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The last Sunday before Lent begins (next Wednesday!) is Transfiguration Sunday. As the First Sunday of Epiphany begins with the baptism of Jesus and the voice from heaven identifying him as the Beloved of the Father, so the last Sunday in the Transfiguration ends with the same Voice saying the same thing. The Revelation of the Son to the nations celebrated in Epiphany is the Celebration of the Triune God, revealed to us as Father through the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The readings this week may be ordered with the Gospel placed in the center. In this way we see the foreshadowing of the Transfiguration in the figure of Moses at Sinai, the Transfiguration itself which makes Paul’s declaration – we might even call it in the holiness tradition, his testimony – intelligible to us.

Exodus 24:12-18

The Exodus passage records the ascent of Moses into God through God’s own invitation. The imagery has been very important in the history of Christianity. What is the purpose of Moses’ ascent in the Lord’s invitation? What does he do before hand? Into what does Moses ascend when he ascends to the “Lord”? Is it a fire or a cloud (warning: trick question – but is fascinatingly precise in how the text makes distinctions between what Moses enters and what the people see)? Does Moses ascent to God allow him to “grasp” God? What “is” God that Moses “experiences” here?

Matthew 17:1-9

Notice the numbers of days comparison between the Matthew story, the Exodus passage, and, of course, creation. What happens to Jesus? Why is the cloud a “bright cloud” – kind of like a sunny fog!

What does the Voice say? Notice the response of the disciples to the Voice and Jesus’ response to the disciples? What is the significance of these two movements? What is it that Jesus’ says after the Voice tells them to listen to him? By the end, what has happened? Why do you think Jesus gives the instruction that he does? What “is” the God manifested here?

Philippians 3:7-14

vv. 7-11
Given the above passages, what has grasped Paul’s live here in the Philippians passage? What has changed “because of Christ” for Paul? Notice that Paul seeks to be found “in Christ,” not to have Christ found in him? What is the difference? While the translationsspeak of the “one that comes through the faith in Christ”, it is better translated, one that comes through the faithfulness of Christ. What difference does this make? Why is faith (allegiance, trust and obedience) in Christ necessary to “gain” and “be found” in Christ? Why would Paul want to share Christ’s sufferings?

vv. 12-14

What is the goal? What has Paul made “his own”? Why is it necessary to forget the behind, and press ahead? What is the justification for living for the future? In Christ, why would one want to live for the future rather than from the past?

Steve Fowl in his commentary on Philippians writs that “as 3:12-14 will confirm, being transformed is not a one-time achievement. Rather, it is a life-long process of having our desires and affections and attention continually redirected and refocused by our knowledge of the crucified and resurrected Christ. Moreover, failure to engage in this process of transformation will not leave Christians in some neutral, unformed state. Rather, our affections and attention will be drawn to and shaped by other factors. If, as some research indicates, we are confronted with up to 16,000 advertisements and media messages each day, it will not take long before our attention and ultimately our desires are drawn away from God and toward any number of enticements. We will no longer be friends of the cross. At best we will become strangers to it. At worst we will become enemies of the cross of Christ.” (Stephen Fowl, Philippians, p. 158) How do you think the Fowl captures the center of Paul’s testimony?

How does the Mystery of God seen in the Exodus story and the Matthew passage provide a “basis” for Paul’s witness? Nicholas Lash in Theology on the Way to Emmaus writes, “If . . . the God whom we seek, the God whose truth sustains and infinitely transcends all projects and all imaginings is, in fact, the incomprehensible ground and goal of all reality and all significance, the creator and redeemer of nature and history, then each and every aspect of the human quest – in all its bewildering, uncontrollable and often conflictual diversity – is an aspect of the quest for God, even when it is not so named or characterize” (p. 14). How do you think that Lash’ statement relates to the passages for this weeks Scriptures?

Posted by johnwright at 11:21 AM | Comments (2)

I've been wanting to share on the blog a correspondence that seems very interesting to me. I intended to move to this when I began blogging on Protestant liberalism -- what I see as coming back into play through certain varieties of "post-secular thought". The correlation comes from reading sections again from Michael Alan Gillespie's important Nihilism before Nietzche with Gary Dorrien's historical account of the rise of early American liberalism. If the correlation is accurate, I shows the deep affinity between Protestant liberalism as a proto-nihilistic reaction to late medieval theological shifts in the understanding of God from their high scholastic origins.

