Prominent Christian Quotes

There is no indication that any church official suggested or supported the emperor's action against gay people. On the contrary, the only persons known by name to have been punished for homosexual acts were prominent bishops.

A clear pattern soon emerged, as demonstrated by many polls: the more prominently Christians entered the political arena, the more negatively they were viewed by the rest of society.

Take an instance: the removal of the motto [In God We Trust] fetched out a clamor from the pulpit; little groups and small conventions of clergymen gathered themselves together all over the country, and one of these little groups, consisting of twenty-two ministers, put up a prodigious assertion unbacked by any quoted statistics and passed it unanimously in the form of a resolution: the assertion, to wit, that this is a Christian country. Why, Carnegie, so is hell. Those clergymen know that, inasmuch as "Strait is the way and narrow is the gate, and few — few — are they that enter in thereat" has had the natural effect of making hell the only really prominent Christian community in any of the worlds; but we don't brag of this and certainly it is not proper to brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter in at the narrow gate.

One prominent spiritual leader insists, “The only way to have a genuine spiritual revival is to have legislative reform.” Could he have that backwards?

Prominent Christians in Constantine's time waited to be baptized until their deathbeds lest they commit a "major"sin that couldn't be forgiven of those already baptized. Others felt anyone who did anything to avoid martyrdom were apostates had no valid subsequent ministry.

Although Wayne occupies a prominent place in the pantheon of evangelical heroes, he is but one of many rugged and even ruthless icons of masculinity that evangelicals imbued with religious significance. Like Wayne, the heroes who best embodied militant Christian masculinity were those unencumbered by traditional Christian virtues. In this way, militant masculinity linked religious and secular conservatism, helping to secure an alliance with profound political ramifications. For many evangelicals, these militant heroes would come to define not only Christian manhood but Christianity itself.

It is darkness that propels light to its prominence.

In the meantime, prominent British pastor John R. W. Stott, who acknowledged that suffering is “the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith,” has reached his own conclusion: I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. . . . In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. ‘The cross of Christ . . . is God’s only self-justification in such a world’ as ours.25

A prominent Christian journalist has confided that his biggest fear in life is that his own children will grow up to hate him, because they will believe the terrible things said about the faith in public these days. He

Modalism was the view that evidently was held by a majority of Christians at the beginning of the third century—including the most prominent Christian leaders in the church, the bishops of the church of Rome (i.e., the early “popes”).

The man God uses does not pattern his life after well-known military strategists, political figures, heroes ofthis world, or other prominent Christians. Rather, he makes an absolute commitment to pattern his life after Jesus Christ as the Master Servant.

It is love which makes Christian fear differ from servile dread, and true faith differ from the faith of devils; yet in the beginning of the religious life, fear is the prominent evangelical grace, and love is but latent in fear, and has in course of time to be developed out of what seems its contradictory. Then, when it is developed, it takes that prominent place which fear held before, yet protecting not superseding it. Love is added, not fear removed, and the mind is but perfected in grace by what seems a revolution.

The pulpit elevates the clergy to a position of prominence. True to its meaning, it puts the preacher at center “stage”—separating and placing him high above God’s people.

Believers think only prominent ministers can have followers, but actually, every believer can and should have a few or at least one newer or younger believer as a disciple.

The truly radical Christian is not the one whose life appears extraordinary, but the one whose unseen communion with God is extraordinary. Living radically is about prayer, not prominence.

The lynching tree—so strikingly similar to the cross on Golgotha—should have a prominent place in American images of Jesus’ death. But it does not. In fact, the lynching tree has no place in American theological reflections about Jesus’ cross or in the proclamation of Christian churches about his Passion. The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the “lynching era,” between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these “Christians” did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.

Racist power at once made biological racial distinction and biological racial hierarchy the components of biological racism. This curse theory lived prominently on the justifying lips of slaveholders until Black chattel slavery died in Christian countries in the nineteenth century. Proof did not matter when biological racial difference could be created by misreading the Bible.

My blood relatives are dead," Chen stated. "The Prominence Royal Army killed them. I'm the only one left. My given name is Qiao. I tell people my name is Chen, my surname, to honor the ones I lost.

At Abraham's burial, his two most prominent sons, rivals since before they were born, estranged since childhood, scions of rival nations, come together for the first time since they were rent apart nearly three-quarters of a century earlier. The text reports their union nearly without comment. "His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre, in the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites." But the meaning of this moment cannot be diminished. Abraham achieves in death what he could never achieve in life: a moment of reconciliation between his two sons, a peaceful, communal, side-by-side flicker of possibility in which they are not rivals, scions, warriors, adversaries, children, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. They are brothers. They are mourners. In a sense they are us, forever weeping for the loss of our common father, shuffling through our bitter memories, reclaiming our childlike expectations, laughing, sobbing, furious and full of dreams, wondering about our orphaned future, and demanding the answers we all crave to hear: What did you want from me, Father? What did you leave me with, Father? And what do I do now?

Around 400 A.D., Saint Augustine, a prominent Roman bishop, described a pastor's job: Disturbers are to be rebuked, the low-spirited to be encouraged, the infirm to be supported, objectors confuted, the treacherous guarded against, the unskilled taught, the lazy aroused, the contentious restrained, the haughty repressed, litigants pacified, the poor relieved, the oppressed liberated, the good approved, the evil borne with, and all are to be loved.

Paul knew what he was talking about when he called Christians “earthen vessels.” We’re baked clay. We’re privy pots. The advance of the gospel will never occur on account of us. This helps explain why God chose none of the early preachers among the apostles because of his superior intellect, position, or prominence. As I wrote in my book Twelve Ordinary Men, these twelve were so ordinary it defies all human logic: not one teacher, not one priest, not one rabbi, not one scribe, not one Pharisee, not one Sadducee, not even a synagogue ruler—nobody from the elite. Half of them or so were fishermen, and the rest were common laborers. One, Simon the Zealot, was a terrorist, a member of a group who went around with daggers in their cloaks, trying to stab Romans. Then there was Judas, the loser of all losers. What was the Lord doing? He picked people with absolutely no influence. None of the great intellects from Egypt, Greece, Rome, or Israel was among the apostles. During the New Testament time, the greatest scholars were very likely in Egypt. The most distinguished philosophers were in Athens. The powerful were in Rome. The biblical scholars were in Jerusalem. God disdained all of them and picked clay pots instead.

As prominent Baptist historian Walter “Buddy” Shurden has pointed out, it wasn’t until the last two decades of the twentieth century that white Baptist historians directly faced up to the proslavery, white supremacist origins of their denomination.

