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Jesus Said "Don't Look Back." He Didn't Say "Don't Think." Here's What the Plow Actually Means.
When Jesus says that anyone who puts a hand on the plow and looks back is not fit for the kingdom of God (Luke 9:62), it sounds harsh. Maybe it is. But the plow metaphor is doing something specific — and it's not telling you to abandon your family without warning or surrender your brain at the door. A plow requires sustained attention, active decision-making, and constant correction. Discipleship, it turns out, is not passive. It is one of the most demanding forms of agency there is.
Before we get to the plow, we need to know where we are. Because Luke cares about where we are.
Luke's Gospel, combined with Acts, tells the story of God's mission expanding in concentric circles — Jesus, then family, then the temple in Nazareth, then Galilee, then Samaria, then Jerusalem, then Corinth, Philippi, Ephesus, Greece, and finally Rome. And now across the planet. Luke-Acts is the story of a movement that began in a very particular place and expanded beyond every tribal and national boundary.
In this passage, we're in Samaria. That matters.
John's Gospel Is a Coming-Out. Here's Why That Matters for the Church Right Now.
The four Gospels are not four copies of the same story. Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written for a season of caution — cryptic parables, coded language, a Messiah whose identity is a secret the reader has to figure out. John was written for a season of declaration — direct statements, bold claims, no parables, no mystery. "God so loved the world." "I am the way." "Love one another." The shift from the Synoptics to John maps onto an experience that some of us know personally: the shift from caution to clarity. From protecting a secret to declaring the truth. From letting people fill in the blanks to saying it out loud. John's Gospel is a coming-out. And the church in 2026 is in a season that needs exactly what John was written for.
Jonathan Stayed with His Abusive Father. The Bible Doesn't Call That a Mistake. Here's What It Calls It.
Jonathan — prince of Israel, military hero, covenant partner of David — spent his adult life inside a family system that was falling apart. His father Saul was violent, unstable, and increasingly dangerous. Saul tried to kill David, threw a spear at Jonathan, and publicly humiliated him. Jonathan could see what was happening. He was not naive. He was not trapped. He had a way out — David, the future king, his closest person in the world, wanted him. But Jonathan stayed with his father. He stayed with his brothers. He died with them at Gilboa. Interpreters have called this piety, or tragedy, or wasted loyalty. But there is another way to read it: Jonathan stayed because he was grounded. His covenant with David didn't pull him away from his family — it gave him the strength to remain present to them without being destroyed. This is not a story about martyrdom. It is a story about what it looks like to stay in a hard place when you have someone who holds you steady.
How the Bible Happened and How We Read It: Toward A Novel Biblical Interpretation Lens (Reunion Hermeneutic Series)
Before we use the family reunion lens on anything, we need to talk about the thing we're reading.
The Bible is not a book. It's a library. It was written across roughly a thousand years by dozens of communities in multiple languages for different purposes. It was assembled, edited, argued over, canonized, translated, retranslated, and re-argued-over across another two thousand years. The process that turned these texts into "the Bible" is itself a story worth knowing, because how the library was assembled shapes what any lens can see in it.
Any hermeneutic lens — including the one I'm proposing — has to respect this history. Otherwise it's just another way of treating the Bible as a single book with a single author making a single argument, and there are already too many of those.
How the Library Was Assembled
The Hebrew Bible and Old Testament:
"I Am a Withered Tree." How Isaiah 56 Revises the Family's Rules from the Inside (Reunion Hermeneutic Series)
By now you have the tool. You've seen how it works on three different texts from the Hebrew Bible. This article is different. We're not demonstrating the lens anymore. We're using it.
Isaiah 56. Eight verses. One of the shorter prophetic oracles. It sits in what scholars call Third Isaiah (chapters 56-66), composed during or after the return from exile — a community rebuilding, redefining itself, arguing about who belongs.
Let's read it.
The Text
Three Reunions and a Failure: How Biblical Heroes Make Up or Give Up (Reunion Hermeneutic Series)
The family reunion lens is a hermeneutic tool — a theme you bring to a text and let interact with your reading in both directions. The first article introduced the tool. The second situated it in the long tradition of biblical assembly and interpretation.
This article puts the tool to work on three texts from the Hebrew Bible. They come from different centuries, different genres, different source traditions. The Jacob/Esau material is patriarchal narrative from multiple strands. The Joseph cycle is a novella. The Exodus is national origin story. They are not a coordinated collection. The lens meets each one separately.
Three encounters. Three very different family situations. In each case, we ask: what does this text show us about reunion when we read it through this lens? And what does our own experience of family reunion make visible in this text that we might not have seen before?
The argument is not that these three texts share a message. They don't. They come from different communities across centuries. The argument is that the lens is productive in each — it reveals something that other lenses leave in the dark.
Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25-33)
The Bible Is One Long Family Meeting: The Family Reunion Lens in Ministry (Reunion Hermeneutic Series)
The Bible is full of families. That's not a devotional observation — it's a structural one. The text spends an extraordinary amount of its narrative space on who married whom, who fathered whom, who betrayed whom, who reconciled, who didn't. Genealogies, inheritance disputes, sibling rivalries, household management, kinship obligations, estrangements, and — sometimes — reunions.
And yet most of the major interpretive lenses we bring to Scripture treat this family material as scenery. The Jacob/Esau story illustrates God's sovereignty. The prodigal son illustrates grace. The Joseph cycle illustrates providence. The family content is the vehicle. The theological point is the destination.
What if the family content is the point?
This article introduces a hermeneutic lens — family reunion — that takes the Bible's obsession with family relationships seriously as a site of theological inquiry, not as illustration of other theological claims.