Gillespie's work is of tremendous importance in understanding how modernity develops out of late medieval thought -- the development of nominalism -- and how it develops into nihilism by inverting the notion of a absolute omnipotent, infinite, irrational divine will onto the sphere of the human will. As Gillespie notes, "Scholasticism rested on teh assumption that God and the cosmos are essentially rational. Nominalism argued that it contradicts God's divinity to assume that he is subordinate to nation or reason. . . . it also established an omnipotent divine will unrestrained by any rational notion of the good. The nominalist revoution thus fostered a growing doubt about the ground of science and morality in a cosmos ruled by a willful, transrational God" (p. xiii). This provides the context, according to Gillespie, for the thought of Descartes. Descartes reasons from humanity to God (rather than vice versa in high scholasticism) in order to establish a "universally protected space" against an irrational God. Anchoring theology in anthropology arises to protect a realm for human against the voluntaristic God of an arbitrary, omnipotent, absolutely sovereign will. As Gillespie writes, "Nominalism emphasized the supremacy of divine will. Modernity in a variety of ways sought to construct a bulwark against the chaos that this will entailed. Descartes' conceptoni of the self-certainty of consciousness and empiricism's notion of an infinite natural causality helped to constrain the power and scope of divine caprice" (xvii).

Within Romanticism, however, the absolute will becomes transferred from the divine to the transcendental will of the human. Truth becomes the will-to-power. One is not guided by a rationality that originates through participation in the Triune God, but by feelings, intutions that direct the human will beyond rationality through the omnipotence of the human will to control nature. The earlier voluntaristic absolute divine will becomes transferred to sphere of the human. The human becomes the divine via an assertion of the will; nihilism is the secularization of the earlier absolutized divine will, reduced to the human. Whereas in nominalism truth becomes a name for the arbitrary workings of the divine will, in nihilism truth becomes the arbitrary workings of the human will. Thus, according to Gillespie, "nihilism arises in the context of a new revelation of the world as the product not of reason but of will. . . . the solution to nihilism thus lies not in the assertion of the will but in a step back from willing" (p. xxiii). A historical dialectic of the will emerges that moves from the error of an arbitrary divine volunteerism that persons criticize to legitimate its inverse in the assertion of the human will. What was originally perceived as a movement to preserve the dignity of the particular human being, ultimately empties the individual human of its dignity as merely a play of forces of domination and resistance within the never ending sameness of the movement of history.

Of course, Protestant liberalism has its roots deep in the modern and particularly, in certain types of Romanticism. What has interested me is how the movement to theology as anthropology arises as a theological/ethical criticism of a high Calvinism, itself with roots in medieval divine volunteerism. For the high Calvinist, salvation for humans arises within the eternal decrees of God; if God wills, the particular human being may be damned for the glory of God. Salvation is the arbitrary judicial decree of God's will through Jesus's satisfying God's judgment in his death on the cross that creates a legal fiction -- salvation is thorough nominal and irrational.

Dorrien tells this story through the life of William Ellery Channing, the founder of American Unitarianism. To understand Unitarianism, one has to see it as a reaction against and within the Puritan, Calvinistic environment in which it arose in early 19th century New England. According to Dorrien, "liberal Christianity was a corrective to bad religion, which 'tends strongly to pervert the moral faculty, to form a gloomy, forbidding, and servile religion, and to lead men to sustitue censoriousness, bitterness, and persecution, for a tender impartial charity.' Genuine Christianity praises God not because God is overpowering, Channing declared, but because God is the perfection of virtue" (vol. 1, p. 33). Therefore, theology becomes human morality: "The religion of Christ is the way to true holiness, he emphasized, not a doctrine about the abstract debt payment of a God-man. The way of Christ cultivates and is marked by the virtues of 'the spirit of love, charity, meekness, forgiveness, liberality and beneficience'" (p. 35), all virtues of the human will.

