PAGE 8:
Highlight
“The central and guiding metaphor throughout the book is Jere- miah’s admonition to Jews in exile in Babylon: “Seek the peace (shalom) of the city where you dwell” (Jer. 29:7).”
PAGE 9:
Highlight
“Friesen was set on the course of this book by lectures he heard John Howard Yoder give, in which Yoder made Jeremiah 29:7 central. Some of those Yoder lectures have since been published in his For the Nations, a title distinguishing Yoder’s understanding of God’s will for the church from Stanley Hauerwas’s Against the Nations.”
PAGE 24:
Highlight
“The Epistle to Diognetus expresses a profound tension at the heart of being a Christian in the world. The second-century writer to Dio- gnetus describes Christians who share the language, customs, dress, and place of residence with their fellow citizens, while living in a way that makes them seem like strangers or aliens within their own country.”
Highlight
“Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humankind by country, or by speech, or by dress. . . . They do not dwell in cities of their own, or use a different language, or practice a peculiar life. . . . They live in countries of their own, but simply as sojourners; they share the life of citizens, they endure the lot of foreigners; every foreign land is to them a homeland [“fatherland” in the original], and every homeland a foreign land. —The Epistle to Diognetus”
PAGE 26:
Highlight
“Christian existence involves polarities that pull us in opposite directions and sometimes seem like contradictions, yet must be held together in creative tension.”
Highlight
“David Tracy believes that theology must move beyond the church to connect with the academy and the larger society in order to speak to larger public issues.”
Highlight
“We do not have to choose between “being” the church and “connecting” with the larger culture. Rather, we must do both.”
PAGE 27:
Highlight
“I hope to develop a theology of culture that enables us to discrim- inate, to make choices about how we relate to the wider culture as a people with an alternative vision.”
Highlight
“Psalm 137 and Jeremiah’s letter call for faithful response to the good news of God’s commitment to restore the cosmos to the wholeness God intended.”
Highlight
“Insofar as the church in North America is faithful to God’s inten- tion, the church now is in a state of exile similar to the Jews who were carried off into captivity in Babylon.”
PAGE 30:
Highlight
“Brueggemann argues that the third period—post-exilic Israel—is especially appropriate for a vision of the North American church today. Israel developed strategies for survival as a distinctive minority faithful to God to avoid accommodation to the dominant culture around it. It developed a theology of hope to counter the tendency to escapism and despair.”
PAGE 35:
Highlight
“a theology of culture for our North Amer- ican context will seek to develop a vision of the church that is an alter- native to Christendom models, which assume that the church is and should be integrally connected with the dominant institutions of soci- ety. A”
PAGE 37:
Highlight
“The musical metaphors of dissonance and harmony describe the situa- tion of the church in the late twentieth century. Tension, ambiguity, suspense—these words describe the dynamics of the Christian church’s relationship to culture.”
PAGE 40:
Highlight
“To pray genuinely to God for the welfare of the city is to yearn with all one’s heart for its well-being. To pray means to weep with God when the city chooses the way of death, to pronounce judgment, to yearn for, urge, and then act with the com- passion of God that the city may choose the way of life.”
PAGE 41:
Highlight
“Based on the model of Christ, the church is to embody an alternative cultural vision that then becomes a basis for its mission and involve- ment in the cultural setting wherever it is, as a creative pioneering com- munity.”
PAGE 44:
Highlight
“A N YO N E W H O C O N S I D E R S T H E T O P I C of the relationship of church and culture must take into account two groundbreaking works in the field of Christian social ethics, Ernst Troeltsch’s The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1911) and H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (1951).”
PAGE 53:
Highlight
“Like Troeltsch before him, Niebuhr defined Christ in such a way that if one were to have a “pure” rela- tionship to this Christ, one would by definition stand in opposition to culture. By treating culture as a monolithic entity to which Christ is re- lated, Niebuhr set up a dichotomy between Christ and culture. Thus Niebuhr defined the problem as a tension between Christ and culture, as if the problem were an opposition between two monolithic entities separate from each other.”
PAGE 54:
Highlight
“The tension, then, is not between Christ and culture, but between different cultural visions. There is no form or “essence” of Christianity (as Harnack sought to develop it) “outside” of or against culture. Rather, in the New Testament, different cultural visions come into con- flict with each other.”
