Sublime

However, “the law” they had in mind and that they rubbed up against every day was not the law of God. It was a contemporary version of religious respectability, very harsh and oppressive in application, that Jesus referred to as “the goodness of scribes and Pharisees” (5:20).

To take a step back once more, when people write about “atonement theology,” the tendency has been to go to Paul and Hebrews and to come to the gospels only for those detached phrases that will support (or so it seems) the kind of “theological” construct that has already been culled from Paul.

His basic hermeneutic for understanding the Bible was to ask the question of every passage: Is this law, or is this gospel?

from the perspective of the dominant class in Israel.

Christianity was never “supposed” to be a philosophy in the first place.34 Christianity, understood correctly, should not claim to offer intellectually satisfying answers to all intellectual questions, even legitimate intellectual questions.

Foundationalism is the idea that we, scientists with nature or readers with texts, can find some place that will provide a dependable “basis” of firm, secure, incontrovertible “knowledge” on which we can then build systems of secondary values, beliefs, systems of thought or belief. Nonfoundationalists argue that no such place exists in the universe

Put simply, Jewish theology assumes that we are capable of keeping the commandments; Christianity, especially in its Protestant forms, usually does not.

The word prostatis is a bit more controversial. Most English Bibles render it somewhat along the lines of the NIV’s “a great help.” A few feminists have tried to argue, on the basis of cognate words, that it means “leader” or even “pastor.”73 But a growing consensus of complementarians and egalitarians alike are recognizing its widespread use as “p

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), the priest and humanist scholar who, as early as 1516, began preaching against clerical abuses, and whose sermons ‘from true, divine scripture’, starting in 1520, inaugurated a popular movement in Switzerland against such practices as priestly celibacy and the keeping of fasts.