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

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

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

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.

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 Christian claim that in Jesus of Nazareth the creator of the world—the whole world, not a Christian subset of the world!—is being rescued and renewed. Of course, non-Christians will say they don’t believe this. But Christians do, or at least should—and are therefore committed to believing that the new creation launched in Jesus is good news for

Taken as a whole, the church clearly can’t live without the Bible, but it doesn’t seem to have much idea of how to live with it. Almost all Christian churches say something in their formularies about how important the Bible is. Almost all of them have devised ways, some subtle, some less so, of ostentatiously highlighting some parts of the Bible an

It was this eschatological takeover bid which caused Enlightenment thinkers to pour scorn on the Bible’s picture of the coming Kingdom, in a move which is still taken for granted in many circles today: first, to misrepresent it (“All the early Christians expected the world to end at once”) and then to rubbish it (“They were wild fanatics, and they

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.