PAGE 59:
Highlight
“The perennial issue confronting the church is the relationship be- tween cultural visions, not between Christ and culture. Every expres- sion of Christianity is embodied in cultural form.”
PAGE 60:
Highlight
“A Christian vision is never noncultural. Thus, we should not define the issue as how we relate Christ and culture. Nor should we state the issue as a conflict between the church and culture. The church itself is embodied culturally.”
PAGE 66:
Highlight
“I believe we need an orientation to life—a “place” to stand—that will make us an alien in our own country.”
PAGE 68:
Highlight
“Theology must draw on three sources of wisdom: the biblical story, human experience, and reason.”
PAGE 69:
Highlight
“In particu- lar, Christian theological reflection must faithfully and accurately in- terpret the way of God revealed through Israel and through the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without that orien- tation the church has lost its way and accommodated to cultural values alien to the good news.”
PAGE 70:
Highlight
“Mystery is therefore an integral perspective in any theology, a “bafflement of mind” that humans experience when they try to “wrap their minds around” the symbol, God. All talk about God is a “construal” of reality.”
PAGE 72:
Highlight
“all theology is a human cultural perspective and must constantly be reworked in relationship to the sociological and in- tellectual factors of the time and place. While theology reflects upon God, that ultimate reality, in terms of which all of culture is to be in- terpreted, it is shaped by and integrally related to the categories and the assumptions of the age in which it is developed.”
PAGE 76:
Highlight
“To say, for example, that God is like a parent is to draw upon our finite experience of parenthood and our experience that God cares for us. It is to say how God is like that, even as we are aware that God is beyond and not quite like anything we know of human parenthood. The point is that we never grasp God apart from our interpreting, our metaphorical relationship to the one to whom we are devoted.15″
PAGE 78:
Highlight
“A Christian theology of culture is a self-conscious process of as- sessing the appropriate metaphors for understanding God’s relation- ship to the cosmos and our lives.”
PAGE 85:
Highlight
“Martin L. King Jr. modeled the alternative culture vision I am proposing. He integrated an intellectual and moral vision that leads neither to despair nor withdrawal from society, but to action that con- tributes to the peace of the city. King embraced his own particularity while addressing the univer- sal implications of the good news for the entire world.”
PAGE 86:
Highlight
“King integrated these three elements of Christian theology. As human beings we want to know what is true. I use the image of the philosopher for this dimension of culture as loving wisdom.”
PAGE 87:
Highlight
“Second, the creation of human culture is a social enterprise. We create who we are as citizens together with others.”
Highlight
“The third element in the triad is the human quest for beauty, that standard of excellence by which we judge the created world of human”
PAGE 88:
Highlight
“culture.”
Highlight
“This ability to create arises from the human capacity of lan- guage. Because of our language, we can imagine possibilities of pattern and order that do not yet exist: tools or technology to accomplish our goals, designs of the material objects to serve both functional and aes- thetic needs, ways of structuring our institutions, conceptions of the organization of our living spaces, patterns of social life in our towns and cities, the patterns of our rituals.”
PAGE 90:
Highlight
“In what follows, I will be making three claims. First, speaking about God in a Christian way requires Trinitarian language. Second, Trinitarian thought is profoundly relevant to how we interpret the larger cosmos and culture in which we live. Third, the Trinity is essen- tial in providing us with a moral vision that can give practical guidance to the church.”
PAGE 99:
Highlight
“As Paul Tillich has stated so well, doubt is an integral component of faith. He speaks not of the doubt of the skeptic who cynically refuses to commit to anything, nor the methodological doubt entailed in scientific inquiry, which appropri- ately resists believing in the truth of a hypothesis until it can be sup- ported by evidence. Rather, Tillich means the existential doubt that re- quires a commitment to an ultimate reality beyond our finite limits.”
PAGE 100:
Highlight
“Gandhi subtitled his autobiography, “My Experiments with Truth.””
Highlight
“The creative engagement of others through nonviolent means opens the possibility for new truth and insight to emerge. The destruction of oth- ers through violent force forecloses the future by making it impossible for a creative synthesis of new truth to emerge.”
Highlight
“In genuine human communication, the hiddenness of the other is disclosed and revealed.”
PAGE 101:
Highlight
“The cre- ative process of bringing the universe into being is itself an act of cre- ative love, a yearning on the part of God to affirm life.”