In little more than two years’ time, “In God We Trust” had surged to public notice, first taking a place of prominence on stamps and currency, and then edging its way past “E Pluribus Unum” to become the nation’s first official motto. The concept of unity from diversity could not compete with that of unity from divinity. “In God We Trust,” along with its counterpart in the Pledge of Allegiance, “one nation under God,” quickly emerged as the twin pillars of the ceremonial deism sweeping through the Capitol.

Excessive wealth, enormous power, and luxury, Chrysostom charges, are destroying the integrity of the churches. Clerics, infected by the disease of “lust for authority,” are fighting for candidates on the basis of family prominence, wealth, or partisanship.

What is even more striking than the negational character of this political culture is the absence of robust and constructive affirmations. Vibrant cultures make space for leisure, philosophical reflection, scientific and intellectual mastery, and artistic and literary expression, among other things. Within the larger Christian community in America, one can find such vitality in pockets here and there. Yet where they do exist, they are eclipsed by the greater prominence and vast resources of the political activists and their organizations. What is more, there are few if any places in the pronouncements and actions of the Christian Right or the Christian Left (none that I could find) where these gifts are acknowledged, affirmed, or celebrated. What this means is that rather than being defined by its cultural achievements, its intellectual and artistic vitality, its service to the needs of others, Christianity is defined to the outside world by its rhetoric of resentment and the ambitions of a will in opposition to others.

It is not only the far too prominent moral failures among Christians that bring shame to God and deprive Him of being glorified in our lives but simply the lack of Spirit-led submission to one another. Our independent, self-centered attitudes create dissension that paralyzes the work of God and makes us no different from the world.

The Rothschilds are people we certainly would not attempt to defend given the rumors swirling around them of financial corruption and market manipulation in this era and in earlier eras. However, the way they are held up, by conspiracy extremists and other paranoid thinkers, to represent the Jewish community is an absolute joke. There are good and bad people in all races. The fact that there are many Jews in the banking sector is being used by neo-Nazis and anti-Semites to try to sway the uneducated to believe the Jews are the problem instead of banking shysters and banksters in general. Another important point relating to the current Jewish prominence in the banking world is there is a very obvious historical reason for it...Historically Jews did not have much freedom of choice when it came to their occupations. In fact, they were once forbidden by Christian authorities, and by some Muslim authorities, to pursue most regular occupations. They were, however, permitted and even encouraged to enter the banking industry because, in the medieval era at least, Christians/Muslims were not allowed to charge fellow-Christians/Muslims interest, but someone had to make loans – so the Jews were charged with the task. Jews were also permitted to slaughter animals – another equally unsavory job – and they were then despised and mocked by entire communities for being animal slaughterers and bankers.

But the shtick that makes Amplitude unique is its prominent triangular nicks that carve out space at stroke junctions. The “ink trap” is normally a functional device, used to compensate for ink gain (see Bell Centennial), but Christian Schwartz makes it an aesthetic device, giving a stylish edge to headlines without sacrificing the type’s readability in

few years ago, the Barna Group, a prominent research company, went to every state in the US and asked young non-Christians what their perceptions of Christians were. What they found was heartbreaking. The top three answers were: (1) anti-gay, (2) judgmental, (3) hypocritical. And they did not say the number one thing Jesus said we should be known for: loving.

True, the Christian Bible is a mass of contradictions; but what could be more contradictory than the term "Christian Atheist"? If prominent leaders of the Christian faith are rejecting the past interpretation of God, how then can their followers be expected to adhere to previous tradition? With all the debates about whether or not God is dead, if he isn't he had better have MEDICARE!

warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces, Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the “valiant” settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s “myth of the essential white American”—that the “essential American soul” is a killer.

The individual to whom one ascribes “a strong personality” merely presents a particular mixture of natural elements, with certain prominent traits. Despite these salient traits, such a person ultimately creates only the impression of déjà vu. A saint is striking because of a countenance unique in the world, because of a light that is always ultimately personal. He or she has never been seen before.

So instead of providing another intellectual answer that would be ignored, David cut right to the heart. He said, “You’re raising all of these objections because you’re sleeping with your girlfriend. Am I right?” All the blood drained from the young man’s face. He was caught. He was rejecting God because he didn’t like God’s morality. And he was disguising it with feigned intellectual objections. This young man wasn’t the first atheist or agnostic to admit that his desire to follow his own agenda was keeping him out of the kingdom. In the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul revealed this tendency we humans have to “suppress the truth” about God in order to follow our own desires. In other words, unbelief is more motivated by the heart than the head. Some prominent atheists have admitted this. Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously wrote, “God is dead and we have killed him,” also wrote, “If one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, we should be even less able to believe in him.”[24] Obviously Nietzsche’s rejection of God was not intellectual! Professor Thomas Nagel of NYU more recently wrote, “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My

I have become well acquainted with the dualism in the North American church. Once, after taking a trip to Iraq to protest the war, I went to Willow Creek and gave a talk titled “The Scandal of Grace.” Afterward, they explained to me that the pulpits are not for political messages. I thought about what would have happened if Reverend King hadn’t allowed the gospel to get political. My heart sank as I walked into the foyer and noticed something I had never seen before: the American flag standing prominently in front of the auditorium. And never before was I so heartbroken that the cross was missing. For the flag and the cross are both spiritual. And they are both political. It is a dangerous day when we can take the cross out of the church more easily than the flag. No wonder it is hard for seekers to find God nowadays. It’s difficult to know where Christianity ends and America begins.1 Our money says, “In God We Trust.” God’s name is on America’s money, and America’s flag is on God’s altars.

Sweet was no fanatic, but a gentle, traditionally minded man disinclined to question the religious authorities in his life, a person who hoped more than anything to discharge his professional duties within the context of his Christian faith. The prominent spokespeople for his faith were telling him that abortion was evil, and, in my opinion, he chose to believe them. I understood his dilemma—no one understood it better than I—but I vehemently disagreed with his action. In fact, I was surprised at how fast indignation boiled up within me.

