Christians everywhere celebrate communion.  Christians do it because of quite specific guidance given by Jesus in the Bible: “this do in remembrance of me.”

 That instruction appears in all four gospels (Matthew 26: 26-28; Mark 14: 22-24; Luke 22: 17-20), and it is emphasized by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11: 23-26:  “²³ For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, ²⁴ and when he had given…

Could consideration of divorce help us understand how we make use of the Bible?  And might that help us in understanding what God asks of us with regard to homosexuality? 

In Luke 16:18 Jesus says¹⁸ “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”  That’s pretty clear.  But Matthew 19:9 has Jesus saying exactly the same thing and adding “except for immorality.” Matthew has Jesus giving a…

Reading the newspaper this morning, I came across this quotation from Harry Emerson Fosdick: “I should be ashamed to live in this generation and not be a heretic."  That sentence, I learned later, is from the final sermon he preached at First Presbyterian Church in New York City, in March 1925.  The whole quotation is worth noting: "They call me a heretic. Well, I am a heretic if conventional orthodoxy is the standard. I should be ashamed to live in this generation and not be a…

In 1949, Elton Trueblood published a short book on The Common Ventures of Life: Marriage, Birth, Work and Death (New York: Harper and Row).  “The purpose of this book,” he says in the Preface, “is to help puzzled men and women to prepare for the intelligent and reverent facing of those experiences which are so central to man’s life that they have seemed supreme in all generations and in all cultures.”  Marriage is the first of those “common ventures” that Trueblood…