Contemporary Christian Quotes

when the imitation of Christ does not mean to live a life like Christ, but to live your life as authentically as Christ lived his, then there are many ways and forms in which a man can be a Christian.

If we didn't have the storms, we'd never get to play in the waves.

The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation...

Contemporary Christians have declared war on individual immorality but seem remarkably silent about the evil of systems, especially corporate greed and malfeasance. (p. 176)

It's so funny being a Christian musician. It always scares me when people think so highly of Christian music, Contemporary Christian music especially. Because I kinda go, I know a lot of us, and we don't know jack about anything. Not that I don't want you to buy our records and come to our concerts. I sure do. But you should come for entertainment. If you really want spiritual nourishment, you should go to church...you should read the Scriptures.

The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others.

The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now. Spirituality is about this process: the opening of the heart to the God who is already here.

There is a great superficiality in today's evangelical world. Many Bible-believing Christians share the contemporary case for self-gratification, emotionalism, and anti-intellectualism. Many people who believe in the Bible have never read it.

And the kiss?” Her frown was deep, sorrowful. “That was the script, too. I know. But I don’t see any difference. You held her like you held me. You even looked at her the same.” “I was acting.” “I know.” Tears brimmed her eyes. “That’s what I’m afraid of.

Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.

If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.

[...] outlining how certain fans of ’NSYNC like to imagine Justin Timber lake getting fisted by Lance Bass. Glenn Dixon surmised that much of the Contemporary Christian genre is driven by artists who literally want to fuck Jesus Christ.

every Christian is constantly invited to overcome his neighbor’s fear by entering into it with him, and to find in the fellowship of suffering the way to freedom.

He is conscious of the past and present injustices, but he knows that real remedies are to be found in contemporary Christian compassion, and not in compensatory justice.

Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being 'disturbers of the peace' and 'outside agitators.' But they went on with the conviction that they were a 'colony of heaven' and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be 'astronomically intimidated.' They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. Things are different now. The contemporary Church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the archsupporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the Church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the Church’s silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are.

It's funny how after all those years attending youth events with light shows and bands, after all the contemporary Christian music and contemporary Christian books, after all the updated technology and dynamic speakers and missional enterprises and relevant marketing strategies designed to make Christianity cool, all I wanted from the church when I was ready to give it up was a quiet sanctuary and some candles. All I wanted was a safe place to be. Like so many, I was in search of sanctuary.

Who can save a child from a burning house without taking the risk of being hurt by the flames? Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind? In short: “Who can take away suffering without entering it?

Our images of God matter. Just as how we conceptualize God affects what we think the Christian life is about, so do our images of God.

The bad preacher takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out into the traditional language of Christianity. The core of his thought is merely contemporary; only the superficies is traditional. But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear modern dress.

Loving someone wasn't about their perfection. It was about coming to accept every part of them, their good qualities at their weaknesses and flaws--looking on everything they were and loving it all. As she looked on everything Jake was, right down to his center, she loved him.

When tradition is thought to state the way things really are, it becomes the director and judge of our lives; we are, in effect, imprisoned by it. On the other hand, tradition can be understood as a pointer to that which is beyond tradition: the sacred. Then it functions not as a prison but as a lens.

The spoken word has come to dominate many Protestant forms of worship: the words of prayers, responsive readings, Scripture, the sermon, and so forth. Yet the spoken word is perhaps the least effective way of reaching the heart; one must constantly pay attention with one’s mind. The spoken word tends to go to our heads, not our hearts.

God wills our liberation, our exodus from Egypt. God wills our reconciliation, our return from exile. God wills our enlightenment, our seeing. God wills our forgiveness, our release from sin and guilt. God wills that we see ourselves as God’s beloved. God wills our resurrection, our passage from death to life. God wills for us food and drink that satisfy our hunger and thirst. God wills, comprehensively, our well-being—not just my well-being as an individual but the well-being of all of us and of the whole of creation. In short, God wills our salvation, our healing, here on earth. The Christian life is about participating in the salvation of God.

A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it.

Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.

If contemporary Christians took seriously the possibility that those outside the boundaries of the church might hold the promise of renewal, if we ceased regarding ourselves as the source of salvation and the secular world as a potential threat, and if we emulated Jesus' example in accepting the faith and the courage of those who live beyond conventional standards of purity, well, I can hardly imagine how things would look.

Christian leadership is a dead-end street when nothing new is expected, when everything sounds familiar and when ministry has regressed to the level of routine.

He'd sacrifice even his sanity for her. If it came down to it, he'd let her break his heart. Because he loved her.

In order for things to work out, God had to be at the forefront.

It matters because you matter to Him.

Lovemaking is more than sex, it's a connecting of hearts, meeting of minds, & touching of souls." ~ Dr. Scott Hensley

It is easy enough to write and talk about God while remaining comfortable within the contemporary intellectual climate. Even people who would call themselves unbelievers often use the word gesturally, as a ready-made synonym for mystery. But if nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self.

Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity.

To be a Christian is to be a theologian—a student of God and his will. The church is where believers should be nurtured in the practice of correct theology. The contemporary disdain for theological content and emphasis on self-image and emotions were not shared by the apostolic church.

As I stumbled into confusion about what was real and what was not, the strangest thing happened: The world disintegrated. Reality collapsed, or my perception of it. It ripped apart like a dry skin under pressure, giving way to something I can only describe as ineffable dimensions, depths upon depths.

After you die, you go to be "with Christ," but your body remains dead. Describing where and what you are in that interim period is difficult, and for the most part the New Testament writers don't try. Call it "heaven" if you like, but don't imagine that it's the end of all things. What is promised after that interim period is a new bodily life within God's new world. I am constantly amazed that many contemporary Christians find this confusing. It was second nature to the early church and to many subsequent Christian generations. It was what they believed and taught. If we have grown up believing and teaching something else, it's time we rubbed our eyes and read our texts again.

