Taking the Word of God Seriously

I was listening to one of the courses I found on ItunesU, The Historical Jesus, held at Stanford University Spring 2007. It is an extremely provocative course taught by Dr. Thomas Sheehan, here is an excerpt from the first class of the eleven class course he entitled "Call Me Yeshua." In this excerpt, he strongly encourages people to read the Bible as a theological story to encourage faith and a history to be taken as literal fact. I like Dr. Sheehan believe that literal interpretations of the biblical narrative such as those espoused by many fundamentalist evangelical Christians do more harm to the faith than any agnostic critique ever could. In fact, they give most of the fuel for agnostics arguements against our faith. Listen to Dr. Sheehan he expresses this much more eloquently than I ever could, the audio is approximately 3 minutes.