Any true definition of preaching must say that that man is there to deliver the message of God, a message from God to those people. If you prefer the language of Paul, he is 'an ambassador for Christ'. That is what he is. He has been sent, he is a commissioned person, and he is standing there as the mouthpiece of God and of Christ to address these people. In other words he is not there merely to talk to them, he is not there to entertain them. He is there - and I want to emphasize this - to do something to those people; he is there to produce results of various kinds, he is there to influence people. He is not merely to influence a part of them; he is not only to influence their minds, not only their emotions, or merely to bring pressure to bear upon their wills and to induce them to some kind of activity. He is there to deal with the whole person; and his preaching is meant to affect the whole person at the very centre of life. Preaching should make such a difference to a man who is listening that he is never the same again. Preaching, in other words, is a transaction between the preacher and the listener. It does something for the soul of man, for the whole of the person, the entire man; it deals with him in a vital and radical manner. I remember a remark made to me a few years back about some studies of mine on “The Sermon on the Mount.” I had deliberately published them in sermonic form. There were many who advised me not to do that on the grounds that people no longer like sermons. The days for sermons, I was told, were past, and I was pressed to turn my sermons into essays and to give them a different form. I was most interested therefore when this man to whom I was talking, and he is a very well-known Christian layman in Britain, said, "I like these studies of yours on “The Sermon on the Mount” because they speak to me.” Then he went on to say, “I have been recommended many books by learned preachers and professors but,” he said, “what I feel about those books is that it always seems to be professors writing to professors; they do not speak to me. But,” he said, “your stuff speaks to me.” Now he was an able man, and a man in a prominent position, but that is how he put it. I think there is a great deal of truth in this. He felt that so much that he had been recommended to read was very learned and very clever and scholarly, but as he put it, it was “professors writing to professors.” This is, I believe, is a most important point for us to bear in mind when we read sermons. I have referred already to the danger of giving the literary style too much prominence. I remember reading an article in a literary journal some five or six years ago which I thought was most illuminating because the writer was making the selfsame point in his own field. His case was that the trouble today is that far too often instead of getting true literature we tend to get “reviewers writing books for reviewers.” These men review one another's books, with the result that when they write, what they have in their mind too often is the reviewer and not the reading public to whom the book should be addressed, at any rate in the first instance. The same thing tends to happen in connection with preaching. This ruins preaching, which should always be a transaction between preacher and listener with something vital and living taking place. It is not the mere imparting of knowledge, there is something much bigger involved. The total person is engaged on both sides; and if we fail to realize this our preaching will be a failure.

Individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism have built renowned and racially homogenous ministries, but these have been cold comfort to those members of the body of Christ who exist outside the boundaries of racial whiteness. If white Christians are to reckon with racial discipleship, we must also look critically at the deeply held assumptions that have thus far hindered our attempts to address racial segregation and injustice. While it’s been over a hundred years since Ida B. Wells and Dwight L. Moody overlapped in Chicago, the dynamic they illustrate continues today. In the current cultural moment, black Christians are fighting for more equitable criminal justice policies, immigrant churches are advocating for policies that don’t separate asylum-seeking parents from their children, and Native American believers are lamenting as ancient tribal lands are being polluted by oil pipelines. At the same time, there are prominent white Christians publicly debating whether justice, from a biblical vantage point, can ever be social. Some of these leaders wonder whether justice can even be considered Christian when not limited to an individual. As disheartening as this divide is between white Christianity and many Christians of color, white Christianity’s tools help us to see why we haven’t been able to move past it.

Over the years, “black theology” has brought profound new insights about race to our understanding of the biblical texts. “Feminist theology” opened our eyes to the prominent role of women in the Bible. “Liberation theology” focused our attention on the Bible’s liberating gospel for the poor and oppressed. Today, “queer theology” is illuminating our understanding of the role of sexual minorities in the biblical text. In each case, the theological insights of formerly marginalized groups have enriched the whole church’s understanding of Scripture. In the process, these liberating theologies have helped to bring many Christians into a closer relationship with God.

One point is certain: In many Gnostic circles women had a prominence they did not have in society at large. Part of the reason for this was that, since it is the spirit and not the body that is important, the shape of one’s body has little to do with eternal realities. Also, in many of the genealogies of eons with which Gnostics explained the origin of the world, there were female as well as male eons. It is quite possible that it was partly in response to this feature in Gnosticism that orthodox Christianity began restricting the role of women in the church, for it is clear that in first-century Christianity women had roles in the church that the second century began to deny them.

So, we have an element newly prominent in American religious and political life, a new form of entitlement, a self-declared elect. What some have seen as a resurgence of Christianity, or at least a bold defense of American cultural tradition—even as another great awakening!—has brought a harshness, a bitterness, a crudeness, and a high-handedness into the public sphere that are only to be compared to the politics, or the collapse of politics, in the period before the Civil War. Its self-righteousness fuels the damnedest things—I use the word advisedly—notably the acquisition of homicidal weapons. I wonder what these supposed biblicists find in the Gospels or the Epistles that could begin to excuse any of it.

The fascination with Medusa did not diminish at the end of the Greek Classical Era. She continued to function as a lightning rod for prevailing cultural attitudes. During the Greco-Roman period, images of Medusa were reproduced for wealthy patrons on mosaics and sculptural reliefs as mostly young and beautiful rather than disturbingly ferocious. Nevertheless, Christian zealots, who were rising in prominence, considered all pagan images abominations to be destroyed, especially of the Gorgon Medusa. During the Medieval period in Europe, Christian scholars considered the beheading of Medusa by Perseus to be an allegory of the virtuous son of god destroying the manifestation of evil, intrinsic to all women, that threatens men's souls.

The theologically backed assertion of the superiority of both "the white race" and Protestant Christianity undergirded a century of religiously sanctioned terrorism in the form of ritualized lynchings and other forms of public violence and intimidation. Both the informal conduits of white power, such as the White Citizens' Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, and the state and local government offices, were populated by pastors, deacons, Sunday school teachers, and other upstanding members of prominent white churches. The link between political leaders and prominent white churches was not just incidental; these religious connections served as the moral underpinning for the entire project of protecting the dominant social and political standing of whites.

The theologically backed assertion of the superiority of both “the white race” and Protestant Christianity undergirded a century of religiously sanctioned terrorism in the form of ritualized lynchings and other forms of public violence and intimidation. Both the informal conduits of white power, such as the White Citizens’ Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, and the state and local government offices, were populated by pastors, deacons, Sunday school teachers, and other upstanding members of prominent white churches. The link between political leaders and prominent white churches was not just incidental; these religious connections served as the moral underpinning for the entire project of protecting the dominant social and political standing of whites.

When exactly did this all change, and what were the social and theological factors that led to the change? The answer seems to be in the second century and: (1) because of the consolidation of ecclesial power in the hands of monarchial bishops and others; (2) in response to the rise of heretical movements such as the Gnostics; (3) in regard to the social context of the Lord’s Supper, namely, the agape, or thanksgiving, meal, due to the rise to prominence of asceticism in the church; and (4) because the increasingly Gentile majority in the church was to change how second-century Christian thinkers would reflect on the meal. Thus, issues of power and purity and even ethnicity were to change the views of the Lord’s Supper and the way it would be practiced.

According to historian Darren Dochuk, Tea Party observers have radically underestimated the white evangelicals support that buttressed the movement. By 2011, white evangelicals had come to be ‘driven by a theology of small government, free enterprise, family values, and Christian patriotism, and backed by a phalanx of politically charged churches, corporations, and action committees.’ As Dochuk writes this "late Tea Partyism has come into focus as principally a revitalized evangelical conservatism." Among white evangelicals, the Tea Party did not constitute extremist positions, but rather elevated the values they saw neglected yet sorely needed today. Similarly, David Campbell and Robert Putnam also find religion to be central to the Tea Party; alongside their Republicanism, they "want to see religion play a prominent role role in politics.

