Richard Mouw wrote this short and simple book a dozen years ago, but it is, perhaps, even more timely today than when it first appeared. The last several presidential elections indicate that our country and our churches are badly divided over a broad range of important issues like gay rights, abortion, stem cell research, the place of America in the world, global economics, health care, and the list goes on. Many people employ a military metaphor to describe our so-called “culture wars.” In a war, to state the obvious, you have friends and foes, enemies and allies, the goal being for Good (that would be “our” side) to defeat Evil (“their” side). Sharp, partisan and demonizing rhetoric about these issues divides us even further. One is left to exasperate with Rodney King, “why can’t we all just get along?” Mouw shows how and why Christians should not only be people of conviction, but people of compassion and civility. We are, he reminds us, to “pursue peace with everyone” (Hebrews 12:14), and to “show every courtesy to everyone” (Titus 3:2). Civility does not mean we have to like everyone we meet or forfeit our convictions to a relativistic perspective. Rather, it means caring deeply about our civitas and its public life. After defining the nature and parameters of Christian civility, Mouw investigates its implications for our speech, attitudes, pluralistic society, sexual mores, other religions, and leadership in a fallen world. He explores the limits of civility, when there is no “on the other hand.” In his final two chapters he cautions against our tendencies to triumphalism, and trying to usher in the kingdom of God right now, as opposed to appreciating the ways and means of a patient, slow-moving God who loves His creation deeply and longs to redeem it. ~ Daniel B. Clendenin
The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels is unique among reference books on the Bible, the first volume of its kind since James Hastings published his Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels in 1909. In the more than eight decades since Hastings our understanding of Jesus, the Evangelists and their world has grown remarkably. New interpretive methods have illumined the text, the ever-changing profile of modern culture has put new questions to the Gospels, and our understanding of the Judaism of Jesus’ day has advanced in ways that could not have been predicted in Hasting’s day. But for many readers of the Gospels the new outlook on the Gospels remains hidden within technical journals and academic monographs. The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels bridges the gap between scholars and those pastors, teachers, students and lay people desiring in-depth treatment of select topics in an accessible and summary format. The topics range from cross-sectional themes (such as faith, law, Sabbath) to methods of interpretation (such as form criticism, redaction criticism, and death of Jesus) to each of the four Gospels as a whole. Some articles–such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic traditions and revolutionary movements at the time of Jesus — provide significant background information to the Gospels. Others reflect recent and less familiar issues in Jesus and Gospel studies, such as divine man, ancient rhetoric and the chreiai (aphorisms). Contemporary concerns of general interest are discussed in articles covering such topics as healing, the demonic and the historical reliability of the Gospels. And for those entrusted with communicating the message of the Gospels, there is an extensive article on preaching from the Gospels. The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels presents the fruit of evangelical New Testament scholarship at the end of the twentieth century — committed to the authority of Scripture, utilizing the best of critical methods, and maintaining dialog with contemporary scholarship and challenges facing the church. ~ Book Description
It seems to me that elsewhere in America liberty is far more a matter of law than practice. The Bill of Rights is still on the books and they’d have a hell of a time putting you in jail for just saying something, but how free are we? Whatever the guarantees, I believe liberty resides in its exercise. Liberty is really about the ability to feel free and behave accordingly. You are only as free as you act. Free people must be willing to speak up … and listen. They can’t merely consume the fruits of freedom, they have to produce them. This exercise of liberty requires that people trust one another and the institutions they make together. They have to feel at home in their society. Well, Americans don’t appear to trust each other much these days. Why else would we employ three times more lawyers per capita than we did in 1970? Why else would our universities be so determined to impose tolerance that they’ll expel you for saying what you think and never notice the irony? Why else would we teach our kids to fear all strangers? Why else have we become so afraid to look one another in the eye? We have come to regard trust as foolishness and fear as necessary. We live in terror that the people around us might figure out what we’re actually thinking. Frankly, this America doesn’t feel very free to me at all. What has happened to our liberty? I think much of the answer lies in the critical difference between information and experience. These days we view most of our world through a television screen. Most of our knowledge comes from information about things, not experience with them.
