The Universal Christ

Then What About Hell? One of our biggest roadblocks to this healthier understanding of the cross and resurrection is the prevail ...

takes a slightly different form. It’s often referred to as the “Harrowing of Hell,” an old English term that meant “to despoil” ...

gymnastics, “Love could not bear that.” On the whole, we have been slow to notice how God grows more and more nonviolent through ...

Israelites’ sin by loving them even more! This is God’s restorative justice. Yet we remember collectively the admittedly harsh j ...

We Shall All Be Changed When you study or pray before the Eastern Orthodox icons of the resurrection, you see something quite di ...

As if to confirm this message for me, while writing this chapter on a lovely fall day in New Mexico, I heard the trumpeting and ...

*12 Sweeney, Inventing Hell, and Julie Ferwerda, Raising Hell: Christianity’s Most Controversial Doctrine Put Under Fire (Lander ...

15 Two Witnesses to Jesus and Christ Among the examples we find in the Bible of who can take us into deeper knowing of both Jesu ...

Mary Magdalene In the Gospel of Luke (8:2), Mary Magdalene is described as a woman who became a follower and friend of Jesus aft ...

would he suddenly give such a cold response? The answer lies in an understanding of the Eternal Christ. I don’t believe the resu ...

encounter before we move to the universal experience available to all. Spiritual knowing is an inner encounter and a calm inner ...

witnesses of a transformed life. I want you to notice that Mary took her journey not by grasping on to the old Jesus, but by let ...

Paul Unlike Mary Magdalene, the apostle Paul never knew Jesus in the flesh; he only and forever knew the Risen Christ. Earlier w ...

times in all his authentic letters? (And two of those appear in the hymn from Philippians 2:10–11, which presumably he did not w ...

except the Kingdom of God. This is a much better agenda than feeling you have to attack things directly, or defeat other nation- ...

my own small lifetime—toward nonviolence, inclusivity, mysticism, and ever more selfless love, as well as more correct naming of ...

and 18:17). He needs living and visible models of this new kind of life—to show that the Christ people really are different from ...

cheerleaders. If God can use a woman with seven devils and a murderous religious zealot to be his primary witnesses, then we had ...

16 Transformation and Contemplation The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God ...

inherently argumentative Christianity jumped the tracks even further. It set us on a very limited “rational” way of knowing that ...