Dorrien documents how this initial Unitarianism transmitted in the course of 40 years into a "religion" that becomes emptied of any Christological or Christian content in Romanticism. Inverting the Calvinist arbitrary divine will onto the human to protect the human, "religion" becomes what the individual human will asserts in moving to a "post-Christian univerisal religion." Dorrien argues that "The Unitarian Conference retains its minimal tie to the faith of historic Christianity, but in a way that marginalized faith language of Christ as Lord and Savior. . . . The transcendentalist philosophy of Parker and Emerson became passe, but their implicitly post-Christian religious humanism reconfigured the church of Channing and the Henry Wares. The Unitarian church liberalized enough to become a comfortable hom to a wide continuum of liberal Christian, neo-Christian, and non-Christian ethical humanismst, including the humanist successors of the Free Religious Association" (p. 109). Faith becomes completely separated from reason, a matter of feeling or intuition that grounds the individual human in its finitude amid the Absolute or the Infinite. Human beings are determined solely by their will. Romanticism easily moves into nihilism, though by then, having no ties at all left to the Christian tradition.

If this is so, it is interesting to watch movements within "Wesleyan theology" today. Wesleyans have a habit of legitimating their own particular "brand name" of theology by differentiating it against the arbitrary Divine of Calvinism in its popular manifestations, manifestations anchored deeply in medieval nominalism. What is the "Wesleyan" response? To emphasize human "response-ability" -- to provide a buffer against an arbitrary divine will by inverting it onto the human in an equally arbitrary human will that has the ability to stand against God's will, and thus, to maintain its own dignity and ethical worth. God and humanity's wills are on the same ontological level, interacting, as in process thought, through a give and take in which the human will enacts changes in God who is trying to lure the human will back to God in "relationship". Jesus becomes representative of the proper relationship between human will and divine will that we all can participate as human in relationship with God. The divine will and the human will exist in a zero-sum game of give-and-take as both will share in the same ontologies of will -- a force that holds the divine and the human together in the same continuum of being.

Of course, the divine will ultimately becomes unnecessary as it can be increasingly transferred into the human. Yet severed from transcendence, the infinite divine will becomes eclipsed from the infinite human will. Truth is the will-to-power. Romanticism morphs into nihilism. The modern transforms into its new stage of the post-modern. All that is becomes the play of wills, whether it be in competition between the mysterious "wills" of genes to transmit themselves in the evolutionary process or the continual contest of global capitalism as wills engage for domination and resistance within the marketplace that life is -- and therefore is not. If this scenario is correct, the "Wesleyan" will transform into pious forms of Protestant liberalism (if we are not already there) before it moves into a type of "religious liberalism or spirituality" become it utterly dissolves into a nihilism of the will.

Of course, Wesley himself provides a means to stop the cycle by returning to the high scholastic understanding of God whose will cannot be separated from God's nature as revealed in the Logos, Jesus Christ, by the power of the Spirit. Wesley was no nominalist or divine voluntarist, but a classical Catholic Christian thinker. Wesley lived on the cusp of modernity, but rather than moving forward into a deeper modernity by embracing a theological nominalism, moved back before the nominalists in a return to the sources for a contemporary reembodiment of the faith given to the saints. It is only in the recovery of the Wesley deeply committed to the church catholic that can preserve the "Wesleyans" from intellectual/cultural/social movements embedded within the commitments of late medieval thought and life.

Posted by johnwright at 7:53 PM | Comments (9)

First . . . an update on things around the congregation. We're entering a time of rain -- possibly 4 to 5 nights in a row. Rain also complicates the distribution of bread, while we're simultaneously working on the kitchen a little at a time. Monday night we slept 10 in the building -- very thankful people, and a beautiful atmosphere. Nacho is back! He has been ill -- even spent some time in the hospital. We're going to have to pull together to show proper hospitality for those who are our guests in the rain.

Also, there are signs that the economic slowdown is hitting Mid-City. Yesterday we had lots of goods to distribute, but still ran out. Those at the end of the line where disappointed. Part is that whereas we usually had 70-80 persons on Tuesday, we had 130 persons through yesterday. Saturday we had over 200. Ironically, it is probably not unemployment or the credit crisis that is directly hitting people in Mid-City -- very few own their homes who live here. I would guess that inflation pressures are impact. Gas and food prices are going up; as more people move from owning to renting, rent is going up. The working lower middle class, the working poor, the immigrant, and those on fixed incomes are the first ones to feel this pinch. God is giving us opportunities to love, not merely in word, but in deed also.

I think that this is related to Epiphany -- the visible manifestation of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ to the world. As the body of Christ, Christ comes to us in those who are poor and sick and hungry and naked. In our unity in response, the God who as Love in Jesus Christ is made known to us. For this week's readings, it is possible to move from the OT to the Gospel to the Epistle reading with benefit.

