I know this seems like a heretical question, especially for those of us who teach confirmation but also, I suspect, for any of us who went through it. It is, after all, perhaps the most significant religious right of passage in mainline Christianity. But that’s precisely what I want to question: confirmation as a rite of passage. As ample research has shown, confirmation functioned something like graduation for previous generations of Protestant mainline Christians. It was the end of required attendance, and when our kids left our churches in droves we didn’t worry too much about it because we could count on them returning once they’d...

Last week I offered four reasons not to read the Bible literally. But what’s the alternative? I mean, isn’t reading it literally taking the Bible at face value, taking it most seriously? Actually, I’m not sure it is, and in this post I want to begin to offer an alternative. To do so, we need to begin with just a little bit of history. Many of our categories for thinking about truth in relation to facts developed about three and a half centuries ago, but were relatively unknown to biblical authors. You see, disillusioned by the religious fervor that fed the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the early architects of what would later be called...

Believe it or not, this is a more complicated question than one might imagine. On the one hand, those who argue against the proposition point to several key pieces of evidence. First, many if not most of the Founders of the country cannot be described accurately as Christians but as Deists, persons who believe that a benevolent Creator set the world in motion but no longer intervenes in it. Indeed, Washington would never publicly admit to being a Christian and Jefferson was regularly accused of being hostile to Christianity and famously took his scissors to the Bible to cut out any incidences of divine interaction. Further, the United States...

What do you think of when you think of faith? Some folks think of the things you have to believe. To have faith is to believe certain propositions regardless of external evidence. Others see faith more as a matter of trust. Faith is, quite literally, trusting in something or, even more, trusting in someone. For most of my life I’ve leaned toward this latter view, that faith is relational. In the Apostles’ Creed, for instance, we don’t just confess the faith by saying “I believe that there is a God” but rather the more relational “I believe in God” – that is, I not only believe there is a God, but put my trust and confidence...

I’ve gotten a number of questions of late about the conservative, or literal, way of reading the Bible. It’s that way of reading the Bible that’s maybe best summed up in the bumper sticker, God Said It. I Believe It. That Settles It. Most of us, it seems, have at least one friend or family member who reads the Bible this way and although we may covet their confidence, we often don’t feel like that way of reading the Bible “fits” with us or “works” for us. I use quotation marks to name these feelings because it’s often hard to describe what doesn’t seem accurate or faithful about...