Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Bible

  • ŠEQER: JEREMIAH AND THE LIE THAT UNDERMINES EVERYTHING

    Sometimes a single word helps put a name to something you have been struggling to understand. For me recently such a word has been šeqer (pronounced shéqer), biblical Hebrew for “falsehood,” “a lie”). I came upon šeqer in the best possible way—by accident. I was rummaging around in my library looking for books on Jeremiah. I preached this weekend,…

  • WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DIE?

    THINKING ABOUT CHRISTIAN HOPE What happens when we die?  Perhaps we should ask the question in a more abstract, more overtly theological, way: what is the shape of Christian hope? I come in part to these questions because they have been forcefully raised by the popular New Testament scholar, N. T. Wright in his latest…

  • READING THEOLOGICALLY, AND WHY IT MATTERS

    God’s Homecoming Last week I published a rather long review of a popular book by N. T. Wright, God’s Homecoming (2025). I spent some time with the book because I think it raises important issues. In it, Wright attempts to redefine what it means to be human—what it means to live and to die apart from two…

  • LIFE BEYOND: A REVIEW OF GOD’S HOMECOMING by N. T. Wright

    N. T. Wright, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal (HarperOne, 2025; digital edition, 2026) He understands as he mouths the words what’s happening here. He desperately wants to believe that his son still exists, still exists in some actual sense, not just as a memory, and what happened to him is somehow part of some…

  • CHANGING EXPECTATIONS

    GETTING RESURRECTION RIGHT I’m back—from Europe, that is, from a part of Europe where religion remains vital—the countries of the former Yugoslavia—and where religious traditions meet, sometimes in peace and sometimes not. More on that in later posts. (If you would like an introduction to the complicated religious and political scene in the region, check…

  • WHEN THINGS FALL APART

    HOPE IN A TIME OF DISINTEGRATION Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst  Are full of passionate intensity.                  W.H. Yeats, “The Second…

  • JESSE JACKSON AT CALVIN SEMINARY

    JESSE JACKSON AT CALVIN SEMINARY When I was a seminary student, the late Jesse Jackson came to speak. In my memory, likely faulty, it was my first year at Calvin Theological Seminary, placing Jackson’s appearance in late 1968 or early 1969. Only months before, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.…

  • THE IMPULSE TO EXPLAIN

    Seeker Services In 1975, Bill Hybels, a Chicago youth pastor with roots in the Christian Reformed Church, started a movement to bring new people into the church. He proposed a style of service stripped of anything that might put unchurched people off: no crosses on the walls, no old hymns, not much scripture. A message…

  • GARDEN STORIES

    Pondering the Story For years I have pondered the garden story in Genesis 2-3. The story is part of a larger conversation in the ancient Middle Eastern culture about what it means to be human, including such stories as Adapa and the Gilgamesh. To be human, so goes the ancient conversation, is to be between: between the animal…

  • MORE (MOSTLY SHORT) NOTES ON HOW TO READ THE BIBLE WITH JOY

    MORE (MOSTLY SHORT) NOTES ON HOW TO READ THE BIBLE WITH JOY A few posts back I made a few suggestions about how to read the Bible with joy and a certain confidence. Five simple suggestions: To those five suggestions for reading the Bible, allow me to add five more, beginning with: 1. Laugh occasionally. The Bible…