The failure of the Crusades intensified anti-Jewish persecutions in Europe. Banned from owning land or joining trading companies, forced to wear special clothing, Jews were often involved in moneylending, supposedly taboo for Christians. Kings borrowed money from them, and so protected them, but whenever society was strained, by recession or plague, they were attacked. In 1144, after a boy was murdered in Norwich, England, Jews were accused of killing Christian children to make Passover matzoh, unleashing the ‘blood libel’ which in various forms – but always featuring a conspiracy of Jews to harm non-Jews – reverberates down to the twenty-first century. It spread: in 1171, it hit Blois, France, where thirty-three Jews (seventeen women) were burned alive. In the failed state of England, where Henry III struggled to maintain royal power in the face of endemic noble revolt, both king and rebels borrowed from a wealthy banker, David of Oxford. After David’s death, his widow Licoricia of Winchester, the richest non-noble in England, lent to both sides, partly funding the building of Westminster Abbey. But her murder in 1277 showed the perils of being a prominent Jew. In 1290, Henry’s son Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Yet in 1264 Bolesław, duke of Poland, had granted the Statute of Kalisz which gave Jews the right to trade and worship freely and banned the blood libel, legislating against Christian conspiracy theories and denunciations: ‘Accusing Jews of drinking Christian blood is expressly prohibited,’ declared the Statute. ‘If, despite this, a Jew should be accused of murdering a Christian child, such charge must be sustained by testimony of three Christians and three Jews.’ Poland would be a Jewish sanctuary for many centuries.

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.

One sees more and more that folk either have head religion or dead religion, or a very shallow view of the real thing. It seems these days the average evangelist offers too much for too little. A shallow repentance, if that is what it can be called, is accepted and then the person is guaranteed immunity from divine justice, eternal security, escape from hell, and the title deed to a first class mansion in heaven. What a travesty of the real thing. May God pity us. Newsweek has reported that six prominent Americans have been converted to Christianity recently. But none mentioned conviction of sin or of receiving Christ as Lord. So I see more than ever the weakness of modern evangelism. We get folks to walk an aisle and say a sinner’s prayer to ask forgiveness. But when do sinners, who are rebels against God, ever cry for mercy? Mercy, like repentance, is a dirty word with most evangelists. The old school view of evangelism is that people did not come to an altar for five minutes and leave, but would stay seeking the face of God until they had a real breakthrough.

The publication of the Gospel of Judas within Codex Tchacos represents a significant moment for the study of religion and culture. It is a rare occurrence that a previously unknown gospel manuscript is discovered, particularly one that was mentioned in early Christian sources, and that is precisely what is the case with the Gospel of Judas. The Gospel of Judas can be dated, with some certainty, to around the middle of the second century, or perhaps even a bit before, and the materials included within it are even older. The gospel is thus an early source for our knowledge of an important mystical movement within early Christianity and Judaism, namely the Sethian gnostic school of religious thought. Further, the text provides the opportunity to evaluate, and perhaps reevaluate, the historical role of a figure—Judas Iscariot—who has been much maligned within Christianity and has been a prominent figure in the development of anti-Semitism. All in all, the Gospel of Judas sheds important light on the character of developing Christianity, and reminds us again of the rich diversity of the early church.

Europe was not born in the early Middle Ages. No common identity in 1000 linked Spain to Russia, Ireland to the Byzantine empire (in what is now the Balkans, Greece and Turkey), except the very weak sense of community that linked Christian polities together. There was no common European culture, and certainly not any Europe-wide economy. There was no sign whatsoever that Europe would, in a still rather distant future, develop economically and militarily, so as to be able to dominate the world. Anyone in 1000 looking for future industrialization would have put bets on the economy of Egypt, not of the Rhineland and Low Countries, and that of Lancashire would have seemed like a joke. In politico-military terms, the far south-east and south-west of Europe, Byzantium and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), provided the dominant states of the Continent, whereas in western Europe the Carolingian experiment (see below, Chapters 16 and 17) had ended with the break-up of Francia (modern France, Belgium and western Germany), the hegemonic polity for the previous four hundred years. The most coherent western state in 1000, southern England, was tiny. In fact, weak political systems dominated most of the Continent at the end of our period, and the active and aggressive political systems of later on in the Middle Ages were hardly visible. National identities, too, were not widely prominent in 1000, even if one rejects the association between nationalism and modernity made in much contemporary scholarship.

Even more threatening to Christian assumptions than the Qur’an’s flat denial that Jesus had been crucified, however, was the imperious, not to say terrifying, tone of authority with which it did so. Very little in either the Old or the New Testament could compare. For all the reverence with which Christians regarded their scripture, and for all that they believed it illumined by the flame of the Holy Spirit, they perfectly accepted that most of it, including the Gospels themselves, had been authored by mortals. Only the covenant on the tablets of stone, given to Moses amid fire and smoke on the summit of Sinai, ‘and written with the finger of God’,13 owed nothing to human mediation. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Moses, of all the figures in the Old and New Testaments, should have featured most prominently in the Qur’an. He was mentioned 137 times in all. Many of the words attributed to him had served as a direct inspiration to Muhammad’s own followers. ‘My people! Enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you!’14 The Arab conquerors, in the first decades of their empire, had pointedly referred to themselves as muhajirun: ‘those who have undertaken an exodus’. A hundred years on from Muhammad’s death, when the first attempts were made by Muslim scholars to write his biography, the model that they instinctively reached for was that of Moses. The age at which the Prophet had received his first revelation from God; the flight of his followers from a land of idols; the way in which—directly contradicting the news brought to Carthage in 634—he was said to have died before entering the Holy Land: all these elements echoed the life of the Jews’ most God-favoured prophet.15 So brilliantly, indeed, did Muslim biographers paint from the palette of traditions told about Moses that the fading outlines of the historical Muhammad were quite lost beneath their brushstrokes. Last and most blessed of the prophets sent by God to set humanity on the straight path, there was only the one predecessor to whom he could properly be compared. ‘There has come to him the greatest Law that came to Moses; surely he is the prophet of this people.’16