Highlight
“The act of re- demption in Christ to restore the universe to the intention God has for it and the creative process of bringing the universe into being are both actions that arise from the one God who is the power of love both in creating and redeeming the universe.”
PAGE 102:
Highlight
“Theology has struggled with how to understand the relationship of God to an evolving universe. This evolutionary process arises either from chance variation or completely under the control of God. Neither position seems plausible. It is difficult to account for the order and beauty of the cosmos simply on the basis of chance. On the other hand, to think of God as an absolutely controlling power fails to account for events that seem to lack any purposeful explanation.”
PAGE 103:
Highlight
“Volf ’s argument is problematic for several reasons. In the first place, it raises serious problems with a Trinitarian notion of God, which he argued for cogently earlier in the book. If we are to accept Volf ’s ar- gument, there is another God than the God we know in Jesus Christ.”
Highlight
“Second, this ultimate appeal to violent force as the only way in which evil can be defeated undermines Volf ’s argument in the rest of his book—that the way of the cross and forgiveness is the only way in which the escalating cycle of evil can be broken in history.”
Highlight
“Third, Volf ’s argument assumes a miraculous intervention of God at the end of history that does not square with the relationship of God to the cosmos the previous 15 billion years.”
PAGE 106:
Highlight
“We do not “see” and “know” God by an escape to another realm of reality, by ascending to some other sphere beyond the world (as in various forms of Neoplatonic philoso- phy), but by embracing the cosmos, the earth, the earthy sensuous re- ality in which our bodies live and move in our daily activities.”
PAGE 107:
Highlight
“Feminist theologians have noted that the most extended instance of female imagery for God in the Bible is the presence of God’s Spirit in Wisdom.”
Highlight
“We are not persons who have a body, as if it were exter- nal to us. We are not spiritual beings with a soul distinct from the body. In the biblical understanding, we are “spirited bodies.””
PAGE 108:
Highlight
““Sacramental presence” is the conviction that all material reality is holy because God is present in it. This conviction is essential to a the- ological orientation that seeks the peace of the city.”
PAGE 110:
Highlight
“Jesus Christ is God’s disclosure of what it means to be fully human.”
Highlight
“The church is the context in which we discern what it means to be faithful to the story of Jesus. Commitment to Christ as norm means to commit as a people to an ongoing conver- sational process under the guidance of Scripture in the face of a multi- tude of challenges.”
Highlight
“An adequate theology of culture is one that has an “embodied” Christology. We need a Christology that can provide a vivid picture of a Christ who is not disembodied from cultural formation, but who is concrete enough to provide leverage for assessing how we should en- gage the particularities of culture.”
PAGE 111:
Highlight
“The Trinitarian model introduced ear- lier suggests that Christ is the one who proclaims God’s kingdom of justice and righteousness, the servant who is faithful to death on the cross, and the living spirit in the new community, the church. This Trinitarian structure functions as a compass or guide for our appropri- ation of Jesus as norm for the church’s engagement with culture.”
Highlight
“The One Who Proclaims God’s Kingdom”
Highlight
“The kingdom of God rep- resents the wholeness God intends for the entire cosmos.”
Pen
PAGE 112:
Highlight
“Zacchaeus symbolizes liberation from a corporate system of exploitation and from his complicity in that system by virtue of his own greed. He is liberated to become a person who practices justice by a redistribution of his resources to those in need. This brings his salva- tion today, not in some distant future.”
PAGE 116:
Highlight
“Another way of understanding Christ is more in harmony with the New Testament and undergirds the “alternative” culture model we have proposed. The work of Christ should be understood primarily as aimed at transforming people rather than primarily satisfying God or the devil.”
Highlight
“The implication of this view of Christ is that the church should not divide the spiritual and ethical, this life and the life to come. Both di- mensions are integrally connected to the one salvation brought about by God in Christ. Being a new community of peace in the world, and seeking the peace of the city where the church dwells is therefore cen- tral and integral to the gospel, the good news.”
PAGE 117:
Highlight
“God’s love for the cos- mos (John 3:16) cannot be carried out authentically when we divide the world into the good and the evil and direct our hostility to the evil.”
