Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today

To the second point: the creator God is in the business of remaking the original creation, not abandoning it. This principle, so deeply woven into the New Testament, has often been obscured by the legacies of different types of dualism, which have had this in common, that they have seen salvation in terms of humans (perhaps “souls”) being rescued f

The Enlightenment thus offered to the world a new analysis of, and solution to, the problem of evil, standing in radical tension to those offered in classical Judaism and Christianity. The real problem of evil, it proposed, is that people are not thinking and acting rationally, and Enlightenment rationalism is going to teach them how and create the

This is the nemesis, at another stage of the argument, of the idea that the main point of the New Testament at least is to chronicle “early Christian experience,” as though such “experience” is the main thing that matters and anything which will enable people to approximate to it, to recover the initial enthusiasm of Jesus’s first followers, is to

without giving our honored predecessors the final say or making them an “alternative source,” independent of scripture itself. When they speak with one voice, we should listen very carefully. They may be wrong. They sometimes are. But we ignore them at our peril. The study of church history is not, ultimately, a different “subject” from the careful

The challenge of living with tradition is not so much, as in official Roman Catholic understandings, that one should let tradition and scripture flow together straightforwardly into a single stream, but that tradition should be allowed to be itself; that is, the living voice of the very human church as it struggles with scripture, sometimes misunde

One way of understanding this has been proposed, on the basis of detailed study of comparative material in the ancient Near East, by John Walton in his remarkable book The Lost World of Genesis One. Walton insists that in that ancient world anyone reading about something being built by a god in six days or stages would know that it was basically a

The widespread habit of private reading and study of scripture, once a more particularly Protestant phenomenon but now widely encouraged among Roman Catholics as well, has a long track record as a central part of Christian devotion.

Paul expressed what the apostles all discovered: that this retelling of the ancient story, climaxing now in Jesus, carried power—power to change minds, hearts, and lives. “The gospel is God’s power to salvation” (Romans 1:16; compare 1 Thessalonians 1:5; 2:13). The “word” did not “offer itself” in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion, any more than Caesar

All Christians, all churches, are free to improvise their own variations designed to take the music forward. No Christian, no church, is free to play out of tune. To change the metaphor back to the theater: all the actors, and all the traveling companies of which they are part (i.e., different churches) are free to improvise their own fresh scenes.