Some people say that the revelation in Jesus can be accepted along with everything else biblical writers say. However, that view is implausible. There are biblical accounts of God doing things that just don’t fit with the kind of God Jesus talked about. There are teachings of Jesus about matters such as loving your enemies that don’t fit with the vengeance biblical writers sometimes represent as appropriate in responding to enemies. It is a futile task to treat all biblical teachings as being on the same level and think that you have to reconcile them into a single whole.

My parents told me that the biblical text wasn’t about all kinds of judgment; it meant not to judge whether someone else was saved. I don’t know where they got their answer. Most likely, it was something they had heard from a pastor. But it strikes me now as not only obviously wrong, but the kind of interpretation that lets us off the hook with regard to the teaching in question.

A woman I know says that she married her husband before she saw what he was like during football season. His interest in the prospects for his team turned out to be what seemed to her an obsession that crowded out lesser concerns, making her wonder where the man she thought she knew had gone. He spent hours studying the news about his team and regarded missing one of their games as unthinkable. When the team did well, he was thrilled; when they did badly, he suffered. Not everyone is fanatical about a sports team, but all of us know what it means to get vicarious satisfaction from identifying with particular groups.

Instead of clinging to the idea that God can do whatever we can imagine, we might instead think that God’s power in our world is limited because creating a world where creatures like us exist involves a kind of pouring out of power.

Defective habits of Bible reading are difficult to overcome, especially when they have been repeatedly supported by authority figures who told you what you were supposed to find. But one of the first steps to reading better is to ask yourself what interpretive key you are using. I think that the best place to look for such a key is in the teaching of Jesus.

As I see it now, there were multiple ways that our ideas about being saved distorted biblical teachings. One is that our form of religion was about escaping from earthly life, whereas Jesus’s message was fundamentally about transforming it. Because we saw the central issue to be life after death, we tended to miss New Testament teachings about what God sought for this world. If we noticed in Jesus’s model prayer the request that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven,” we assumed that God’s will being done was primarily a matter of getting people to make a commitment that prepared them for eternity.

The preacher at the memorial service no doubt thought he was giving a message of comfort to those who had lost a loved one. The central thrust of his message was that it was Jim’s time to go. It was apparently the kind of message he had repeated many times before. Jim was my wife’s younger brother, and the memorial service had been delayed a year because of Covid.

Saying that God can work through nature does not imply that everything nature does should be attributed to God, but rather that in some events that nature brings about we can recognize indications of what God is doing. In other words, there are events that at one level can be understood as natural phenomena, but might also have a fuller meaning for a person of faith. Perhaps some cases of God working through nature are a matter of allowing nature to take its course, but we might also think that God’s presence can be an influence on what created things do.

A few years ago, I heard a preacher at an evangelical church claim that Jesus was born in order to die. My immediate reaction was that there was something wrongheaded about this way of thinking. Accepting this claim meant that dying was the really important thing Jesus did; the rest of his life was like a preliminary to the main event. I knew where the preacher was coming from. He assumed the same teaching about Jesus’s death that I had received as a child: that through the death of Jesus the penalty for sin had been paid so that God could turn from wrath to forgiveness. But it now seems to me that seeing dying as Jesus’s main accomplishment gets things backwards.

So, whose side are church people on? Are they more like the defenders of their own religious status who opposed Jesus or more like this prophetic disrupter of the system who says that God’s love extends to everyone? When you go into the average church, are you more likely to hear words of judgment against those with different beliefs or ways of living or expressions of love for them? Are Christians more like the Pharisees in thinking that God should punish the wicked severely or more like Jesus in thinking that everyone should receive mercy and forgiveness?

Aside from the question of what events God arranges, the idea of God bringing about meaningful coincidences raises the question of how God does such a thing. Some people may be content to say that God can do anything and leave it at that. But suppose we ask whether this kind of display of God’s power involves miraculous interventions in which God overrides the ordinary operation of nature. Christians who think such a thing are likely to think that this kind of miraculous intervention is common. But believing that such miracles are common raises a problem when we consider that there are many occurrences of terrible things that God doesn’t intervene to prevent.

Some people think that all biblical stories fit together into a whole that reveals what God is like. But trying to fit all these stories together in that way leaves us with a God who resembles humans who suffer from multiple personality disorder.

When Jesus says to turn the other cheek or go the second mile or let someone have what he is trying to take from you, he is describing unexpected behaviors that can potentially change the situation. His examples are not rules to be applied rigidly, but specific examples of alternatives to responding aggressively that may startle someone who expects a different response. In elaborating on the teaching of Jesus Paul suggests that returning good for evil can appeal to the conscience of someone who is doing wrong.

If you start thinking you’re one of the good guys, the problem may not be that you brag about it, but that the real truth is much less clear than this simplistic portrayal. If we think it is clear, we probably lack a significant degree of self-awareness. The Pharisee is in many respects a great guy, one of the best. But he’s just too sure about where he comes out in the scale of goodness. On the other hand, it’s blindingly obvious to the tax collector that he’s not one of the good guys. But in his self-awareness is the potential for something better.

I think that there are enough credible stories to lead an open-minded person who is not wedded to a materialistic worldview to think that in our times (not just in biblical times) there are events that can be called miraculous by my definition of the term (an event that goes against what we would expect to happen apart from the operation of some extraordinary power). Some events strongly suggest the operation of powers other than those recognized by contemporary scientific accounts.

Some people think that there are reasons why God might set up a system in which making prayer requests is a factor in what God does, but I don’t find any of the reasons I have heard convincing. However, the standard model is not the only option. Instead of thinking about petitionary prayer as trying to get God to do something, suppose we think of it as a way of accessing powers that God has made available.

His [Jesus’s] message has been described as a “great reversal” in which those who are benefitting from privileged status lose their benefits and those who are weak and vulnerable are elevated. In this “upside down” kingdom Jesus announces that one achieves greatness not by advancing to the top of the social hierarchy, but by acts of service to the community. Given this kind of message, it is not surprising that the wealthy and privileged of Jewish society opposed Jesus and ultimately killed him. He was a danger to a social order in which they were deeply invested and wanted to preserve. While his message might have been good news to those at the bottom, it was not good news for them.

Western education tends to bias people toward thinking that what happens in the world is fully explicable in terms of the forces recognized by contemporary science. Part of this bias is connected with the assumption that ordinary sense experiences is the only way to know about reality. Traditional religions arose in contexts where people presumed visionary or mystical apprehensions could put people in touch with deeper dimensions of reality than what we find in ordinary sense experience.

Thinking that there are powers that produce events that seem anomalous from a scientific point of view does not lead all the way to God. But if there are powers other than God’s that might lead to remarkable events, we can be more open to levels of reality beyond our ordinary understanding of physical causality. Viewing the world through a lens that is shaped by materialist assumptions conditions us to filter out aspects of reality that don’t fit with these assumptions.

In the churches where I grew up, citing what the Bible said on some topic was regarded as a claim to ultimate authority. It was taken for granted that the Bible couldn’t be wrong about anything, and it was assumed that determining what the Bible taught was relatively unproblematic. People knew, of course, that other Christian groups had different interpretations of what the Bible said, but among the churches I attended there was great confidence that where these other groups taught something different from what we said, they were wrong.