When I look back at the Christian faith, I see that we have had to retranslate, almost reinvent ourselves a number of times.

I don't like to talk about it in those terms; it's impossible to describe who or what God "is." Suppose you were a horse, and you were asked to describe what a human being was like. You couldn't do it.

I know that Arnold Toynby, the great historian, said he had always hoped the religions of the world would evolve until they began to bring the very best of each tradition into one tradition. He hoped that Christianity would be the one religion that finally incorporated the values of Hinduism and Buddhism, and enriched itself with them.

In that process of coming to know that which we name as divine, the God who is love is slowly transformed into the love that is God. Let me repeat that...We breathe love in, and we breathe love out. It is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. It is never exhausted, always expanding. When I try to describe this reality, words fail me; so I simply utter the name God. That name, however, is no longer for me the name of a being.

"You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is your neighbor's." Your neighbor is clearly a male, and the woman, the ox and the ass are property of the male. That's not morality I will salute today.

You don't take your newborn baby, put that baby on your lap, and say, "Now listen, kid, you were born in sin, you're not worth anything, and you've got to pray for mercy." That's not going to raise a healthy adult. And that's what we do Sunday after Sunday after Sunday.

The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.