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I read a quotation recently in which the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, musing on the negotiation of clout, gave an appropriate summation of the power of Christ’s love and kindness, saying, “I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force! Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.” I confess, I have often wondered how a soft Jesus would instill such devotion in the hearts of men. I suppose the answer rests in this mingling of challenge and kindness. But the kindness part is not so palatable for me, the word kindness rings as a synonym to, well, weakness, wimpiness. I came across a book a few years ago, however, that helped me understand the power of kindness in leadership. The book was about a man named John Gagliardi and his career as head football coach at St. John’s University. The unorthodox method in which Coach Gagliardi leads [...]

Biblically, you are hard-pressed to find theological ideas divorced from their relational context. There are, essentially, three dominant metaphors describing our relationship with God: sheep to a shepherd, child to a father, and bride to a bridegroom. The idea of Christ’s disciples being His mother and father and brothers and sisters is also presented. In fact, few places in Scripture speak to the Christian conversion experience through any method other than relational metaphor. Contrasting this idea, I recently heard a man, while explaining how a person could convert to Christianity, say the experience was not unlike deciding to sit in a chair. He said that while a person can have faith that a chair will hold him, it is not until he sits in the chair that he has acted on his faith. I wondered as I heard this if the chair was a kind of a symbol for Jesus, and how irritated Jesus might be if a lot of people kept trying to sit on Him. And then I wondered at how Jesus could say He was a Shepherd and we were sheep, and that the Father in heaven was our Father and we were His children, and that [...]

Perhaps the reason Scripture includes so much poetry in and outside the narrative, so many parables and stories, so many visions and emotional letters, is because it is attempting to describe a relational break man tragically experienced with God and a disturbed relational history man has had since then and, furthermore, a relational dynamic man must embrace in order to have relational intimacy with God once again, thus healing himself of all the crap he gets into while looking for a relationship that makes him feel whole. Maybe the gospel of Jesus, in other words, is all about our relationship with Jesus rather than about ideas. And perhaps our lists and formulas and bullet points are nice in the sense that they help us memorize different truths, but harmful in the sense that they blind us to the necessary relationship that must begin between ourselves and God for us to become His followers. And worse, perhaps our formulas and bullet points and steps steal the sincerity with which we might engage God. Becoming a Christian might look more like falling in love than baking cookies. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that in order for a person [...]

When I think about God arriving in the Garden after the Fall, I think about Jimmy Carter arriving at the base of Mount Saint Helens after the eruption. It’s just fifty miles across the river, Mount Saint Helens, and on a clear day you can see it from Portland. And I remember seeing Jimmy Carter getting out of his helicopter, the belly of the helicopter caked in mud, the sides of it gray with ash. Carter stepped down from his seat, his expression confused, troubled, all the pain of a region mapped in the lines of his face. And later, when I was twenty-one, I went to the place myself and tried to imagine it then. I imagined Harry Truman at Mirror Lake, refusing to leave despite the warnings. I imagined two thousand feet of this once great mountain coming down on him, sliding him and his lake over the next mountain and down the other side, displacing the body of water altogether. There were tremors, only a month of them, hardly a warning for a mountain that had sat dormant for a hundred years. A few years ago I drove up the winding road in my car, the fresh [...]

You would think some of the writers of the Bible would have gone to a Christian writers’ seminar to learn the magical formulas about how to dangle a carrot in front of a rabbit, but they didn’t. Instead, the writers of the Bible tell a lot of stories and account for a lot of history and write down a lot of poems and recite a great many boring numbers and then conclude with various creepy hallucinations that, in some mysterious way, explain the future, in which, apparently, we all slip into Dungeons and Dragons outfits and fight the giant frog people. I forget how it goes exactly, and I mean no disrespect. But because it is so scatterbrained, and has virtually no charts and graphs, I am actually quite surprised the Bible sells. Perhaps it’s those lovely and colorful maps, which puzzles me because they aren’t even current. But I like the Bible. Now that I no longer see it as a self-help book, it has infinitely more merit. It has soul, I guess you could say. As far as the writers in the Bible go, there are a few I like more than others. I like Paul the best [...]