Notes from the margins
A reading room.
Slow notes on faith, scripture, and the days in between — with the occasional tech footnote.
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When Did the Gospel Become a Plan of Salvation?
In my last post, “The Gospel Is Bigger Than the Plan of Salvation,” I admitted something that has stayed with me: for years, when I thought I was sharing the Gospel, I was usually sharing the Plan of Salvation. I talked about sin, separation from God, the death of Jesus, personal faith, repentance, and the…
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Why the Bible Needs to Get Weird Again
5 Surprising Lessons from the Book of Enoch For many modern readers, the Bible has been “tamed.” We have smoothed over its rough edges and sanitized its supernatural elements to fit within a comfortable, scientific paradigm. In doing so, we risk turning the text into a mere mirror, where we see only reflections of our…
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Christianity Today: Can Anger at God be Righteous?
The Psalms show us how to faithfully protest to God. J. Todd Billings| December 28, 2018 After I was diagnosed with cancer five years ago, I returned to the Book of Psalms anew. I started to pray with psalms that I had merely read before or had skipped altogether. While I was receiving intense chemo,…
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Thoughts on Pain (from Jack Deere)
The fact that someone else’s catastrophe is greater than mine has never made my pain feel better. I have never overcome my pain by comparing it to someone else’s pain. I have never overcome my pain by reasoning myself out of it, nor has it helped to seek comfort in some version of theology that…
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