Amos 3:1-8

Why would this passage of judgment begin with a statement of God's deliverance of the elect from slavery in Egypt? What is the relationship between God's election and judgment? What is the purpose of all the rhetorical questions? What is the purpose implied in the passage of judgment? If we Gentiles have been made elect in Jesus Christ, what is the message of this passage for us?

Matthew 4:12-23

Why would Jesus return to Galilee after he heard that John had been arrested? Is Jesus out to "confront the powers" here? Is he merely giving in to the powers? Why or why not? Whose purpose is served in the passage by Jesus going to Capernaum? How is the beginning of Jesus' proclamation of repentance a response to John's arrest? Where exactly has the kingdom of God has come near? Why would the kingdom require repentance?

How is both repentance and kingdom shown in Jesus' calling of the disciples to follow him? Why do you think that the text notes Jesus' teaching and healing after the calling of the disciples? What difference does it make that this follows, rather than precedes, the disciples who follow?

1 Corinthians 1:10-17

The Corinthian church that Paul had founded was stricken by dissension and fragmentation, both by persons within the congregation and by later persons who came into the congregation with different teachings than Paul. Why is Paul's appeal and why is it important? What is Paul's problem with persons claiming to belong to "different people" within the congregation? What is the proper source of the unity of the congregation? Why would it be difficult to sustain the unity of a small, minority congregation in Paul's day?

How do these passages of judgment, call to follow Jesus, and the unity of the congregation relate to the message of Epiphany -- the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ to the world for repentance and faith? What inner characteristics do we as a pilgrim people, caring for a pilgrimage way-station, vowed to works of mercy need in order to continue the task of the Epiphany, amid a world that still would arrest John the Baptist?

Have a wonderful gathering! And welcome to the new Thursday night group!

Posted by johnwright at 10:50 AM | Comments (2)

I had a quick 29 trip-and-back-again to Kansas City that ended last night around 11:00 pm. It was an honor participating in a DMin seminar that is reading my book at Nazarene Theological Seminary. It also has put a "crimp" in the catch-up work today. This is therefore late and a little thinner.

The readings unfold again with the Christological reading of Isaiah 49 fitting into the reading of the Gospel. The beginning of 1 Corinithians helps see the significance of the Gospel reading from "the future." It fits within a narrative plotting of "prophecy"-"fulfillment in Jesus"-the church. The Epiphany continues to spread.

Isaiah 49:1-7

What are the relationships between the "you people from far away", "Jacob/Isurvivors of Israel" and the "I" in relationship to the "The LORD" throughout the passage? How does the "I/me" in the passage relate to all the other figures as well?

John 1:29-41

The Gospel of John does not describe Jesus' baptism by John, but gives a retro-report from the mouth of the character of John. Obviously the Lamb of God has references to the Temple sacrificial system -- but remember that this sacrifice is to share as a meal as well. How does the description of Jesus as the Lamb of God correspond with the other titles/descriptions that John gives him? What is the long term affect on John of his witness to Jesus? What happens to the witness of the two disciples of John? Why does the witness spread to others? In what sort of networks does it spread?

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

What are the reasons for Paul's thanksgiving? What is Paul's hopes for this people?

What difference do we see in these passages that the "Epiphany" of Jesus makes to those around them? Maybe you can discuss how your experiences of this "Epiphany" relates to those described in these passage!

Have a wonderful evening!

Posted by johnwright at 5:34 PM | Comments (2)

The Sunday after Epiphany is always readings on the baptism of Jesus. The revelation of God to the Gentiles now proceeds in the "public" ministry of Jesus, beginning with his baptism. It is also a time of evangelism: a proclamation of the gospel as a call to repentance and faith to be sealed in baptism.

The season of Epiphany will end on Ash Wednesday. We are reminded in the readings of God's call to faith in Jesus Christ, a faith to be sealed in baptism as the continuation of the ministry of Jesus. The OT and the Epistle readings both provide commentary on the event of the baptism of Jesus. Let's start with the Gospel and move to its commentaries in the other readings.

Matthew 3:13-17

Verse 13 tells of the situation of Jesus' baptism; Verses 14-15 tell us why Jesus has to be baptized; and vv. 16-17 give God the last word in the baptism!

