We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Thinking Biblically?

Bible

Olga Caprotti via Compfight

Micah J. Murray over at Redemption Pictures posted this reflection called Beware of Thinking Biblically. The image of a google search on the topic is worth the price of admission. Christians throw around this phrase in some really damaging ways, as Rachel Held Evans demonstrated in her recent publication of A Year of Biblical Womanhood. What do we mean by “thinking Biblically” and how can we avoid using this phrase to marshall support for our various sacred cows? Keeping Jesus at the center and maintaining a healthy amount of humility and openness would go a long way.

From Micah’s reflection:

So do we give up on “thinking Biblically” altogether? Certainly not. But we must approach our own conversations with the constant awareness that we might be wrong. That we don’t have all the answers. That someday, five hundred or a hundred or thirty years from now our brothers and sisters may look back and wonder how we could have missed the point. We must be open minded, willing to read its pages over and over again and change our minds as our hearts are opened to the truth.

And always, always, we must cling to Jesus.

 

Related Reading

Podcast: Does a Jesus-Centric Theology Reduce God?

Greg challenges the traditional starting point of many theologies and defends starting our theology about God’s nature and character with what has been revealed about Jesus. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0325.mp3

Does God Inflict Physical Disabilities?

In Exodus 4, we find Moses claiming that he could not be used by Yahweh to get the children of Israel out of Egypt because he was “slow of speech and tongue.” To this Yahweh replies, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them…

God’s Non-Violent Ideal in the OT

While God condescended to working within the violent-prone, fallen framework of his people in the Old Testament—as I argue in Crucifixion of the Warrior God—the OT is also full of references to how God worked to preserve his non-violent ideal as much as possible. He did this by continually reminding his people not to place…

Revolting Beauty

In this sermon clip, Greg shares the story of how foster parents entered into the pain of a severely abused child and demonstrated compassion rather than judgment when she displayed puzzling and revolting behaviors. This moving story illustrates the way that God enters into our sin and our curse on the cross, and gives us…

Would God Kill a Baby To Teach Parents a Lesson?

Question: We have a group of guys that are going through your book “Is God to Blame” and a question came up that I would be curious how you would look at it. In the beginning of the book you ask the question “do you really think that God kills babies to teach parents a lesson?”…

Eye for Eye: That Time Jesus Refuted An Old Testament Teaching

One of the most surprising aspects of Jesus’ teaching is that, while he clearly shared his contemporaries’ view of the Old Testament as inspired by God, he was nevertheless not afraid of repudiating it when he felt led by his Father to do so (Jn. 8:28; 12:49-50; 14:31). For example, while the OT commands people…