The sources to which Taylor refers are the moral ideals, ideas, and understandings that have dominated in various historical eras. Taylor’s basic premise is rather simple, “we are only our selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good (p. 34).” His purpose is not to specify the good, that is, he does not seek to set normative definitions or qualifications. His purpose is to show that self-definition requires a framework in which to be understood. The historical course of his narrative begins with the classical perspective. In this view, self was dependent on a vision of the True or the Ideal. The hierarchical nature of reality presupposed in classical thought meant that self-definition was subservient to the whole. Traditional Christian thought embraced the classical perspective and the preference for self-definition by externals. Obviously, this short sketch of classical thought seems to be absurdly irrelevant in our contemporary world. Self is definitely not defined in relation to externals, but by an extreme interiority, complete rejection of hierarchical schemes, and the assumption that reality is defined empirically rather than conceptually. This book traces the transformation of the classical perspective through history in each of these areas: the movement toward inwardness, the affirmation of ordinary life, and the voice of nature. ~ Peter A. Kindle at Amazon.com
We need grace. We need God. We need to be loved despite our sin. This is infinitely more than what secular psychology says, that we need human positive strokes, that we are O.K. We are not O.K., and we know it, even as we repeat, for the millionth time, the most attractive lie the Devil has ever hooked us on, that sin is a superstition, that we are intrinsically good. Modernized Christianity, in it desperate attempt to be accepted by the world, compromises its bad news of sin and thus trivializes its Good News of salvation. This modernized Christianity will never get what it wants, the world’s acceptance. Even as it taunts us for Puritanism, it envies us for telling the truth that it knows, deep down inside, it has covered up. The patient likes to be told by the nice doctor that there’s nothing seriously wrong, but the patient knows all the time that both are fooling themselves. Dying people in America are usually told they’re going to be “just fine”, and they play along to spare the family the grief and honesty it cannot endure, thus plunging both into a conspiracy of lies. The same is true with regard to the greater illness of the spirit when we indulge in the conspiracy of lies that “everything’s going to be all right.” That’s the song people sing as they march to Hell.
This interpretation (of the Sermon on the Mount) naively assumes what all of history disproves, that we broken bricks can constitute an unbroken building if only we have an unbroken blueprint. Malcolm Muggeridge says, more realistically, that the most unpopular of all Christian dogmas is the one that is most empirically verifiable, the dogma of Original Sin.
What’s missing here? Simply the essence of Christianity, which is not the Sermon on the Mount. When Christianity was proclaimed throughout the world, the proclamation was not “Love your enemies?” but “Christ is risen!” This was not a new ideal but a new event, that God became man, died, and rose for our salvation. Christianity is first of all not ideal but real, and event, news, the gospel, the “good news.” The essence of Christianity is not Christianity; the essence of Christianity is Christ… The Sermon on the Mount not only comes from Jesus but also leads us to Jesus. It does not divert us from Jesus to a set of abstract ideals, but its ideals lead us to Jesus. who alone can fulfill them in us, if we let him. The sermon is an arrow and Jesus is the bull’s eye, not vice versa.
The initial relevance of the traditional doctrine [of just war] today lies in its value as the solvent of false dilemmas. Our fragmentized culture seems to be the native soil of this fallacious and dangerous type of thinking. There are,first of all, the two extreme positions, a soft sentimental pacifism and a cynical hard realism. Both of these views, which are also "feelings," are formative factors in the moral climate of the moment. Bot of them are condemned by the traditional doctrine as false and pernicious. The problem is to refute by argument the false antinomy between ware an morality that they assert in common, thought in different ways. The further and more difficult problem is to purify the public climate of the miasma that emanates from each of them and tends to smother the public conscience.
So far no attempt at naturalizing content has produced an explanation (analysis, reduction) of intentional content that is even remotely plausible. A symptom that something is radically wrong with the project is that intentional notions are inherently normative. They set standards of truth, rationality, consistency, etc., and there is no way that these standards can be intrinsic to a system consisting entirely of brute, blind, nonintentional causal relations. There is no mean component to billiard ball causation. Darwinian biological attempts at naturalizing content try to avoid this problem by appealing to what they suppose is the inherently teleological, normative character of biological evolution. But this is a very deep mistake. There is nothing normative or teleological about Darwinian evolution. Indeed, Darwin’s major contribution was precisely to remove purpose, and teleology from evolution, and substitute for it purely natural forms.
Our law affords constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education. Our cases recognize “the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” Our precedents “have respected the private realm of family life which the state cannot enter.” These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion by the State.