Why would the Jordan River be important? Can you think of anytime of "passing through" the Jordan? Why would John not want to baptize Jesus? What is right and what is wrong about John's response (or, ask Eric if it is a contradiction, ironic, or a paradox!).

How are we to interpret 'to fulfill all righteousness'? (if you figure it out, let me know because the commentators all disagree!!)

What is the effect of Jesus' baptism? For whom?

Isaiah 42:1-9

Discuss how the Isaian passage helps understand the passage from Matthew? What does it reinforce that is there? What does it add?

Acts 10:34-38

How does Acts interpret the significance of Jesus' baptism -- mentioned in the middle of the passage? What is the baptism of Jesus seen as here? How does it differ from the Isaiah passage in its emphasis? What does it have in common with the Matthew passage? What does it add to it?

Baptism has been called "the gateway to the life of the Spirit" and its taking place in the Jordan has been seen as a sign of eternal life -- an entering into the promised land. Why do you think that the church has insisted upon baptism through the years as a continuation of this practice that Jesus himself experienced -- that baptism is necessary to "fulfill all righteousness"? How is baptism a "sacrament of faith" in a special and unique manner?

Have a wonderful evening!

Posted by johnwright at 4:00 PM | Comments (6)

The history of the church in the United States has been overdetermined by the liberal philosophical and political context in which the church has found itself. Whereas the origins of European liberalism was explicitly and strongly rhetorically anti-ecclesial, liberalism in the United States attempted to tone down this rhetoric except for "sectarian forms" of Christianity. History has shown that this rhetorical difference does make a difference; check the statistics for adherence to congregations in the US versus Western Europe. Yet it also shows, so it seems to me, that the underlying philosophical/theological antagonism of liberalism to the on-going, concrete institutional life of the church is very real and present.

Gary Dorrien has written an important three volume history of American Liberal Theology. I have begun reading volume one. It is a sympathetic read of this "tradition" as a tradition. Of course this is ironic for liberalism to admit -- it has always sustained itself on its claim to a universal reason that transcends particularistic traditions or at least to a certain pragmatic form of reason -- the best there is to date. But liberalism has been transformed in its most sophisticated forms today -- such thinkers as Jeffrey Stout readily acknowledge that liberalism has historical origins and an institutional means of transmission that is every bit as "particular" as other political/historical traditions.

Dorrien argues that liberal theology "in essence . . . is the idea that Christian theology can be genuinely Christian without being based upon external authority. Since the eighteenth century, liberal Christian thinkers have argued that religion should be modern and progressive and that the meaning of Christianity should be interpreted from the standpoint of modern knowledge and experience" (p. xiii). I think that he has hit the nail right on the head. While this describes theologians in the early 19th century such as Channing and Emerson, it describes as well the millions who identify themselves as Christians who do not participate in a partricular congregation or the constant founding of new "denominations" or "community congregations" or the steady movement from one congregation to another that would either facilitate a type of experience or support a more progressive (or conservative) political environment in the United States. We have met the liberals, and they is us -- or I should say, they is me -- except as I am remade in Christ by the power of the Spirit.

Liberalism, by its very nature, problematizes all authority in order to hand the authority over human bodies to the state -- itself an abstraction that runs, supposedly, by certain impersonal, rational rules. Rationality is set up as opposed to authority within a liberal frame of reference.

Of course, this is profoundly false; it is only accepted because of the authority that we grant to those formed by liberal convictions.

An Augustinian framework, as Alasdair MacIntyre describes it, much more accurately describes the situation in which we learn how to reason truthfully and well: "In the Augustinian scheme when I first believe in order that I may go on to understand, I do not evaluate evidence, but put my trust in certain persons as authorized to represent the apostolic testimony, something which I may come to do in many different kinds of way, none of which will be at the preliminary stage good-reason-providing, because I cannot as yet know how in this area to evaluate reasons as good or otherwise.. . . the apparent arbitrariness of this initial acceptance of authority is itself something that is to be adequately understood only later, and in that later understanding authority is reencountered in a very different way. . . . Continuous authority receives its justification as indispensable to a continuing progress, the narrative of which we first learned how to recount from that authority and the truth of which is confirmed by our further progress, including that progress made by means of dialectical enquiry" (Three Rival Versions, p. 92). One learns within authority in order to question authority to see if it is justified from problems that arise from within and from those outside a particular tradition.

