We are going to see this move of diagonalization again and again in these chapters. It is just what we would expect if the Bible presents an exceptionally rich, complex, and finely balanced account of reality, in relation to which the extrabiblical alternatives are partial, derivative, and lopsided.

We need to hold BOTH the absoluteness AND the pers

A capacious grasp of the biblical storyline will also equip Christian students, pastors, and laypeople to think biblically about the whole of life and defend the faith in the face of hostile attack more fully and more deeply than even the best prepared suite of individual arguments.

The rhetoric of out-narrating is helpful in clarifying one importan

From Frankenstein to the Terminator franchise, the idea of human beings making sentient creatures in our own image has haunted our social imaginary. Similarly, as genetic and other technologies improve, the prospects of making a posthuman or transhuman with improved capacities is becoming an ever-more realistic proposition. How do these myths and d

In creation my existence is contingent on the action of another, and I exist only through his ongoing act of upholding me (and everything else in the universe) "by his powerful word" (Heb 1:3), but this reliance does not make me a puppet. In sin I am "dead" and in thrall to the world, the flesh, and the devil, while still being

This is what Timothy Keller argues, quoting sociologist Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart: "The irony is that here, too, just where we think we [modern people] are most free, we are most coerced by the dominant beliefs of our own culture. For it is a powerful cultural fiction that we not only can, but must, make up our deepest beliefs in the

Christians, wherever practicable, to use biblical language to describe the world. The Bible's categories of creation, sin, grace, idolatry, and so on are not neutral and interchangeable with other sets of terms; they are particular figures that belong to and provide the rhythm for the Bible's account of reality

The answer and what a wonderful answer it is-is that God has not created a world with just enough sustenance, variety, and abundance for survival, but God created a superabundant world fit to foster the flourishing of his creatures. He has not limited supply to the level of demand. Why have one or even one thousand species when you can have an esti

A multi-lens biblical approach, by contrast, sees reality through three lenses: how things are now, how God first created them to be, and how they will be once redeemed. It insists that human existence today, after Genesis 3, is neither original nor the standard for how things should be, and that we were created for a life better than the one we no

This chapter is about what God was like before he created the world, a starting point that requires a little explanation. You would be quite within your rights to ask how on earth we can know such a thing. The simple answer is that we on earth can only know because God told us. A surprising amount of material in the Bible concerns the precreation G