Is the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a man known to the public, whom witnesses saw tried, beaten, crucified, and buried–is his Resurrection from the dead fact or fiction? This is the central question of Christianity. Every other question pales in significance, because unless Jesus is really raised from the dead, then all else is [...]
This looks like an amazing resource from someone we’re proud to call a friend of the Inn! You can purchase Doug’s book on Amazon.
The focus of my last post was the public character of the resurrection that makes the gospel rather different from the sheer power of personal assertion or experience. Here are some suggestions for communicating this central Christian claim to others—and not only at Easter! Suggestions for Conversations The gospel’s effects are deep and wide, so [...]
“Turn your scars into stars and your cross into a stepping stone.” Trivializations such as these have now become a staple even in many evangelical churches at Easter. A mainline Methodist tells the story of visiting a well-known evangelical church at Easter, hoping to hear the gospel. Waiting in anticipation, he says there was nothing [...]
Every Easter affords fresh opportunities for national news magazines to take up the question of Jesus’s resurrection. It’s difficult to point with any firmness to a “consensus” in Jesus scholarship any more than in other studies. Nevertheless, even liberals recognize (and lament) a trend in New Testament scholarship away from many of the “assured results” [...]
This image, from the MSNBC homepage, of pilgrims in Jerusalem commemorating Good Friday, is a great example of the changing face of world Christianity. No longer predominantly western; the public face of Christianity is beginning to reflect what the first Christians probably looked like: the pilgrims who gathered in Israel, the “Parthians and Medes and [...]
Every Christmas and Easter you can count on national periodicals to carry cover stories on “the search for the sacred,” “the Jesus quest,” and heaven. This Easter proves to be no exception, with Newsweek’s Lisa Miller contributing an April 5, 2010 piece, “Far From Heaven.” It is based on her new book, Heaven: Our Enduring [...]