PAGE 120:
Highlight
“The coming of the Spirit is a ful- fillment of Jesus’ inaugural sermon at Nazareth. When the Spirit comes, it is good news for the poor and liberty to the captives, for in the new community of the Spirit people are liberated to have a gener- ous spirit of sharing.”
PAGE 125:
Highlight
“The Spirit of the living God moves and lures us toward a future where everything is connected. Instead of living our lives by separated fragments isolated from each other, we are called to imagine a future where everything is integrally linked to- gether.”
Highlight
“The integration of all reality within the divine Spirit is captured in the Hebrew word shalom.”
PAGE 127:
Highlight
“The church must first be a new society for it to contribute mean- ingfully to the peace of the city where it dwells.”
and Note
“The church must first be a new society for it to contribute mean- ingfully to the peace of the city where it dwells.”
Highlight
“Liturgy is not only the symbolic or rit- ual action of the church, but is also the holistic life of the church as a new society living in response to God.”
and Note
“Liturgy is not only the symbolic or rit- ual action of the church, but is also the holistic life of the church as a new society living in response to God.”
PAGE 129:
Highlight
“The church needs to develop a sense of identity by recreating itself in four areas. It must develop a so- cial structure and process that can respond to modern tolerance and pluralism. It needs a competent and inspired leadership that can help guide the discerning process of cultural engagement. It needs an imag- inative recital of the rich narrative traditions of the Bible and church history to offer paradigms for the interpretation of modern life. And it needs a system of symbols and rituals to provide a clear vision and al- ternative to the symbols and rituals of the dominant culture. All of these factors contribute to a practice of faith that can offer wholeness and hope to the surrounding culture.”
and Note
“The church needs to develop a sense of identity by recreating itself in four areas. It must develop a so- cial structure and process that can respond to modern tolerance and pluralism. It needs a competent and inspired leadership that can help guide the discerning process of cultural engagement. It needs an imag- inative recital of the rich narrative traditions of the Bible and church history to offer paradigms for the interpretation of modern life. And it needs a system of symbols and rituals to provide a clear vision and al- ternative to the symbols and rituals of the dominant culture. All of these factors contribute to a practice of faith that can offer wholeness and hope to the surrounding culture.”
PAGE 133:
Highlight
“We seem incapable of modeling an alternative to the world’s handling of conflict. I confess, therefore, that the church has often been a rigid, fearful, defensive, and hypocritical institution.”
PAGE 134:
Highlight
“The quest for “personal salvation” is particularly disturbing among comfortable, complacent, economically and politically well-situated North Americans. Too often these Christians conveniently relegate Christ and salvation to the realm of the spiritual or life beyond the grave. For such Christians, worship preserves their life of complacency.”
PAGE 135:
Highlight
“The church fails to model an alternative vision of life when it be- comes politicized by adopting the power tactics of any other lobby. The church needs to think of itself as a “pilgrim” people of an alternative way.”
PAGE 137:
Highlight
“Moral formation of a people of character takes place in more inti- mate communities. The acids of modernity have eroded the very com- munities that are essential to moral formation (i.e., the family, neigh- borhoods, the church).”
PAGE 140:
Highlight
“Fourth, we need to balance the emphasis upon being the church with doing the work of mission in the larger society. This is a point we have already made several times in our critique of Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon in Resident Aliens, who argue that the “po- litical task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world” (emphasis mine). The Christian vision is both and, to be the church, and in being that church to seek the peace of the city where we dwell.”
PAGE 146:
Highlight
“Eating a meal together is one of the most basic, elemental acts in which human beings share their solidarity with each other. Disciples should break bread together and they should do it often. Disciples shared meals together with their leader again and again, culminating in that last Passover meal, a meal that has formed the practice of the ritual of the Lord’s Supper ever since.”
PAGE 157:
Highlight
“So long as persons in a congregation are genuinely seeking to fol- low Christ and are willing to listen to others, a congregation should keep the dialogical process open to ongoing ethical discernment on matters where Christians conscientiously disagree.”
Highlight
“We must find a way for Christians who disagree on conscien- tious grounds to keep the process open to ongoing discernment.”
PAGE 158:
Highlight
“I see no grounds for excluding anyone from the church who de- sires to continue to discern God’s will in a spirit of humble sharing and patient listening to others.”