The Christian life requires a form adequate to its content, a form that is at home in the Christian revelation and that respects each person's dignity and freedom with plenty of room for all our quirks and particularities. Story provides that form. The biblical story invites us in as participants in something larger than our sin-defined needs, into something truer than our culture-stunted ambitions. We enter these stories and recognize ourselves as participants, whether willing or unwilling, in the life of God. Unfortunately, we live in an age in which story has been pushed from its biblical frontline prominence to a bench on the sidelines and then condescended to as "illustration" or "testimony" or "inspiration." Our contemporary unbiblical preference, both inside and outside the church, is for information over story. We typically gather impersonal (pretentiously called "scientific" or "theological") information, whether doctrinal or philosophical or historical, in order to take things into our own hands and take charge of how we will live our lives. And we commonly consult outside experts to interpret the information for us. But we don't live our lives by information; we live them in relationships in the context of a personal God who cannot be reduced to formula or definition, who has designs on us for justice and salvation. And we live them in an extensive community of men and women, each person an intricate bundle of experience and motive and desire. Picking a text for living that is characterized by information-gathering and consultation with experts leaves out nearly everything that is uniquely us - our personal histories and relationships, our sins and guilt, our moral character and believing obedience to God. Telling and listening to a story is the primary verbal way of accounting for life the way we live it in actual day-by-day reality. There are no (or few) abstractions in a story. A story is immediate, concrete, plotted, relational, personal. And so when we lose touch with our lives, with our souls - our moral, spiritual, embodied God-personal lives - story is the best verbal way of getting us back in touch again. And that is why God's word is given for the most part in the form of story, this vast, overarching, all-encompassing story, this meta-story.

We can start with approximately nine traditional authors of the New Testament. If we consider the critical thesis that other authors wrote the pastoral letters and such letters as Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians, we'd have an even larger number. Another twenty early Christian authors20 and four heretical writings mention Jesus within 150 years of his death on the cross.21 Moreover, nine secular, non-Christian sources mention Jesus within the 150 years: Josephus, the Jewish historian; Tacitus, the Roman historian; Pliny the Younger, a politician of Rome; Phlegon, a freed slave who wrote histories; Lucian, the Greek satirist; Celsus, a Roman philosopher; and probably the historians Suetonius and Thallus, as well as the prisoner Mara Bar-Serapion.22 In all, at least forty-two authors, nine of them secular, mention Jesus within 150 years of his death. In comparison, let's take a look at Julius Caesar, one of Rome's most prominent figures. Caesar is well known for his military conquests. After his Gallic Wars, he made the famous statement, "I came, I saw, I conquered." Only five sources report his military conquests: writings by Caesar himself, Cicero, Livy, the Salona Decree, and Appian.23 If Julius Caesar really made a profound impact on Roman society, why didn't more writers of antiquity mention his great military accomplishments? No one questions whether Julius did make a tremendous impact on the Roman Empire. It is evident that he did. Yet in those 150 years after his death, more non-Christian authors alone comment on Jesus than all of the sources who mentioned Julius Caesar's great military conquests within 150 years of his death. Let's look at an even better example, a contemporary of Jesus. Tiberius Caesar was the Roman emperor at the time of Jesus' ministry and execution. Tiberius is mentioned by ten sources within 150 years of his death: Tacitus, Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Seneca, Valerius Maximus, Josephus, and Luke.24 Compare that to Jesus' forty-two total sources in the same length of time. That's more than four times the number of total sources who mention the Roman emperor during roughly the same period. If we only considered the number of secular non-Christian sources who mention Jesus and Tiberius within 150 years of their lives, we arrive at a tie of nine each.25

One evening in April a thirty-two-year-old woman, unconscious and severely injured, was admitted to the hospital in a provincial town south of Copenhagen. She had a concussion and internal bleeding, her legs and arms were broken in several places, and she had deep lesions in her face. A gas station attendant in a neighboring village, beside the bridge over the highway to Copenhagen, had seen her go the wrong way up the exit and drive at high speed into the oncoming traffic. The first three approaching cars managed to maneuver around her, but about 200 meters after the junction she collided head-on with a truck. The Dutch driver was admitted for observation but released the next day. According to his statement he started to brake a good 100 meters before the crash, while the car seemed to actually increase its speed over the last stretch. The front of the vehicle was totally crushed, part of the radiator was stuck between the road and the truck's bumper, and the woman had to be cut free. The spokesman for emergency services said it was a miracle she had survived. On arrival at the hospital the woman was in very critical condition, and it was twenty-four hours before she was out of serious danger. Her eyes were so badly damaged that she lost her sight. Her name was Lucca. Lucca Montale. Despite the name there was nothing particularly Italian about her appearance. She had auburn hair and green eyes in a narrow face with high cheek-bones. She was slim and fairly tall. It turned out she was Danish, born in Copenhagen. Her husband, Andreas Bark, arrived with their small son while she was still on the operating table. The couple's home was an isolated old farmhouse in the woods seven kilometers from the site of the accident. Andreas Bark told the police he had tried to stop his wife from driving. He thought she had just gone out for a breath of air when he heard the car start. By the time he got outside he saw it disappearing along the road. She had been drinking a lot. They had had a marital disagreement. Those were the words he used; he was not questioned further on that point. Early in the morning, when Lucca Montale was moved from the operating room into intensive care, her husband was still in the waiting room with the sleeping boy's head on his lap. He was looking out at the sky and the dark trees when Robert sat down next to him. Andreas Bark went on staring into the gray morning light with an exhausted, absent gaze. He seemed slightly younger than Robert, in his late thirties. He had dark, wavy hair and a prominent chin, his eyes were narrow and deep-set, and he was wearing a shabby leather jacket. Robert rested his hands on his knees in the green cotton trousers and looked down at the perforations in the leather uppers of his white clogs. He realized he had forgotten to take off his plastic cap after the operation. The thin plastic crackled between his hands. Andreas looked at him and Robert straightened up to meet his gaze. The boy woke.

