost everyone knows of David’s encounter with Goliath, the bravery he shows when the rest of Israel is afraid to confront the giant, and his remarkable statement of trust in God: “You come at me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the ranks of Israel.”

This premier example of faith in action is counterposed with the other popular conception of David, as the composer of the Psalms.  When we read and hear the words “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” there we have the same faith expressed in song. These texts and traditions stand behind our cultural view of David not only as Israel’s greatest king, but also as the paradigm of a great God-fearing person. When we add in the ancient belief that David is the direct ancestor of, and even model for, the Messiah–a belief common to both Judaism and Christianity–then David’s apotheosis is essentially complete.  Even in his lowest moments (the affair with Bathsheba, in most people’s eyes), David is an exemplar of human repentance and divine forgiveness.

David is the undisputed hero of the Hebrew Bible. Tradition, both in the Bible itself and thereafter, has only increased his standing. (The narratives in the Bible of David’s life, for example, never claim that he actually wrote the Psalms.) There is some real basis for the glorification of David: he was an authentically important (this word is not even strong enough) historical figure, a man who changed the course of human history: the founder of a nation and, in many ways, of a religion.

The question I try to address in the book is, which parts of the story are glorification, and which parts are more historically plausible? This isn’t a question of denying David’s achievements as a national leader, or even his existence (as is relatively common in biblical scholarship). But the David of the Bible, and even more so the David of popular tradition, is a nearly perfected human being. This is theologically a fine thing, but I wanted to explore whether it could be true historically as well.

JM: Why do you think it’s been important to people of faith to paint David as something other than an ambitious power player?