Rembrandt didn’t idealize his subjects. He painted what he saw, which was a mixture of glory and fallenness. He was criticized by his contemporaries for using washerwomen as his models rather than women who looked like Greek goddesses.

...maybe that was the thing about finding stillness in God -- it required nothing and everything all at the same time.

I'd much rather my life be defined by a thousand little moments of faithfulness than by one big moment of fame.

Believe me when I say that one day, Wren, you’re going to fly again.

While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger. Unlike almost every other contested idea in early Christianity, including the nature of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity, the unanimous witness of the ancient fathers and mothers was that hospitality was the primary Christian virtue.

I guess that's what life is, though, isn't it? A whole bunch of little moments that don't seem significant or life-altering at the time, but when you look back . . .' She shook her head. 'I don't know. They become the most profoundly beautiful things.

If it's true there's a beginning to the universe, as modern cosmologists now agree, then this implies a cause that transcends the universe. If the laws of physics are fine-tuned to permit life, as contemporary physicists are discovering, then perhaps there's a designer who fine-tuned them. If there's information in the cell, as molecular biology shows, then this suggests intelligent design. To get life going in the first place would have required biological information; the implications point beyond the material realm to a prior intelligent cause. -Stephen C Meyer, PHD

Secularism in the Christian world was an attempt to resolve the long and destructive struggle of church and state. Separation, adopted in the American and French Revolutions and elsewhere after that, was designed to prevent two things: the use of religion by the state to reinforce and extend its authority; and the use of the state power by the clergy to impose their doctrines and rules on others. This is a problem long seen as purely Christian, not relevant to Muslims or for that matter to Jews, for whom a similar problem has arisen in Israel. Looking at the contemporary Middle East, both Muslim and Jewish, one must ask whether this is still true -- or whether Muslims and Jews may perhaps have caught a Christian disease and might therefore consider a Christian remedy.

Perhaps I shouldn't call it shit. That's a bit crude. I don't really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do despise is the contemporary inclination to flop to the knees and crawl back into the past, to shy from what seem like impossible problems in order to bury the head, asshole aloft and twitching, in the Sands of Time. Cowardice, I calls it. Illusion-seeking. Womb-crawling. And treason. Desertion in the face of the enemy. Strong words indeed. But I've always been rather a blunt, tough, plain-spoken type . . .

Through God's grace we become those who believe and love. But in faith and love we who were once possessors become beings once more, and as such become those who are about to be, those whom God builds. We are taken away from ourselves to our own best advantage. Just for this reason we are free for the neighbor, free for the service of works.

How we think about God matters. It affects the credibility of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. Our concept of God can make God seem real or unreal, just as it can also make God seem remote or near.

Christian leaders are called to help others affirm this great news, and to make visible in daily events the fact that behind the dirty curtain of our painful symptoms there is something great to be seen: the face of God in whose image we are shaped.

Most televangelists, popular Christian preacher icons, and heads of those corporations that we call megachurches share an unreflective modern view of Jesus--that he translates easily and almost automatically into a modern idiom. The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes. Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of social security, food stamps, welfare, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy), or the welfare state. So far as we know, he expressed no opinion on the ethical issues that plague us today: abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, euthanasia, or bombing Iraq. His world was not ours, his concerns were not ours, and--most striking of all--his beliefs were not ours. Jesus was a first-century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first century American we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.

A hallmark of contemporary Christian theology is its view that the fundamental sin of humanity is pride, that is, preoccupation with the self. In contrast, love, particularly Christian love, is assumed to be entirely self-giving and devoid of concern about the self. These teachings, however, bear a particular danger—that of martyrdom—for African-American women who are socialized to live, love, and labor under the weight of atoning for the “sins” of the race as imagined by White patriarchal racism.

If Morris and his contemporaries were possessed by the medieval Christian imagination and the ancient sagas, the moderns looked further back to the ancient world, and rewrote the Greek myths and legends to suit their own ideas about society and history.

He wanted desperately to stay, just a little while longer. But he couldn't be here, in this place, with her. It was calm here. She was innocent and beautiful and perfect. He was not. He didn't want his mess or his mental illness or his past anywhere near her. He wanted to protect her from a lot of things, but most of all from himself.

The real test of progress is how we love God and our neighbor. Everything else is fluff, and potentially dangerous fluff, at that. It gets in the eyes, so that we no longer see clearly as God sees

Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a shallow and inane optimism. I don't believe that man will turn this earth into a bed of roses either with the aid of God or without it. Nor does life among the roses strike me as a dream from which one would not care to wake up after a very short time.

Its main thesis is that not only the emerging Christianity drew on contemporary Judaism but that rabbinic Judaism, too, tapped into ideas and concepts of Christianity to shape its own identity; that, far from being forever frozen in ingrained hostility, the two sister religions engaged in a profound interaction during late antiquity.

It’s not a bad thing, if you’re responsible about it. Just don’t start having boyfriends. Wait until you’ve found your husband.” “And how am I supposed to find a husband if I can’t have a boyfriend until then?” I asked ironically.

The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. ... The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc. Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious... Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, whose prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.