PAGE 170:
Highlight
“eks the peace of the city where we dwell. ”
PAGE 171:
Highlight
“. The creator God is the ground that is, the one most vividly present in the concrete, historical and the one whose Spirit is present in and participates in the cos- Consequently, any particular material form can become for us a ment,” a vehicle through which the gift of God’s grace can come”
PAGE 177:
Highlight
“Theologians, pastors, and church leaders should be educated to in- terpret the nonverbal symbols of communication of music and the vi- sual arts, even as now they learn to interpret the verbal language of”
PAGE 178:
Highlight
“Scripture and the creeds and the language of psychology for pastoral counseling”
PAGE 184:
Highlight
“Some Christians bring to these issues a dualism of body and soul that denigrates the sensual and that assumes human salvation is an es- cape from our earthy, embodied existence. In the absence of an aes- thetic vision that embraces earthy sensuality as an integral element of the Christian faith, these Christians lack a standard of critical judgment by which to assess aesthetic issues.”
PAGE 185:
Highlight
“When we speak of aesthetic excellence theologically, we mean the ideal forms God calls humans to create, to express what humans and the universe were intended to be. Aesthetic excellence means the ideal form God intended for creation, or the new eschatological age for which we hope.”
PAGE 196:
Highlight
“The Spirit of God can speak to us through works of art that may not be explicitly religious. Just as we may interpret theologically knowledge we gain from the natural sciences about the physical uni- verse, so artistic works that are not intentionally religious may com- municate a profound theological insight.”
PAGE 198:
Highlight
“he arts illuminate the religious dimension of hum epresenting the underlying tones or moods of human exis- what some have called the “religious affections.” ”
PAGE 201:
Highlight
“Artistic creativity results from the mystery and dynamic of the in- teraction of finitude and the human capacity to create new form.”
PAGE 205:
Highlight
“The arts are also linked to religious imagination when they open our eyes to see the brokenness of our world, the suf- fering of those around us. The arts can help us overcome the numbing effect of our culture.”
PAGE 212:
Highlight
“This tension between citizenship in two societies is concrete and sociological. Our identity as Christians is shaped by membership in two different sociological structures: the nation-state and the church.”
PAGE 215:
Highlight
“We participate in shaping the attitudes and beliefs of our culture in a myriad of ways by simply being a people who respond to life with an alternative vision of what could be.”
PAGE 216:
Highlight
“The church engages the culture around it with an alternative model of citizenship simply by being itself.”
PAGE 219:
Highlight
“Work is a social activity in which we cooperate with other human beings by contributing to the common good and the well-being of the cosmos. When we look at work as a calling, we interpret what we do with our time and energy as a response to God’s purpose for our lives.”
PAGE 225:
Highlight
“A Christian understanding of the citizen is founded on two princi- ples. It is based on: (1) a vision or model of the good society that grows out of the view of the church elaborated in chapter five; and (2) a com- mitment to the process of analogical thinking that draws norms from that vision for how other societies beyond the church might work and be structured.”
PAGE 243:
Highlight
“The following is a partial list of guidelines for Christian citizen- ship.”
Highlight
“Balance of Individual Dignity and Community The church respects the individual who is a member by voluntary choice based on conviction.”
PAGE 245:
Highlight
“Compassion and Wholeness Toward the Weak and Powerless The church is driven by compassion, based on the Jesus story and the vision of the prophets, to seek wholeness in all dimensions of life on earth.”
PAGE 246:
Highlight
“Love and the Practice of Forgiveness However, the passion for justice must be tempered by love.”
Highlight
“Religious Liberty The church is a voluntary society based on the freedom to respond noncoercively to God’s love.”
Highlight
“Equality In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female”
PAGE 247:
Highlight
“Respect for the Contribution of Each Person to the Public Good Each member of the church is valued and has gifts for building up the entire community.”
Highlight
“Restorative Justice Chapter five identified the reconciling process the church is called to practice in order to deal with the sinner (Matt. 18:15-18).”
PAGE 248:
Highlight
“Nonviolent Resolution of Conflict The Sermon on the Mount summarizes a central practice and teaching of the church in the statement: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God” (Matt. 5:9).”
Highlight
“Peacemaking is a central vocation of Christian citizenship.”
PAGE 249:
Highlight
“Citizen Movements for Social Change Christians will participate in the building of a “global civic cul- ture.””