Any true definition of preaching must say that that man is there to deliver the message of God, a message from God to those people. If you prefer the language of Paul, he is 'an ambassador for Christ'. That is what he is. He has been sent, he is a commissioned person, and he is standing there as the mouthpiece of God and of Christ to address these people. In other words he is not there merely to talk to them, he is not there to entertain them. He is there - and I want to emphasize this - to do something to those people; he is there to produce results of various kinds, he is there to influence people. He is not merely to influence a part of them; he is not only to influence their minds, not only their emotions, or merely to bring pressure to bear upon their wills and to induce them to some kind of activity. He is there to deal with the whole person; and his preaching is meant to affect the whole person at the very centre of life. Preaching should make such a difference to a man who is listening that he is never the same again. Preaching, in other words, is a transaction between the preacher and the listener. It does something for the soul of man, for the whole of the person, the entire man; it deals with him in a vital and radical manner I remember a remark made to me a few years back about some studies of mine on “The Sermon on the Mount.” I had deliberately published them in sermonic form. There were many who advised me not to do that on the grounds that people no longer like sermons. The days for sermons, I was told, were past, and I was pressed to turn my sermons into essays and to give them a different form. I was most interested therefore when this man to whom I was talking, and he is a very well-known Christian layman in Britain, said, "I like these studies of yours on “The Sermon on the Mount” because they speak to me.” Then he went on to say, “I have been recommended many books by learned preachers and professors but,” he said, “what I feel about those books is that it always seems to be professors writing to professors; they do not speak to me. But,” he said, “your stuff speaks to me.” Now he was an able man, and a man in a prominent position, but that is how he put it. I think there is a great deal of truth in this. He felt that so much that he had been recommended to read was very learned and very clever and scholarly, but as he put it, it was “professors writing to professors.” This is, I believe, is a most important point for us to bear in mind when we read sermons. I have referred already to the danger of giving the literary style too much prominence. I remember reading an article in a literary journal some five or six years ago which I thought was most illuminating because the writer was making the selfsame point in his own field. His case was that the trouble today is that far too often instead of getting true literature we tend to get “reviewers writing books for reviewers.” These men review one another's books, with the result that when they write, what they have in their mind too often is the reviewer and not the reading public to whom the book should be addressed, at any rate in the first instance. The same thing tends to happen in connection with preaching. This ruins preaching, which should always be a transaction between preacher and listener with something vital and living taking place. It is not the mere imparting of knowledge, there is something much bigger involved. The total person is engaged on both sides; and if we fail to realize this our preaching will be a failure.

Robert Askins Brings ‘Hand to God’ to Broadway Chad Batka for The New York Times Robert Askins at the Booth Theater, where his play “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday. By MICHAEL PAULSON The conceit is zany: In a church basement, a group of adolescents gathers (mostly at the insistence of their parents) to make puppets that will spread the Christian message, but one of the puppets turns out to be more demonic than divine. The result — a dark comedy with the can-puppets-really-do-that raunchiness of “Avenue Q” and can-people-really-say-that outrageousness of “The Book of Mormon” — is “Hand to God,” a new play that is among the more improbable entrants in the packed competition for Broadway audiences over the next few weeks. Given the irreverence of some of the material — at one point stuffed animals are mutilated in ways that replicate the torments of Catholic martyrs — it is perhaps not a surprise to discover that the play’s author, Robert Askins, was nicknamed “Dirty Rob” as an undergraduate at Baylor, a Baptist-affiliated university where the sexual explicitness and violence of his early scripts raised eyebrows. But Mr. Askins had also been a lone male soloist in the children’s choir at St. John Lutheran of Cypress, Tex. — a child who discovered early that singing was a way to make the stern church ladies smile. His earliest performances were in a deeply religious world, and his writings since then have been a complex reaction to that upbringing. “It’s kind of frustrating in life to be like, ‘I’m a playwright,’ and watch people’s face fall, because they associate plays with phenomenally dull, didactic, poetic grad-schoolery, where everything takes too long and tediously explores the beauty in ourselves,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not church, even though it feels like church a lot when we go these days.” The journey to Broadway, where “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday at the Booth Theater, still seems unlikely to Mr. Askins, 34, who works as a bartender in Brooklyn and says he can’t afford to see Broadway shows, despite his newfound prominence. He seems simultaneously enthralled by and contemptuous of contemporary theater, the world in which he has chosen to make his life; during a walk from the Cobble Hill coffee shop where he sometimes writes to the Park Slope restaurant where he tends bar, he quoted Nietzsche and Derrida, described himself as “deeply weird,” and swore like, well, a satanic sock-puppet. “If there were no laughs in the show, I’d think there was something wrong with him,” said the actor Steven Boyer, who won raves in earlier “Hand to God” productions as Jason, a grief-stricken adolescent with a meek demeanor and an angry-puppet pal. “But anybody who is able to write about such serious stuff and be as hilarious as it is, I’m not worried about their mental health.” Mr. Askins’s interest in the performing arts began when he was a boy attending rural Texas churches affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod denomination; he recalls the worshipers as “deeply conservative, old farm folks, stone-faced, pride and suffering, and the only time anybody ever really livened up was when the children’s choir would perform.” “My grandmother had a cross-stitch that said, ‘God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing,’ and so I got into that,” he said. “For somebody who enjoys performance, that was the way in.” The church also had a puppet ministry — an effort to teach children about the Bible by use of puppets — and when Mr. Askins’s mother, a nurse, began running the program, he enlisted to help. He would perform shows for other children at preschools and vacation Bible camps. “The shows are wacky, but it was fun,” he said. “They’re badly written attempts to bring children to Jesus.” Not all of his formative encounters with puppets were positive. Particularly scarring: D

More directly, almost two decades ago, a prominent anti-abortion extremist appeared on a Christian radio station and talked specifically about Warren Hern. Hern explained, “He invited his listeners to assassinate me. By name. Mentioned my name, quoted scripture, said that I should die.

As the private correspondence and public claims of the men leading this charge make clear, this new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most—not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in Washington. With ample funding from major corporations, prominent industrialists, and business lobbies such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce in the 1930s and 1940s, these new evangelists for free enterprise promoted a vision best characterized as “Christian libertarianism.

The relations of Peter Waldo with the Waldenses were so intimate that many called him the founder of a sect of that name, though others derive the name from the Alpine valleys, Vallenses, in which so many of those believers lived. It is true that Waldo was highly esteemed among them, but not possible that he should have been their founder, since they founded their faith and practice on the Scriptures and were followers of those who from the earliest times had done the same. For outsiders to give them the name of a man prominent among them was only to follow the usual habit of their opponents, who did not like to admit their right to call themselves, as they did, “Christians” or “brethren”. Peter Waldo continued his travels and eventually reached Bohemia, where he died (1217), having laboured there for years and sown much seed, the fruit of which was seen in the spiritual harvest in that country at the time of Huss and later.

The women did not know how he visited Englishmen in Calcutta during the day, only to be treated with contempt. Even a prominent clergyman to whom he had an introduction written by John Newton had refused to see him. And on his return to Manicktullo the two women now openly berated him. In his diary he wrote: I am in a strange land, alone, no Christian friend, a large family - and nothing to supply their wants...I am dejected, not for my sake but my family’s...In the evening (I) poured out my soul to God; but still my burden continued. The next day (I) had a pleasant time in prayer to God in the morning but afterwards the abusive treatment I receive from her who should be a help to me quite overcame my spirits. I was vexed, grieved, and shocked. I am sorry for her who never was hearty in the undertaking, her health has been much impaired, and her fears are great, though five parts of six are groundless...Oh that I may have wisdom from above...[10]