This is why Christian theology and the church's life cannot be "progressive" without first a "return to the sources", a bodily immersion in the biblical, institutional, sacramental, authoritative life of the communion of saints through the ages. It is why any liberal justification for such authorities, collapsing their authority to an expression of a prior "inner, personal" authority messes things up -- for the authority is found in the external as it moves into the internal. It is the corrosive move "inside" versus "outside" that makes liberal Protestant Christianity very hard to sustain except as parasitical on groups who acknowledge an external authority (rightfully or wrongfully) but seek to accomodate more deeply to the mores of the liberal society.

Posted by johnwright at 9:38 PM | Comments (10)

To understate the obvious, I am not a fan of Protestant liberalism. I consider the holiness movement, and the Church of the Nazarene with its emphasis on Christian perfection to have embedded into its fundamental reason for existence to run counter to the accommodation to categories formed by "modernist" reason and liberal democratic political setting in which we find ourselves. I find such categories, even with the post-Vatican II struggles of Roman Catholicism, to violate the fundamental catholicity of the church and the communion of saints. Protestant liberal categories have proven death to congregations and larger ecclesial communities who have adopted them as fundamental to their language and mission.

As an academic in an institution of Christian higher education, I've come to recognize how delicate a task it is to sustain the institutional commitment academically. The story of the accomodation to liberal categories that drain the intellectual resources of the church in exchange for a type of social prestige has well been told by persons like George Marsden, James Burtchaell, David Gleason, and David Schindler -- stories presupposed by my analysis in Conflicting Allegiances. It is

It is interesting, however, to find the resurrgence of Protestant liberalism today -- what I was convinced was dying ten years ago. The impetus comes from several sources, it seems to me. One is the continued movement of evangelicals into liberal categories under the guise of their pietism -- their "relationship with God" -- language found at the basis of Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith. One finds it in the new evangelical leadership that is rightfully trying to separate itself from the neo-conservative captivity of the evangelical church under the Bush administration. It provides a means for a common language with the culture that allows the church to sustain a certains status in the culture.

The second strand, however, comes from "post-secularists" -- persons who have found the banality and inconsistency of an utterly secular, materialist understanding of life. As meaning and reason evaporate -- forced into a position of grounding reason in unreason such as power or survival of the fittest, post-secularists reach to a certain "religious" understanding to justify their own continuing quest. One can find such a position in the Italian "soft nihilist" or "weak being" philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who exhorts the rediscovery of Schleiermacher via Joachim of Fiore. Such a post-secular movement towards the language of "religion" provides legitimation for the evangelical movement in the same direction. One can picture Oprah inviting Rick Warren to set on her coach and talk about the transcendental purpose of the individual human life discovered in their inner spiritual experience.

What is ironic is that such a move seems futile for both evangelicals and for the post-secularists (and Roman Catholics who move that way as well). Liberal commitments are parasitical on other formations; they are unable to sustain their own habits across time. Jule Reuben in The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transofrmation and the Marginalization of Morality (University of Chicago Press, 1996) tells this familiar story. She writes, "I also show how liberal Protestantism contribued to its own demise. Particularly damaging, in my view, was liberal Protestants' tendency to equate relgion with morality, and the vagueness and inclusiveness of their rhetoric. Nonetheless, I do not think historians can show that liberal Christianity, rather than science, was responsible for secularization. The development of liberal Christianity was simly too intertwined with science. To understand the secularization of intellectual life, schoalrs will have to examine why liberal Christianis could not successfully incorporate science into a Christian framework. My research suggests that this had as much to do with changing conceptions of science as with the shortcomings of liberal Christian thought" (p. 14).

Of course, given that "science" provided "truth" and Christianity "meaning", of course Christianity would have to change with the changing conceptions of science in order to mediate Christianity to its cultural despisers. Once surrendering its role as the organizer of human knowledge, Christian theology could only play a correlational, mediating role. The key is not to return to an evangelical biblicism in its own correlational attempts with modernists understandings of history, but to a strong articulation of the Christian event, Jesus Christ, as witnessed to in Scriptures and in the life of the church, particularly in its early, normative years. It is through a discovery of catholicity, the communion of saints in Jesus Christ, that the proper context for the intellectual and congregational life of the church must find itself.

Posted by johnwright at 7:50 PM | Comments (2)