PAGE 250:
Highlight
“A Transnational Network that Transcends Boundaries of Nation States Christian citizens should challenge the idolatry of an exclusive na- tional identity.”
PAGE 251:
Highlight
“Support for Democracy Although Christians may support democracy, they do not do it in the way the U.S. State Department uses its power to support democ- racy in the world, including the occasional use of military force.”
PAGE 253:
Highlight
“. The word philosopher in the chapter title describes one of e fundamental dimensions of a Christian theology of culture, the ve of wisdom. B”
PAGE 254:
Highlight
“In the biblical wisdom tradition, God’s wisdom is understood to be universal, available to all human beings, irrespective of particular cul- tural or social identities.”
PAGE 262:
Highlight
“Both authoritarianism and relativism create serious practical prob- lems. Authoritarianism hides insecurity and can lead to fanaticism and intolerance. Relativism does not take human interaction seriously. In- stead, it provides a convenient escape from taking seriously alternative worldviews and ways of life.”
Highlight
“Wisdom entails relationships with persons of other faiths. We should not view our relationship to other religions abstractly. The key relationship is not between two religions as a composite set of truths, beliefs, or dogmas. Christians do not relate to religions as intellectual constructs or symbolic systems, but to people—people who adhere to a particular faith and way of life.”
PAGE 263:
Highlight
“A healthy relationship to people of other faiths de- pends upon the acceptance and affirmation of one’s own particularity, not a denial of it. Genuine faith entails commitment to that which is re- garded as ultimate. The ultimate is that to which persons give them- selves above all, that to which they are loyal above all.”
PAGE 264:
Highlight
“People become Christians when they become inwardly convinced by the truthfulness and signifi- cance of the story of God’s restoration of life in all its dimensions. Peo- ple become Christians when they identify their lives with the story of God’s action in Christ, when they see in that story the key to their own and the world’s restoration to wholeness.”
PAGE 269:
Highlight
“The mission of the church in the world must begin with listening to others. Through listening we connect our own particular vision of life to the vision and practice of others.”
PAGE 274:
Highlight
“Outcomes of a dialogical process. The outcome of this dialogical process will vary. And this indeed makes Christian mission a learning and growing process in which one does not know in advance what the outcome will be. From a theological standpoint, this makes the Christ- ian encounter with the religions a venture of faith.”
Highlight
“1. Complementary views. Two views may be able to complement each other.”
PAGE 275:
Highlight
“2. Paths to the same goal. Certain forms of Hinduism see different religions as paths to the same goal.”
Highlight
“3. Conversion. One may also be converted from one perspective to another.”
PAGE 276:
Highlight
“4. Appropriating other religious practices into one’s own world- view. It is possible to appropriate aspects of one religious perspective within another.”
PAGE 277:
Highlight
“5. Change after encountering the other. A fifth possibility is the al- teration of one’s own religious perspective after an encounter with the “other.””
Highlight
“6. Judgment. Finally, one may conclude that one’s own or another religious perspective is fundamentally flawed.”
Highlight
“7. Mission. Is this Christian mission? Is the center of the Christian faith the conviction that a way of life must appear concretely in histor- ical time and space? If so, this truth must be expressed in its encounter with the actualities of history.”
PAGE 279:
Highlight
“Our relationship to science is similar to our relationship to other religious traditions. In the first place, we can affirm wisdom gleaned from scientific inquiry. There need be no ultimate tension between dis- coveries of science and of Christian faith. Second, as we will see, there are significant parallels between science and religion. Both involve the creative interaction of models or paradigms and the interpretation of our experience of the world.”
PAGE 283:
Highlight
“So while scientific and religious ways of knowing are expressed in different languages that serve different functions, they are also similar in many respects. It is important, therefore, in interpreting religious texts like the Genesis accounts of creation that we not confuse the dif- ferent functions of science and religious faith. The religious language of Genesis is not scientific language. It does not purport to give a sci- entific account of how the universe functions. Rather it makes certain claims about the meaning and value of the universe in the light of the ultimate reality of God. Genesis is more concerned about questions of why than how, with questions about purpose rather than the processes of how things came to be.”
PAGE 288:
Highlight
“Pastors and laypersons in the church are constantly faced with the intersection between areas of knowledge and their identity as Christians. Unfortunately, the church often does not provide a structure for a process of critical dis- cernment.”