Almost every book in the NT has something to say about false beliefs and those who advocate them. We are warned, e.g., about false prophets (Matt. 7:15–16; 24:11), false christs (Matt. 24:5, 24; Mark 13:22), a different Jesus and a different spirit (2 Cor. 11:4), false apostles (2 Cor. 11:13–15), and “another gospel” (Gal. 1:8). With so many warnings, it is clear God knew that many false teachers would come, and that he did not want his people to be deceived (cf. Eph. 4:14; 2 John 7). In what follows, notable deceptions of prominent cults will be summarized, along with a brief biblical response. From the viewpoint of those who hold to historic, evangelical Christianity, a “cult” is any religious movement that claims to be derived from the Bible and/or the Christian faith, and that advocates beliefs that differ so significantly with major Christian doctrines that two consequences follow: (1) The movement cannot legitimately be considered a valid “Christian” denomination because of its serious deviation from historic Christian orthodoxy. (2) Believing the doctrines of the movement is incompatible with trusting in the Jesus Christ of the Bible for the salvation that comes by God’s grace alone (Eph. 2:8–9). By this traditional understanding of the word “cult,” the following groups described are “cults,” though this does not imply that they share the extremely oppressive, authoritarian, life-controlling, and often immoral practices that are found in what the secular world calls “cults,” using the term in a more extreme sense.

for the next week we endured what can only be described as verbal abuse from anti-equality Christians. Truly, not all of those opposing marriage equality were mean spirited. Some were nice enough, and went so far as to offer us water and snacks. Too many others, though, were just plain unkind, and too few of the good Christians who stood nearby did anything to rein them in. The most harrowing moment for me came when a prominent ex-gay activist pointed at my clergy collar and yelled, “You’re not fooling anyone with that thing!” He yelled that I was not a real pastor, and that I had simply bought a clergy shirt to try to deceive others. When I replied that I was an ordained minister he looked incredulous and told me to read the Bible. (I let him know that I’d read it cover to cover, in English and the original Hebrew and Greek.) Fuming, he told me I was going to hell. Before I could respond Heidi grabbed my shoulder and guided me away. The incident left me shaken, not so much for me, but for Christians everywhere. Too often progressive Christians have ceded the public proclamation of Christian values to conservatives and fundamentalists. If you asked the youth and young adults who were with us in that hallway that week what Christians thought of them, they would likely have believed that the vast majority of Christians hated them. That was true, even with Heidi, myself, and a moderate number of other supportive clergy visible and engaged. This is probably not all that surprising to you if you are a progressive Christian. If you’re anything like me, you roll your eyes in frustration every time a right-wing extremist clergy person claims to offer the “Christian perspective” on an issue. Or,

The CUP’s genocidal wartime policies towards the Armenians and Kemal’s ruthless expulsion of Christian Ottomans featured prominently in the Nazi imagination.

The CUP’s genocidal wartime policies towards the Armenians and Kemal’s ruthless expulsion of Christian Ottomans featured prominently in the Nazi imagination. They became a source of inspiration and a model for Hitler’s plans and dreams in the years leading up to the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939.74

And what of Allegro? Shunned by the scholarly community, he left academia to pursue a career as a writer. During his scroll years, he was described as "cavalier, impudent, cheerfully iconoclastic," but in time the hostility of the scholarly community left him "weary and disillusioned." In 1970, he committed scholarly suicide by publishing a book entitled The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, in which he argued that Jesus never existed but was merely an image produced by early Christians under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms, that Christianity began as an orgiastic mushroom cult. In a letter to the London Times, fourteen prominent British scholars, including his old Oxford mentor, Godfrey Driver, repudiated the book and his publisher apologized for publishing it. Allegro remained in academic and literary exile until his death at sixty-five in 1968.

St Laurence gathered the poor, the blind, and the lame together in the church in Rome and brought in the rapacious Roman authorities, proclaiming, “Here are the riches of the Church!” Whenever Christians refuse to use the word “Church” as a synonym for “those in prominent roles in the clergy hierarchy,” but instead assume and take for granted that “Church” means principally the uncelebrated, the downtrodden, and the poor, the Holy Spirit is active in making the stories of Church history live in the habits of Christian speech.

Several themes that are common in early non Muslim sources but far less so in sources from the Arabo-Islamic tradition feature prominently in al-Zuhrī’s account. For instance, al-Zuhrī portrays the ascendance of Muhammad’s followers: (1) as led by a new king (malik), or else as ushering in an era of new kingship/dominion (mulk); and (2) as primarily an ethnic dominion, being a rule not of a community of faithful believers (al-muʾminīn) but rather of “the circumcised people [al-khitān].” While this is not incompatible per se with early Islamic historiography, these themes deeply resonate with early Christian accounts of the rise of Islam, particularly in the Levant, which most often speak of the new Arab/Saracen rulers in terms a new dominion (Syr. malkūtā), not a new religion and hence just as often depict Muhammad and other early Muslim rulers as merely “kings” (Syr. malkē) and nothing more. The account of Ps.-Fredegar fits this pattern perfectly, inasmuch as it describes the “circumcised” conquerors in purely ethnic terms, designating them as either Hagarenes (Agarrini) or Saracens (Saracini), but displays no knowledge of Muhammad, his religion, or the religious convictions and motivations of the “Saracen” conquerors.

As I noted earlier, spirit guides together with God energy and our loved ones who have crossed make up our Team of Light on the Other Side. If the concept of spirit guides sounds a little strange to you, you should know that it’s not a new concept—it’s been around since the dawn of humanity. Different cultures have different names for them, but they have always been a part of the tapestry of human existence. In Christianity, they are called angels, or guardian angels, and they play a prominent role in the Bible.

Christian supporters and opponents of slavery were prominent in political affairs. One leading Southern clergyman linked political proslavery arguments directly to the Christian faith: It is not the narrow question of abolitionism or slavery— not simply whether we shall emancipate our negroes or not; the real question is the relations of man to society. . . . The parties in this conflict are not only abolitionists and slaveholders— they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins, on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground— Christianity and Atheism the combatants.

The answer depends on what is meant by the word free. In some senses of the word free, everyone agrees that we are free in our will and in our choices. Even prominent theologians in the Reformed or Calvinistic tradition concur. Both Louis Berkhof in his Systematic Theology (pp. 103, 173) and John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion16 are willing to speak in some sense of the “free” acts and choices of man.

Rose is the epitome of a hard-scrabble professional, complete with a practiced resting bitch face. Dark, smoky makeup accentuates her piercing hazel eyes that bore into anyone catching her gaze. Her short auburn hair perches in an all-business cut, with a slight flourish over her right cheek. A chain made of thick silver links adorns her neck, complete with a prominent cross. Is she a devout Christian or will it all be a ploy to curry favor with the salt-of-the-earth jurors in this county? A tight, merciless navy-blue skirt and blazer stress her athletic frame. She is all business, and in it to win it.

