Easy. You don’t. You channel it, or re-direct it, or surf it. Note: this is a metaphor. I say this in case someone decides to actually try this and then (if they survive) comes after me with their high-priced-lawyer-cousin-working-for-free claiming…
Sanctified seeing
The following is the text of a homily I preached earlier this afternoon in a School of Divinity chapel service at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina] John 9 is all about seeing and the inability to see. That’s…
Seeking Jesus is like hunting for Easter eggs
Whenever I hear someone suggest the gospels are pretty much straight forward, I want to ask her or him whether we are reading the same books. There are so many times when reading the gospels, I stop, wondering if I…
What Easter means (and why what literally happened on Easter morning is irrelevant)
What matters most is not what historically happened on Easter morning to the body of Jesus but what the Easter story means. The Easter stories in the Gospels are religious/spiritual/theological stories, not historical reports. That is not to say there…
Sharper than the sword: The power of God’s word
In October, Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond had the privilege of hosting all seven volumes of the Heritage Edition of the Saint John’s Bible on our campus. For those not familiar with the project, The Saint John’s Bible is the…
A museum of the Bible is the wrong kind of monument
The founder of the Hobby Lobby chain is building a Bible museum in Washington, D.C. That’s nice. But building a monument to the Bible runs the risk of compounding the serious problem of Bible worship that has plagued evangelical Christianity…
Legislator aims to make Bible state book of Tennessee
By Bob Allen A former Southern Baptist pastor turned state lawmaker has introduced legislation to designate the Bible “the official state book” of Tennessee. Rep. Jerry Sexton, a Republican from Bean Station in the Morristown metropolitan area in East Tennessee,…
When I knew everything
May 8, 1970 was the day when I knew everything. On that day, I received a master of divinity degree after three years of study at an accredited theological seminary. I had received good grades (well, I did get a…
A failure of imagination on reading Scripture, part 1
God sure seems to get a bad rap sometimes, even from his followers. Well, that may go just a bit far. God’s word gets a bad rap much more frequently than he does. How should we handle this? How about…