The primary leaders of the so-called founding fathers of our nation were not Bible-believing Christians; they were deists. Deism was a philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution. Its major tenets included belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems and belief in a supreme deity who created the universe to operate solely by natural laws. The supreme God of the Deists removed himself entirely from the universe after creating it. They believed that he assumed no control over it, exerted no influence on natural phenomena, and gave no supernatural revelation to man. A necessary consequence of these beliefs was a rejection of many doctrines central to the Christian religion. Deists did not believe in the virgin birth, divinity, or resurrection of Jesus, the efficacy of prayer, the miracles of the Bible, or even the divine inspiration of the Bible. These beliefs were forcefully articulated by Thomas Paine in Age of Reason, a book that so outraged his contemporaries that he died rejected and despised by the nation that had once revered him as 'the father of the American Revolution.'... Other important founding fathers who espoused Deism were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, James Madison, and James Monroe. [The Christian Nation Myth, 1999]

Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. Then, too, any character in a serious novel is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself. The novelist doesn’t write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, a total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama. The Christian novelist is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin. According to his heritage, he sees it not as a sickness or an accident of the environment, but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future. Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe. One reason a great deal of our contemporary fictions is humorless is because so many of these writers are relativists and have to be continually justifying the actions of their characters on a sliding scale of values.

Evangelism is not persuading people to make a decision; it is not proving that God exists, or making out a good case for the truth of Christianity; it is not inviting someone to a meeting; it is not exposing the contemporary dilemma, or arousing interest in Christianity; it is not wearing a badge saying 'Jesus Saves'! Some of these things may be right and good in their place, but none of them should be confused with evangelism. To evangelize is to declare on the authority of God what he has done to save sinners, to warn men of their lost condition, to direct them to repent, and to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.5

We ourselves have so long ceased to use it [the Christian worldview] except for the discussion of the moral, the liturgical, or the spiritual, that it is rusty and out of date. We have no Christian vocabulary to match the complexities of contemporary political, social, and industrial life. We have long ceased to bring Christian judgement to bear upon the secular public world.

All too often people say to artists, 'To be an artist is fine if your art can be used for evangelism.' And art has often become a tool for evangelism. But let's be precise. As such there is nothing against this. But we must be aware that art cannot be used to show the validity of Christianity; it should rather be the reverse. Christianity is true; things and actions and human endeavor only get their meaning from their relationship to God; if Christ came to make us human, the humanity and the reality of art find their foundation in him. So art should not be used to preach even if it can help. Yet there is another way that art can be or is meaningful.

[…] I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical — I would even say “Mediterranean” — current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity. […] In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam — one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

The historical record of lived Christianity in America reveals that Christian theology and institutions have been the central cultural tent pole holding up the very idea of white supremacy. And the genetic imprint of this legacy remains present and measurable in contemporary white Christianity, not only among evangelicals in the South but also among mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast.

It is not by reading the Scriptures in the original languages or in some contemporary version that makes us better Christians. Rather, it is getting on our knees with the Scriptures spread before us, and allowing the Spirit of God to break our hearts. Then, when we have been thoroughly broken before God Almighty, we get up off our knees, go out into the world and proclaim the glorious message of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world.

But some contemporary believers, such as Lisa Domke, a pastor and mother in Seattle, ground their identity in Christ’s love but a love that goes beyond sentiment or feeling. “I say that I am someone seeking to live in the world with love and humility,” Lisa reports, “following God in the way of Jesus.” Love is the active practice of Christian virtue. As Sky, a Seattle Baptist, relates, “Children know that love is behavior, not romantic words.

The New Testament has a normative role in Christian theology and ethics that is different from the Old Testament’s role. We do not have a simple, undifferentiated canon running from Genesis to Revelation. The claim that Jesus’ death and resurrection is the central decisive act of God for the salvation of humankind means that the cross becomes the hermeneutical center for the canon as a whole. Thus, within the canon the New Testament has a privileged hermeneutical function.

The lifestyle of Christians matched their teachings, so that many early Christians were not afraid to say, 'Imitate us as we imitate Christ.' Unfortunately, in contemporary evangelicalism sometimes people say, 'Don't look at us, look at Christ,' because we are worried what people will find if our own lives are scrutinized.

To follow Jesus is to pay the cost of discipleship, and then to die to ourselves, to our own interests, our own agendas and reputations. It is to pick up our crosses and count the cost of losing all that contradicts his will and his way—including our reputations before the world, and our standing with the people and in the communities that we once held dear. It is to live before one audience, the audience of One, and therefore to die to all other conflicting opinions and assessments. There is no room here for such contemporary ideas as the looking-glass self, and no consideration here for trivial contemporary obsessions such as one’s legacy.

The ethical issues that confront Christians who try to discern the will of God in Scripture are, as I shall try to show in this book, far more nuanced than a simple conservative/liberal polarity would suggest. One reason that the church has become so bitterly divided over moral issues is that the community of faith has uncritically accepted the categories of popular U.S. discourse about these topics, without subjecting them to sustained critical scrutiny in light of a close reading of the Bible.

