Sublime

The Victorian era in England stretched from 1837 until the turn of the twentieth century and featured a popular Christianity that was muscular, moralistic, and disciplined. It was notably civic-minded, with a strong emphasis on social reform. This reformist Evangelicalism spread to the United States, sparking the Third Great Awakening, which

The crisis in Galatia had taught Paul a sobering lesson: that so extreme might be the sense of dislocation experienced by his converts that some of them, groping after a way to reorient themselves, could seriously contemplate circumcision. The Jews, after all, were an ancient people, and their laws famously strict. The appeal of an identity that

my strategy is “Schaefferian” in the sense that my primary audience is not just philosophers but practitioners—more specifically, Christians engaged in ministry in a postmodern world, as well as searching inhabitants of this postmodern world. As such, these essays are not an academic project per se.

But Christians can never seek refuge in a ghetto where their faith is not proclaimed as public truth for all. They can never agree that there is one law for themselves and another for the world. They can never admit that there are areas of human life where the writ of Christ does not run.

In a postmodern church we don’t really need a category of “tradition” separate from scripture as long as scripture is interpreted to reflect the sedimentation of Christian experience of the past.

the “ideological” project to replace the only human condition we know with a utopian “Second Reality” oblivious to—indeed at war with—the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation has taken on renewed virulence in the late modern world, just thirty-five years after the glorious anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989.

We face even greater challenges in our day. It is clear that the culture is increasingly moving away from Christian belief. The academy, the media, and the entertainment world challenge Christian faith on intellectual, spiritual, and moral fronts. Pragmatism lures us with promises of vast size and huge budgets. Postmodernism suggests we lay down

Nobody now can be a Hector or a Gisli. The answer is that perhaps what we have to learn from heroic societies is twofold: first that all morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular and that the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion; and secondly that