Discipleship in the Present Tense: Reflections on Faith and Culture

faith and doubt.

Everything in this book is animated by the conviction that the tradition of Christian orthodoxy is a gift, not a liability—a resource for the future, not an embarrassment that we should be trying to sweep under the carpet or tuck away in a back room like a crazy uncle.

At the heart of that revival was a sense that the ancient was a resource for the contemporary—that the past had wisdom for the present.

We are heirs of “the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3) but also enjoined to “become all things to all people, that [we] might by all means save some” (1 Cor. 9:22 NRSV).

To be faithful in the present is

Christian scholars are called to help the body of Christ live faithfully at these intersections.

To live at that intersection is to be caught up in the life of our incarnating God, who at the fullness of time intersected with history and now invites us, ever anew, to be his contemporaries.

to be both pressed and stretched, located at the intersection of church and world, past and future, ancient and modern, memory and hope.

Charles Taylor describes ours as a “cross-pressured” situation,