Method Archives
There is more than meets the eye. Sight alone can be deceptive. The full use of the five senses may actually blind us to the awareness of a deeper reality. What we see is not all there is. There is a realm of reality that eludes and evades those who rely only upon sight to navigate this world.
»MORE
The study of the origin or
evolution of religion usually attracts those who are antagonistic to religion. For such individuals, no matter what the evidence reveals, the
existence of God is rejected. If the religions studied are in conflict, then
they must
all be wrong. If they are similar, then they must merely be human
inventions.
»MORE
"Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ." Why is hearing celebrated in scripture while sight is held in suspicion? What advantages does the word have over the image to the life of faith? These are vital questions in an image-saturated culture that has great difficulty listening to liturgy and preaching, must less reflect on their significance.
»MORE
"It's
just a story" is a flippant response that must be rejected. Stories are a powerful truth medium and should never be considered inferior to abstract reasoning. Stories
are truth and we
are our stories.
»MORE
Neither complete despair nor empty faith are the only two options for postmodern people. The real world exists. Even more, a real God exists. However, our human limitations should cause us to recognize that even though our apprehension of reality and God may be true, it
can never be complete.
»MORE
Our story intersects God's story when we answer Jesus' call to "Follow me." Jesus calls us to a journey - a daily walk with Jesus that involves a beginning, an end, and everything in-between. By following Jesus our story intersects with God's story.
»MORE
Truth must be reconnected to kindness, beauty, and goodness. Futhermore, it must be reconnected to spiritual growth in Christian virtue and moral excellence. "For theology is not just an intellectual art; it cultivates the skill of living well."
»MORE
The Church has effectively reduced and misused its greatest treasure - its Spirit-given canonical heritage. In order to correct this, we must expand our embrace to encompass the whole of the Church's canon and rightly use it for the purpose of spiritual formation instead of epistemological criterion.
»MORE
The historic understanding
of
Sola Scriptura does not
teach that Scripture is our
only authority, but that it is our
highest authority.
»MORE
According to the Jesus Seminar, what we possess in the
Gospels is a highly unreliable collection of inauthentic
sayings.
»MORE
Human beings possess a longing for meaning and transcendence. We long to identify with stories that help us understand our world, others, and ourselves. More often than not, stories empower us by presenting a transcendent dimension that makes life worth living. Fantasy stories like
The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe do this with ease by making the transcendent a "natural" part of the story.
»MORE
We must not forget the problems of language in regard to speaking of God. The shift away from “analogical” language to “univocal” language – “the growing confidence that our language about God makes roughly the same sort of sense as our language about creatures” – is the first stage of “the domestication of transcendence.”
»MORE
Total objectivity is not possible for one simple reason: we always bring a person to every discovery. We must reject the possibility of absolute certainty and pure objectivity and instead embrace the adventure of personal knowledge in a world that holds infinite possibilities for discovery.
»MORE
The Bible is a storybook, not an encyclopedia. It is vital that we recover the narrative structure of truth. The story of God is meant to impact our lives and shape our own stories - our own truth. It can only do this insofar as it becomes our story.
»MORE
Many evangelicals have nothing good to say about postmodernity. Too often they equate it with secularism and relativism. This is unfortunate...
»MORE
Truth is knowable. Truth is do-able. Truth is proclaim-able. Thus, the Christian finds herself at odds with radical pluralists who claim that all truth-claims are equal, with postmodernists who question whether truth is knowable, and fundamentalists who reduce truth to propositional truth-claims.
»MORE
Agnostic A. J. Jacobs writes of his attempt to live the ultimate biblical life - to follow the Bible as literally as possible for one year. He quickly recognizes that it is impossible to follow the Bible with consistent literalism. He discovers that “when it comes to the Bible, there is always—but always—some level of interpretation, even on the most seemingly basic rules.”
»MORE
I don't think christocentric goes far enough. Why? Because
ultimately Christ is theocentric.
»MORE
At the heart of Jewish/Christian difference is the simple question: Is Christ the interpretative key to the Hebrew Bible? For Christians, the answer is yes. For Jews, no. This essential difference should demonstrate how vital it is for Christians to interpret all Scripture in light of its relationship to Christ.
»MORE