The lens doesn't only reach texts that other approaches leave in the dark. It can transform texts you thought you already understood.
What a Hermeneutic Lens Is
"No Harm" Preaching: Three Principles for Not Accidentally Destroying Someone on Sunday Morning
I preached a Mother's Day sermon at a retirement facility once.
I thought I did a good job.
I was careful. I knew I had my own stuff about family — who doesn't — and I thought I'd kept it out of the sermon.
Stayed positive. Stayed theological. Didn't go anywhere near the personal stuff.
What is a Wesleyan Bible Study
A Wesleyan Bible study is a style — not a denomination, not a politics, not a club — but a style of rigorously faithful reading of scripture, built on John Wesley’s instructions: show up, do no harm first, read Scripture through four lenses, keep the table open, and trust that grace was already moving before you arrived.
Noah’s Ark, the Rainbow, and God’s Promise
Let’s talk about Noah’s Ark.
It’s one we all know.
But, have you looked at it? It’s weird!
Noah takes two of each animal, and then makes a burnt sacrifice when he lands. How?! What was sacrificed?!
But more importantly, what does the story actually have to say about God and the Christian community?
The Only Bible Verse About Pregnancy Loss Assigns a Fine. Here's Why That Matters.
Exodus 21:22-25 prescribes a fine if fighting men cause a woman to miscarry, but "life for life" if the woman herself dies — a legal distinction that shows the fetus did not have the same status as a born person under the very law code most often cited as biblical authority.
Trans Identity, and What the Bible Actually Says. Here's Why It Matters
The only verse in the Bible that mentions clothing and gender is a law about disguise. Not identity. Disguise.
It sits inside a purity code that also prohibits mixed fabrics, that Christians do not follow, and that addresses a world in which "trans" as a concept did not exist. A trans woman wearing women's clothes is not disguising herself. She is dressing as herself. The framework of the prohibition does not apply to someone living authentically. It applies to the opposite.
But the deeper problem with using this verse against trans people is not the misapplication. It is the pattern. Take a text from one context, strip its meaning, claim divine authority, and use it to harm people the text was never about.
Rome Killed Jesus. God Did Not Require It. Here's Why
Jesus was executed by the Roman Empire on political charges, by Roman soldiers, using a method reserved for slaves and rebels — and he asked God to stop it. If God required the death, that prayer makes no sense. If Rome did it, the prayer makes complete sense. This changes everything about what the cross means — and what it means for your suffering.
Black Skin Is Not a Biblical Curse. The "Curse of Ham" Was Fabricated to Justify Slavery. Here's the Evidence
Christian theologians put a lot of work into persuading themselves that Black skin is a punishment from God.
And now we have a lot of work to do in healing our communities from this…. rhetoric.
First.
No verse in the Bible connects skin color to divine punishment. The passage cited for the "Curse of Ham" — Genesis 9:20–27 — curses Canaan, not Ham, says nothing about skin color, says nothing about Africa, and says nothing about any racial group. The connection between Ham, Africa, and dark skin was manufactured by European slave traders and slaveholding theologians who needed divine authorization for an economic system built on kidnapping and forced labor. This was not interpretation. It was fabrication for profit. And while the lie has been formally rescinded by some institutions, it has not been abandoned with anything close to the rigor with which it was constructed. Two hundred years of systematic, institutionally funded, seminary-taught racial theology cannot be corrected by a denominational press release. It requires the same verse-by-verse, claim-by-claim dismantling that built it in the first place.
The Bible Never Says Suicide Sends You to Hell. Here's Why
The teaching that suicide automatically sends someone to hell comes from Augustine (5th century) and was formalized by Thomas Aquinas (13th century). It was a theological conclusion, not a biblical citation. Even the Catholic Church's current Catechism has walked it back, acknowledging diminished responsibility and stating: "We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives."
Romans 8:38-39: "Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God."
Neither death. That means the method of death does not override God's love.
*If you are struggling right now:* you are not condemned. Call or text 988. There are doors out of suffering that are not death.
Chapter and Verse Numbers Were Added 1,000 Years After the Bible Was Written. Here's Why
Chapter divisions were added by Stephen Langton in 1227 CE and verse numbers by Robert Estienne in 1551 CE — they are not inspired, not original, and they often break at exactly the wrong place, which is why reading individual verses in isolation produces bad interpretation.
The Bible Never Mentions Trans People. Here's Why That Matters.
The concept of transgender identity as understood today did not exist in the ancient world. The Bible contains no word for it, no prohibition of it, and no discussion of it. But it does contain extensive positive treatment of gender outsiders, including direct welcome from Jesus.
When people claim the Bible condemns trans people, ask them to cite the verse.
There isn't one.
How to Choose a Bible Translation. Here's What No One Tells You
Every English Bible is a set of choices made by a committee of translators — there is no single "correct" version, and the labels "literal" and "readable" hide five different axes of translation philosophy — so the best way to choose a Bible is to understand what each translation prioritizes and pick the right tool for the job
How to Choose a Bible for Your Kid Without Accidentally Teaching Them Theology You Don't Believe
Children's Bibles are not miniature adult Bibles. They are curated selections of stories, retold for young audiences, with interpretive framing baked into every editorial decision. The pictures, the language, the stories chosen and omitted — all of it is theology. And most parents never think to evaluate it that way.
Ephesians 5:22 Does Not Mean What You Might Think It Means. Here's Why That Matters.
When someone quotes Ephesians 5:22 to keep a woman under a man's authority, they have stopped reading too soon, ignored the Greek, and reversed the passage's meaning. The passage commands husbands to die for their wives — not wives to endure death from their husbands.