More profoundly, Nihilist "simplification" may be seen in the universal prestige today accorded the lowest order of knowledge, the scientific, as well as the simplistic ideas of men like Marx, Freud, and Darwin, which underlie virtually the whole of contemporary thought and life. We say "life," for it is important to see that the Nihilist history of our century has not been something imposed from without or above, or at least has not been predominantly this; it has rather presupposed, and drawn its nourishment from, a Nihilist soil that has long been preparing in the hearts of the people. It is precisely from the Nihilism of the commonplace, from the everyday Nihilism revealed in the life and thought and aspiration of the people, that all the terrible events of our century have sprung. The world-view of Hitler is very instructive in this regard, for in him the most extreme and monstrous Nihilism rested upon the foundation of a quite unexceptional and even typical Realism. He shared the common faith in "science," "progress," and "enlightenment" (though not, of course, in "democracy"), together with a practical materialism that scorned all theology, metaphysics, and any thought or action concerned with any other world than the "here and now," priding himself on the fact that he had "the gift of reducing all problems to their simplest foundations." He had a crude worship of efficiency and utility that freely tolerated "birth control", laughed at the institution of marriage as a mere legalization of a sexual impulse that should be "free", welcomed sterilization of the unfit, despised "unproductive elements" such as monks, saw nothing in the cremation of the dead but a "practical" question and did not even hesitate to put the ashes, or the skin and fat, of the dead to "productive use." He possessed the quasi-anarchist distrust of sacred and venerable institutions, in particular the Church with its "superstitions" and all its "outmoded" laws and ceremonies. He had a naive trust in the "natural mom, the "healthy animal" who scorns the Christian virtues--virginity in particular--that impede the "natural functioning" of the body. He took a simple-minded delight in modern conveniences and machines, and especially in the automobile and the sense of speed and "freedom" it affords. There is very little of this crude Weltanschauung that is not shared, to some degree, by the multitudes today, especially among the young, who feel themselves "enlightened" and "liberated," very little that is not typically "modern.

Culturally, however, Sicily had great advantages. Muslim, Byzantine, Italian, and German civilization met and mingled there as nowhere else. Greek and Arabic were still living languages in Sicily. Frederick learnt to speak six languages fluently, and in all six he was witty. He was at home in Arabian philosophy, and had friendly relations with Mohammedans, which scandalized pious Christians. He was a Hohenstaufen, and in Germany could count as a German. But in culture and sentiment he was Italian, with a tincture of Byzantine and Arab. His contemporaries gazed upon him with astonishment gradually turning into horror; they called him ‘wonder of the world and marvellous innovator’.

As far as I know, all major religions that subscribe to a belief in God—including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism—believe that the universe was created by God at a finite time in the past. The one major contemporary religious tradition that does not incorporate God, Buddhism, holds that the universe has existed for all of eternity. Looked at another way, a universe with a beginning must have had a creation, either by a divine being or by quantum physics. But a universe that has existed forever needs neither.

If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions.

Nothing is more unpopular today than the free market economy, i.e., capitalism. Everything that is considered unsatisfactory in present-day conditions is charged to capitalism. The atheists make capitalism responsible for the survival of Christianity. But the papal encyclicals blame capitalism for the spread of irreligion and the sins of our contemporaries, and the Protestant churches and sects are no less vigorous in their indictment of capitalist greed. Friends of peace consider our wars as an offshoot of capitalist imperialism. But the adamant nationalist warmongers of Germany and Italy indicted capitalism for its "bourgeois" pacifism, contrary to human nature and to the inescapable laws of history. Sermonizers accuse capitalism of disrupting the family and fostering licentiousness. But the "progressives" blame capitalism for the preservation of allegedly outdated rules of sexual restraint. Almost all men agree that poverty is an outcome of capitalism. On the other hand many deplore the fact that capitalism, in catering lavishly to the wishes of people intent upon getting more amenities and a better living, promotes a crass materialism. These contradictory accusations of capitalism cancel one another. But the fact remains that there are few people left who would not condemn capitalism altogether.

Just as the Anabaptists were scorned by Protestants and Catholics alike, anarchism been dismissed equally by the political Left and Right in modernity.  But in our age of political bankruptcy, this is perhaps the best endorsement.  With Ellul, I think that anarchism deserves to be reconsidered, particularly by Christians, and even more particularly by contemporary Anabaptists. 

Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary. If nothing else, an examination of the past—and of the present, for that matter—can be instructive. It shows us that there is little shelter and little gain for Native peoples in doing nothing. So long as we possess one element of sovereignty, so long as we possess one parcel of land, North America will come for us, and the question we have to face is how badly we wish to continue to pursue the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination. How important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight? Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash, and sink into the stewpot of North America. With the rest of the bones. No matter how you frame Native history, the one inescapable constant is that Native people in North America have lost much. We’ve given away a great deal, we’ve had a great deal taken from us, and, if we are not careful, we will continue to lose parts of ourselves—as Indians, as Cree, as Blackfoot, as Navajo, as Inuit—with each generation. But this need not happen. Native cultures aren’t static. They’re dynamic, adaptive, and flexible, and for many of us, the modern variations of older tribal traditions continue to provide order, satisfaction, identity, and value in our lives. More than that, in the five hundred years of European occupation, Native cultures have already proven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient. Okay. That was heroic and uncomfortably inspirational, wasn’t it? Poignant, even. You can almost hear the trumpets and the violins. And that kind of romance is not what we need. It serves no one, and the cost to maintain it is too high. So, let’s agree that Indians are not special. We’re not … mystical. I’m fine with that. Yes, a great many Native people have a long-standing relationship with the natural world. But that relationship is equally available to non-Natives, should they choose to embrace it. The fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives on our terms.

The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldview—but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, the role of women, the nature of glaciers, the age of the world, or the theory of evolution, these white Victorians were in a world topsy-turvy with change, uncertainty and controversy. Deference was paid to Christianity and honest agricultural toil, but more than few questioned the former, and most, as the gold rushes, confidence men, and lionized millionaires proved, would gladly escape the latter. So the attempt to make Indians into Christian agriculturists was akin to those contemporary efforts whereby charities send cast-off clothing to impoverished regions: the Indians were being handed a system that was worn out...

