How can we know God?

In The Naturalist’s Dilemma, I used a video of C.S. Lewis’s famous 1961 article, “Finding Shakespeare” to explain the problem we have with trying to find God in this world. In other words, how would Hamlet find Shakespeare since he is not is his “world?” Science cannot answer this question with God either because, if He exists, He would exist outside of the natural world.

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Everything is relational

In my post, “Thoughts about Intimacy” I said that when we think about God as Father, Son, and Spirt we must understand that He is relational before  we understand anything else about Him. God is love (1 John 4:8), and love is relational. 

How I understand the Old Testament

Much of this is a review of what I’ve written on the subject but will serve as an appropriate ending to this brief series, “Making Sense of the Old Testament,” by summarizing how I read the text.

We’ll already seen that understanding the Old Testament means interpreting the culture it was written to as well the text itself. 

Archeology and the Exodus story

Now it’s time to deal with the elephant in the room. Is the history of Israel and Christianity based on a gigantic lie? Did Jesus and the New Testament writers get it wrong because they accepted the testimony of Moses and Israel’s Exodus?  Deliverance from bondage in Egypt is the very heart of Israel’s story as a people. 

Thoughts about intimacy

When we talk about God, we’re talking about relationship before anything else.  Before all creation, there was mutually shared love between the Father and the Son (John 17:24).  This is important because God is love, and for Him to be love He must be able to express it within Himself, apart from His creation. 

Making sense of the Old Testament – Part Two

When we talk about Old Testament history, we must first understand two inherent problems with understanding history in general, and a third problem with biblical historical criticism in particular.

The first problem is with the nature of ancient history itself. We’re not talking about pure history, but historiography. 

Making sense of the Old Testament – Part One

If we’re going to have a meaningful discussion about the Old Testament we must first go over how to understand it. For instance, superficially reading it as a flat woodenly literal textbook will give us a wrong view of what is being said. It’s not the words of the Bible that are at issue; it’s the interpretation of those words that pose the challenge for us.