Sublime

Myth 1—The Bible is so difficult to understand that only highly skilled theologians with technical training can deal with the Scriptures.

In his important study, The Heresy of Democracy (1955), Lord Percy of Newcastle declared of democracy that it is a “philosophy which is nothing less than a new religion” (p. 16). The justification for all things is not to be found in the triune God but in the people. Virtue means meeting people’s needs, and the democratic state, church, and God hav

I am merely attempting to explain why and how I continue to find traditional Christian doctrines and confessions “true,” why I’m willing to confess the creeds, even though I am a critical scholar who knows much of the Bible is not “true” when taken as history or science. This is not an apology but an attempt at explanation and illustration.

evaluate past interpreters of the faith. Since oppression of the weak by the powerful is one of those elements, we can put the critical question to Athanasius, Augustine, or Luther: What has the gospel of Jesus, as witnessed in Scripture, to do with the humiliated and the abused? If they failed to ask that question or only made it secondary in thei

What if the state ceases to be God’s ministry of justice? What if it becomes a terror to good works, rather than to the evil? (Rom. 13:1–5). Their obedience had to be “for conscience sake” (Rom. 13:5), i.e., in obedience to God, because of His Word, for “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). As a result, Christians

Those black students drove me back to the primary art forms of the black religious experience by refusing to accept a prefabricated theology from the lips of James Cone. I began once more to listen to the heartbeat of black life as reflected in the song and speech of black people. As I did so, I asked myself, What is theology? What is the substance

the death of the man on the tree has radical implications for those who are enslaved, lynched, and ghettoized in the name of God and country. In order to do theology from that standpoint, they must ask the right questions and then go to the right sources for the answers. The right questions are always related to the basic question: What has the gos

The primary rule of hermeneutics was called the “analogy of faith.”

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