A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus, a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the “class struggle”. What I am saying concerning mysticism, gnosis, magic and philosophy would be considered by him only as a ruse on the part of the bourgeois class, with the aim of “screening with a mystical and idealistic haze” the reality of the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie…although I have not inherited anything from my parents and I have not experienced a single day without having to earn my living by means of work recognised as “legitimate” by Marxists! Another contemporary example of possession by a system is Freudianism. A man possessed by this system will see in everything that I have written only the expression of “suppressed libido”, which seeks and finds release in this manner. It would therefore be the lack of sexual fulfillment which has driven me to occupy myself with the Tarot and to write about it! Is there any need for further examples? Is it still necessary to cite the Hegelians with their distortion of the history of humanity, the Scholastic “realists” of the Middle Ages with the Inquisition, the rationalists of the eighteenth century who were blinded by the light of their own autonomous reasoning? Yes, autonomous philosophical systems separated from the living body of tradition are parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings. In fact, they play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession. Their physical analogy is cancer.

Greek and the Hebrew—and whichever side you embrace more strongly determines to a large extent how you see life. From the Greeks—specifically from the glory days of ancient Athens—we have inherited our ideas about secular humanism and the sanctity of the individual. The Greeks gave us all our notions about democracy and equality and personal liberty and scientific reason and intellectual freedom and open-mindedness and what we might call today “multiculturalism.” The Greek take on life, therefore, is urban, sophisticated, and exploratory, always leaving plenty of room for doubt and debate. On the other hand, there is the Hebrew way of seeing the world. When I say “Hebrew” here, I’m not specifically referring to the tenets of Judaism. (In fact, most of the contemporary American Jews I know are very Greek in their thinking, while it’s the American fundamentalist Christians these days who are profoundly Hebrew.) “Hebrew,” in the sense that philosophers use it here, is shorthand for an ancient world-view that is all about tribalism, faith, obedience, and respect. The Hebrew credo is clannish, patriarchal, authoritarian, moralistic, ritualistic, and instinctively suspicious of outsiders. Hebrew thinkers see the world as a clear play between good and evil, with God always firmly on “our” side. Human actions are either right or wrong. There is no gray area. The collective is more important than the individual, morality is more important than happiness, and vows are inviolable.

Men speak of God’s love for man… but if providence does not come in this hour, where is He then? My conclusion is simple. The Semitic texts from Bronze Age Palestine of which Christianity is comprised still fit uncomfortably well with contemporary life. The Old Testament depicts a God capricious and cruel; blood sacrifice, vengeance, genocide; death and destruction et al. Would He not approve of Herr Hitler and the brutal, tribalistic crusade against Hebrews and non-Christian ‘untermensch?’ One thing is inarguable. His church on Earth has produced some of the most vigorous and violent contribution to the European fascist cause. It is synergy. Man Created God, even if God Created Man; it all exists in the hubris and apotheosis of the narcissistic soul, and alas, all too many of the human herd are willing to follow the beastly trait of leadership. The idea of self-emancipation and advancement, with Europe under the jackboot of fascism, would be Quixotic to the point of mirthless lunacy.

The basic training procedure for the perceptron, as well as its many contemporary progeny, has a technical-sounding name—“stochastic gradient descent”—but the principle is utterly straightforward. Pick one of the training data at random (“stochastic”) and input it to the model. If the output is exactly what you want, do nothing. If there is a difference between what you wanted and what you got, then figure out in which direction (“gradient”) to adjust each weight—whether by literal turning of physical knobs or simply the changing of numbers in software—to lower the error for this particular example. Move each of them a little bit in the appropriate direction (“descent”). Pick a new example at random, and start again. Repeat as many times as necessary.

Do you not know,” he asks, “that you [plural] are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you [plural]?” (3:16). To read this last sentence as though it spoke of the Spirit dwelling in the body of the individual Christian would be to miss the force of Paul’s audacious metaphor: the apostolically founded community takes the place of the Jerusalem Temple as the place where the glory of God resides.54 When the community suffers division, the temple of God is dishonored. But the presence of the Spirit in the community should produce unity rather than conflict.

We are not to restrict God's presence in the world to a limited range of “pious” objects and situations, while labelling everything else as “secular”; but we are to see all things as essentially sacred, as a gift from God and a means of communion with him. It does not, however, follow that we are to accept the fallen world on its own terms. This is the unhappy mistake of much “secular Christianity” in the contemporary west. All things are indeed sacred in their true being, according to their innermost essence; but our relationship to God's creation has been distorted by sin, original and personal, and we shall not rediscover this intrinsic sacredness unless our heart is purified. Without self-denial, without ascetic discipline, we cannot affirm the true beauty of the world. That is why there can be no genuine contemplation without repentance.

Those who still defend cessationism risk quenching the Spirit (contra 1 Thess. 5:19) and inappropriately closing themselves and others off from the full range of blessings God might have for them and from potentially the greatest amount of effective service for his kingdom. Without swinging the pendulum to the opposite extreme and embracing the various abuses of the charismata or trying to imitate the Spirit’s work in one’s own strength, cessationists really should cease trying to limit God in how he chooses to work in his world today. It is, in essence, a form of antisupernaturalism for all the postapostolic eras of Christianity.

Christians can disagree about public policy in good faith, and a libertarian and a social democrat can both claim to be living out the gospel. But the Christian libertarian has a particular obligation to recognize those places where libertarianism’s emphasis on freedom can shade into an un-Christian worship of the individual. Likewise the Christian liberal: even as he supports government interventions to assist the poor and dispossessed, he should be constantly on guard against the tendency to deify Leviathan and wary of the ways that government power can easily be turned to inhuman and immoral ends. In the contemporary United States, a host of factors—from the salience of issues like abortion to the anti-Christian biases of our largely left-wing intelligentsia—ensure that many orthodox Christians feel more comfortable affiliating with the Republican Party than with the Democrats. But this comfort should not blind Christians to the GOP’s flaws.

There is no doubt that the biblical concept of the Kingdom calls for a ministry to the suffering, the imprisoned, the oppressed, the hungry and whomever is dehumanized by an unjust society. In abstract, almost all of us can affirm this with enthusiasm. When it is the vocation, however, of one of our number to make this Gospel imperative, a matter demanding and requiring us to change our comfortable ways, then many of us fall away. The prophet has never been popular among his other contemporaries. He has been stoned, beheaded, crucified and shot. If not killed, we have been all too ready to vilify him or her in the name of God, little realizing that it may well be God who sent the prophet to challenge our complacency.

Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism’s egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life. Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care. Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. But this is no defect. Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. In fact, they are culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just

Some contemporary theology has been enamored with the heady idea of an imagined freedom that functions without any law or norm or rule of obligation. The technical name for this idea is antinomianism. This yen for freedoms other than Christ's freedom has compounded the problems in pastoral theology. Pastoral practice has at times been exceedingly ready to be guided by this antinomian tendency in theology that implies: if God loves you no matter what, then your own moral responses to God's absolute acceptance make little or no difference; God is going to love you anyway, so assert your individual interest, express yourself, do as you please, and above all do not repress any impulses. It is on the basis of this normless, egocentric relativism that much well-intended liberal pastoral practice has accommodated to naturalism, narcissism, and individualism. It has therefore steered consistently away from any notion of admonition, hoping to avoid 'guilt trips.' But ironically, guilt is more likely to be INCREASED by the lack of timely, caring admonition. For if there is no compassionate admonition, we tend to hide our guilt in ways that make it worse.

On January 21, with the murder of the King-priest, was consummated what has significantly been called the passion of Louis XVI. It is certainly a crying scandal that the public assassination of a weak but goodhearted man has been presented as a great moment in French history. That scaffold marked no climax—far from it. But the fact remains that, by its consequences, the condemnation of the King is at the crux of our contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarna-tion of the Christian God. Up to now God played a part in history through the medium of the kings. But His representative in history has been killed, for there is no longer a king. Therefore there is nothing but a semblance of God, relegated to the heaven of principles.

Looking back to [Christendom's] youth, we recall the emotional stirrings, the deep sense of Christian purpose, when a temple, say, challenged the existing social order... Where is our Christian duty, our Christian aim? We do not know, we cannot say. Yet our ignorance and silence are certainly not due to the fact that the welfare state has made Christian thinking out of date and irrelevant. The reason we have nothing to say to the contemporary situation is that we have not been thinking about the contemporary situation. We stopped thinking about these things long ago. We stopped thinking Christianly outside the scope of personal morals and personal spirituality. We got into the habit of stepping out of our Christian garments whenever we stepped mentally into the field of social and political life. Becuase the subject was social or political, we left all of our well-tried and well-grounded Christian concepts behind us, and adopted the vocabulary of secularism. We put aside all talk of vocation, or God's providence, or man's spiritual destiny, and instead chattered with the rest about productivity, assembly line psychology, and deployment of personnel.

According to Allan Bloom the whole world is divided between the followers of John Locke and Karl Marx-between liberalism and socialism.42 While the configuration of human ideological loyalties is surely more complex than this statement suggests, and despite the fact that this ideological cleavage has diminished considerably since 1989, it does point to an important truth about the contemporary political debate, namely, that its very parameters have been determined by this secularist religion, whose principal tenet is a belief in human autonomy. Because of this religion's impact, it is no longer doubted that human beings shape their world autonomously. Rather, the principal controversies revolve around the issue of who is the bearer of that autonomy, the individual or some form of community. Those who question autonomy altogether are effectively left out of the discussion.The fact that the world's principal collectivist ideology is in decline and individualism is (at least for now) in the ascendancy has not fundamentally altered this picture.

[I]n addition to being a Spirit person, healer, and wisdom teacher, Jesus was a social prophet. There was passion in his language. Many of his sayings (as well as actions) challenged the domination system of his day. They take on pointed meaning when we see them in the context of social criticism of a peasant society. His criticisms of the wealthy were an indictment of the social class at the top of the domination system. His prophetic threats against Jerusalem and the temple were not because they were the center of an “old religion” (Judaism) soon to be replaced by a new religion (Christianity) but because they were the center of the domination system. His criticism of lawyers, scribes, and Pharisees was not because they were unvirtuous individuals but because commitment to the elites led them to see the social order through elite lenses. Jesus rejected the sharp social boundaries of the established social order and challenged the institutions that legitimated it. In his teaching, he subverted distinctions between righteous and sinner, rich and poor, men and women, Pharisee and outcasts. In his healings and behavior, he crossed social boundaries of purity, gender, and class. In his meal practice, central to what he was about, he embodied a boundary-subverting inclusiveness. In his itinerancy he rejected the notion of a brokered kingdom of God and enacted the immediacy of access to God apart from institutional mediation. His prophetic act against the money changers in the temple at the center of the domination system was, in the judgment of most scholars, the trigger leading to his arrest and execution.

(Inevitably, someone raises the question about World War II: What if Christians had refused to fight against Hitler? My answer is a counterquestion: What if the Christians in Germany had emphatically refused to fight for Hitler, refused to carry out the murders in concentration camps?) The long history of Christian “just wars” has wrought suffering past all telling, and there is no end in sight. As Yoder has suggested, Niebuhr’s own insight about the “irony of history” ought to lead us to recognize the inadequacy of our reason to shape a world that tends toward justice through violence. Might it be that reason and sad experience could disabuse us of the hope that we can approximate God’s justice through killing? According to the guideline I have proposed, reason must be healed and taught by Scripture, and our experience must be transformed by the renewing of our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ. Only thus can our warring madness be overcome. This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus. This might well mean, as Hauerwas has perceived, that the church would assume a peripheral status in our culture, which is deeply committed to the necessity and glory of violence. The task of the church then would be to tell an alternative story, to train disciples in the disciplines necessary to resist the seductions of violence, to offer an alternative home for those who will not worship the Beast. If the church is to be a Scripture-shaped community, it will find itself reshaped continually into a closer resemblance to the socially marginal status of Matthew’s nonviolent countercultural community. To articulate such a theological vision for the church at the end of the twentieth century may be indeed to take most seriously what experience is telling us: the secular polis has no tolerance for explicitly Christian witness and norms. It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence. Let it be said clearly, however, that the reasons for choosing Jesus’ way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms, this way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of nonviolent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our skins, pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing nonviolence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God’s love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.

The average Christian is not supposed to know that Jesus’ home town of Nazareth did not actually exist, or that key places mentioned in the Bible did not physically exist in the so-called “Holy Land.” He is not meant to know that scholars have had greater success matching Biblical events and places with events and places in Britain rather than in Palestine. It is a point of contention whether the settlement of Nazareth existed at all during Jesus' lifetime. It does not appear on contemporary maps, neither in any books, documents, chronicles or military records of the period, whether of Roman or Jewish compilation. The Jewish Encyclopedia identifies that Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, neither in the works of Josephus, nor in the Hebrew Talmud – Laurence Gardner (The Grail Enigma) As far back as 1640, the German traveller Korte, after a complete topographical examination of the present Jerusalem, decided that it failed to coincide in any way with the city described by Josephus and the Scriptures. Claims that the tombs of patriarchs Ab’Ram, Isaac, and Jacob are buried under a mosque in Hebron possess no shred of evidence. The rock-cut sepulchres in the valleys of Jehoshaphat and Hinnom are of Roman period with late Greek inscriptions, and there exists nothing in groups of ruins at Petra, Sebaste, Baalbec, Palmyra or Damascus, or among the stone cities of the Haran, that are pre-Roman. Nothing in Jerusalem itself can be related to the Jews – Comyns Beaumont (Britain: Key to World’s History) The Jerusalem of modern times is not the city of the Scriptures. Mt. Calvary, now nearly in the centre of the city, was without walls at the time of the Crucifixion, and the greater part of Mt. Zion, which is not without, was within the ancient city. The holy places are for the most part the fanciful dreams of monkish enthusiasts to increase the veneration of the pilgrims – Rev. J. P. Lawson (quoted in Beaumont’s Britain: Key to World’s History)

What we are faced with in our culture is the post-Christian version of the doctrine of original sin: all human endeavor is radically flawed, and the journalists who take delight in pointing this out are simply telling over and over again the story of Genesis 3 as applied to today’s leaders, politicians, royalty and rock stars. And our task, as image-bearing, God-loving, Christshaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to the world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to the world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion. So the key I propose for translating Jesus’ unique message to the Israel of his day into our message to our contemporaries is to grasp the parallel, which is woven deeply into both Testaments, between the human call to bear God’s image and Israel’s call to be the light of the world. Humans were made to reflect God’s creative stewardship into the world. Israel was made to bring God’s rescuing love to bear upon the world. Jesus came as the true Israel, the world’s true light, and as the true image of the invisible God. He was the true Jew, the true human. He has laid the foundation, and we must build upon it. We are to be the bearers both of his redeeming love and of his creative stewardship: to celebrate it, to model it, to proclaim it, to dance to it. “As the Father sent me, so I send you; receive the Holy Spirit; forgive sins and they are forgiven, retain them and they are retained.” That last double command belongs exactly at this point. We are to go out into the world with the divine authority to forgive and retain sins. When Jesus forgave sins, they said he was blaspheming; how then can we imagine such a thing for ourselves? Answer: because of the gift of the Holy Spirit. God intends to do through us for the wider world that for which the foundation was laid in Jesus. We are to live and tell the story of the prodigal and the older brother; to announce God’s glad, exuberant, richly healing welcome for sinners, and at the same time God’s sorrowful but implacable opposition to those who persist in arrogance, oppression and greed. Following Christ in the power of the Spirit means bringing to our world the shape of the gospel: forgiveness, the best news that anyone can ever hear, for all who yearn for it, and judgment for all who insist on dehumanizing themselves and others by their continuing pride, injustice and greed.

The global jihad espoused by Osama bin Laden and other contemporary extremists is clearly rooted in contemporary issues and interpretations of Islam. It owes little to the Wahhabi tradition, outside of the nineteenth-century incorporation of the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya and the Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah into the Wahhabi worldview as Wahhabism moved beyond the confines of Najd and into the broader Muslim world. The differences between the worldviews of bin Laden and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab are numerous. Bin Laden preaches jihad; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab preached monotheism. Bin Laden preaches a global jihad of cosmic importance that recognizes no compromise; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s jihad was narrow in geographic focus, of localized importance, and had engagement in a treaty relationship between the fighting parties as a goal. Bin Laden preaches war against Christians and Jews; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab called for treaty relationships with them. Bin Laden’s jihad proclaims an ideology of the necessity of war in the face of unbelief; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab preached the benefits of peaceful coexistence, social order, and business relationships. Bin Laden calls for the killing of all infidels and the destruction of their money and property; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab restricted killing and the destruction of property… The militant Islam of Osama bin Laden does not have its origins in the teachings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and is not representative of Wahhabi Islam as it is practiced in contemporary Saudi Arabia, yet for the media it has come to define Wahabbi Islam in the contemporary era. However, “unrepresentative” bin Laden’s global jihad of Islam in general and Wahhabi Islam in particular, its prominence in headline news has taken Wahhabi Islam across the spectrum from revival and reform to global jihad.

MT: But you are. You are justifying it. RG: I'm trying to show that there's meaning at precisely the point where the nihilistic temptation is strongest today. I'm saying: there's a Revelation, and people are free to do with it what they will. But it too will keep reemerging. It's stronger than them. And, as we have seen, it's even capable of putting mimetic phenomena to work on its behalf, since today everyone is competing to see who is the most “victimized.” Revelation is dangerous. It's the spiritual equivalent of nuclear power. What's most pathetic is the insipidly modernized brand of Christianity that bows down before everything that's most ephemeral in contemporary thought. Christians don't see that they have at their disposal an instrument that is incomparably superior to the whole mishmash of psychoanalysis and sociology that they conscientiously feed themselves. It's the old story of Esau sacrificing his inheritance for a plate of lentils. All the modes of thought that once served to demolish Christianity are being discredited in turn by more “radical” versions of the same critique. There's no need to refute modern thought because, as each new trend one-ups its predecessors, it's liquidating itself at high speed. The students are becoming more and more skeptical, but, and above all in America, the people in power, the department chairs, the “chairpersons,” as they say, are fervent believers. They're often former sixties' radicals who've made the transition to administrative jobs in academia, the media, and the church. For a long time, Christians were protected from this insane downward spiral, and, when they finally dive in, you can recognize them by their naïve modernist faith. They're always one lap behind. They always choose the ships that the rats are in the midst of abandoning. They're hoping to tap into the hordes of people who have deserted their churches. They don't understand that the last thing that can attract the masses is a Christian version of the demagogic laxity in which they're already immersed. Today, it's thought that playing the social game, whether on the individual or the group level, is more indispensable than thinking…it's thought that there are truths that shouldn't be spoken. In America, it's become impossible to be unapologetically Christian, white, or European without running the risk of being accused of “ethnocentrism.” To which I reply that the eulogists of “multiculturalism” place themselves, to the contrary, in the purest of Western traditions. The West is the only civilization ever to have directed such criticisms against itself. The capital of the Incas had a name that I believe meant “the navel of the world.

Concern for one's political community is, of course, right and proper, and Christians can hardly be faulted for wishing to correct their nation's deficiencies. At the same time, this variety of Christian nationalism errs on at least four counts. First, it unduly applies biblical promises intended for the body of Christ as a whole to one of many particular geographic concentrations of people bound together under a common political framework. Once again this requires a somewhat dubious biblical hermeneutic. Second, it tends to identify God's norms for political and cultural life with a particular, imperfect manifestation of those norms at a specific period of a nation's history. Thus, for example, pro-family political activists tend to identify God's norms for healthy family life with the nineteenth-century agrarian family or the mid-twentieth-century suburban nuclear family. Similarly, a godly commonwealth is believed by American Christian nationalists to consist of a constitutional order limiting political power through a system of checks and balances, rather than one based on, in Walter Bagehot's words, a "fusion of powers" in the hands of a cabinet responsible to a parliament. Thus Christian nationalists, like their conservative counterparts, tend to judge their nation's present actions, not by transcendent norms given by God for its life, but by precedents in their nation's history deemed to have embodied these norms. Third, Christian nationalists too easily pay to their nation a homage due only to God. They make too much of their country's symbols, institutions, laws and mores.They see its history as somehow revelatory of God's ways and are largely blind to the outworkings of sin in that same history. When they do detect national sin, they tend to attribute it not to something defective in the nation's ideological underpinnings, but to its departure from a once solid biblical foundation during an imagined pre-Fall golden age. If the nation's beginnings are not as thoroughly Christian as they would like to believe, they will seize whatever evidence is available in this direction and construct a usable past serviceable 34 to a more Christian future. Fourth, and finally, those Christians most readily employing the language of nationhood often find it difficult to conceive the nation in limited terms. Frequently, Christian nationalists see the nation as an undifferentiated community with few if any constraints on its claims to allegiance. 45 Once again this points to the recognition of a modest place for the nation, however it be defined, and away from the totalitarian pretensions of nationalism. Whether the nation is already linked to the body politic or to an ethnically defined people seeking political recognition, it must remain within the normative limits God has placed on everything in his creation.

Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he was crucified. The gospel accounts indicate that he was thought to be the king of the Jews. He was said to have predicted the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but also made it clear that it was not of this world. In the literature of the Late Second Temple period, there had been hints that a few people were expecting a righteous king of the House of David to establish an eternal kingdom, and this idea seems to have become more popular during the tense years leading up to the war. Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius all note the importance of revolutionary religiosity, both before and after the rebellion.2 There was now keen expectation in some circles of a meshiah (in Greek, christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be this messiah – the gospels are ambiguous on this point.3 Other people rather than Jesus himself may have made this claim on his behalf.4 But after his death some of his followers had seen him in visions that convinced them that he had been raised from the tomb – an event that heralded the general resurrection of all the righteous when God would inaugurate his rule on earth.5 Jesus and his disciples came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his death they moved to Jerusalem, probably to be on hand when the kingdom arrived, since all the prophecies declared that the temple would be the pivot of the new world order.6 The leaders of their movement were known as ‘the Twelve’: in the kingdom, they would rule the twelve tribes of the reconstituted Israel.7 The members of the Jesus movement worshipped together every day in the temple,8 but they also met for communal meals, in which they affirmed their faith in the kingdom’s imminent arrival.9 They continued to live as devout, orthodox Jews. Like the Essenes, they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and dedicated their lives to the last days.10 It seems that Jesus had recommended voluntary poverty and special care for the poor; that loyalty to the group was to be valued more than family ties; and that evil should be met with non-violence and love.11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle.12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah,13 keep the Sabbath,14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them.15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.