God forbid that anyone should neglect present duties! To sit idly waiting for Christ, and not to attend to the business of our respective positions is not Christianity but fanaticism. Let us only remember in all our daily pursuits that we serve a Master who is coming again. If I can stir up just one Christian to think more of that second coming and to give it more prominence, I feel that this book will not have been published in vain.

In response to contemporary changes in American culture influenced by the feminist movement, and as a result of the growing number of prominent Christian women contributing to these conversations conservative evangelical gender ideologies were in flux at the very moment that the politics of "family values" were being defined around a purportedly unchanging ideal of traditional family roles.

To seek the love of those who have fully entered into communion with God, who are at one with His will and filled with His grace, is a natural expression of the life of faith. But in addition to the appeal, praise takes a prominent place, rejoicing at the devout and noble lives of the saints, their deeds and victory, and at the divine guidance manifested in them. They are the witnesses to redemption.

Syrian Christians were a prominent minority community with full religious freedoms. Obviously, that changed once parts of the country fell to ISIS, al Qaeda, and other jihadi groups.

The †paschal mystery—God’s bringing about new life through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—is at the center of Paul’s understanding of life in the Spirit (1:3–7; 4:7–15). Christians participate in the paschal mystery by entering into the dynamic of Christ’s self-offering for the sake of others, trusting in God to bring life—to others and to oneself—out of one’s various “dyings.” In these and so many other ways, 2 Corinthians—aptly called by a prominent commentator “the most extraordinary letter of the New Testament”[15]—is extremely relevant for Christian life today.

A warning. However, it may also be that in some cases we fill the role of the surrounding nations rather than that of God’s suffering people. For a common theme in God’s accusation of the nations is that they rejoiced at the divine judgment falling on others. Perhaps we too have been heedless or even happy when our opponents have apparently received their “comeuppance” at the hands of God, whether those opponents be inside or outside the Christian community. We have perhaps been secretly, or not so secretly, glad over the fall of prominent televangelists; some

When we asked him why he was so dedicated to reconciliation and to being willing to make concessions to his opponents, he did not hesitate to say that it had all been due to the influence and witness of the Christian churches. This was echoed by Tokyo Sexwale, the first Premier of the leading industrial province of Gauteng, when he too came to greet our synod as it was meeting in his province. Clearly the Church had made a contribution to what was happening in our land, even though its witness and ministry had been something of a mixed bag. Presumably without that influence things might have turned out a little differently. It could also be that at a very difficult time in our struggle, when most of our leaders were in jail or in exile or proscribed in some way or other, some of the leaders in the churches were thrust into the forefront of the struggle and had thereby given the churches a particular kind of credibility—people like Allan Boesak, formerly leader of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, Frank Chikane, former general secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), Peter Storey, former head of the Methodist Church, Beyers Naudé, the most prominent Afrikaner church dissident and also a general secretary of the SACC, Denis Hurley, formerly Roman Catholic Archbishop of Durban, and leaders of other faith communities who were there where the people were hurting. Thus when they spoke about forgiveness and reconciliation they had won their spurs and would be listened to with respect.

This was perhaps the key to his pastoral gentleness to all other sinners, writes John Piper. “Glad-hearted, grateful lowliness and brokenness as a saved ‘wretch’ was probably the most prominent root of Newton’s habitual tenderness with people.”7

...young Christians are actively being drawn into a worldview battle that wasn't so prominent even 10 years ago. Unfortunately, they're losing their faith in that battle because they haven't been equipped for the fight. If you want to keep your kids on God's side, you'll have to make sure they're armed.

One of the prominent Christian “traditions” today is nondenominational evangelicalism. To deny that this is a tradition is to cut off the possibility of internal evaluation, critique, and reform. Ironically, it tends to create the most resistant sort of traditionalism.

THE FINAL STEP: APPROVAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY Very few evangelical egalitarians up to this time have advocated the moral validity of homosexual conduct, as far as I know. And I am thankful that the leading egalitarian organization Christians for Biblical Equality has steadfastly refused pressures to allow for the moral rightness of homosexual conduct. However, we would be foolish to ignore the trend set by a number of more liberal Protestant denominations, denominations that from the 1950s to the 1970s approved the ordination of women using many of the same arguments that evangelical egalitarians are using today.1 And those few prominent evangelicals who have endorsed homosexual conduct have already set a pattern of following evangelical feminist arguments. Virginia Mollenkott and Letha Scanzoni are two examples in the United States.2

When Jacob Lang, a member of the Illuminati, was hit by lightning during a trip on July 10, 1785, the police found part of secret Illuminati plans intended for the Grandmaster of the Grand Orient in Paris. These plans proved that the Illuminati favor the extermination of the Jewish-Christian philosophy, abolition of the power of all royal houses and monarchies, annihilation of all patriotism and loyalty to sovereignty, destruction of traditional family structures and marriage, a collective education for children by the state, and many more issues that can be found in our modern society. It became clear that the conspirators strived for worldwide objectives when the ruler Charles Theodore of Bavaria ordered a round up in the house of Weishaupt’s assistant, the prominent lawyer Von Zwack, on October 11, 1785. A large number of protocols, documents and letters by Weishaupt, that were based on the Constantinople Letter, were found in his house, which showed that Von Zwack was a high member of an enormous conspiracy. A quote from one of Weishaupt’s letters to Von Zwack reads: “With this plan we will be able to rule all of mankind. In this way we will be able to put everything in motion and set things on fire with most simple means. Our satellites will have to be placed and instructed in such a way that we are able to secretly influence all political negotiations.

Historians Will and Ariel Durant have written in The Story of Civilization: The Reformation that at the time of Luther, “a gallon of beer per day was the usual allowance per person, even for nuns.” This may help to explain why beer figures so prominently in the life and writings of the great reformer. He was German, after all, and he lived at a time when beer was the European drink of choice. Moreover, having been freed from what he considered to be a narrow and life-draining religious legalism, he stepped into the world ready to enjoy its pleasures to the glory of God. For Luther, beer flowed best in a vibrant Christian life.

...I sent the first half of the dissertation to Rudolf Bultmann [major figures of early 20th century biblical studies and a prominent voice in liberal Christianity] as a courtesy with an invitation to respond to any points in my analysis and critique if he wished. I was speechless when I received a long letter from Bultmann, who had diligently examined the details of my arguments. His letter became a featured part of the publication in 1964 by Westminster Press of Radical Obedience: The Ethics of Rudolf Bultmann: With a Response by Rudolf Bultmann. That book, more than any other , launched my career as a serious theologian. But it also led to my reputation as a situation ethicist, ironically just about the time I was beginning to disavow situation ethics.

Shortly after, Paul took up the cry of liberty and declared all meats clean, every day holy, all places sacred and every act acceptable to God. The sacredness of times and places, a half-light necessary to the education of the race, passed away before the full sun of spiritual worship. The essential spirituality of worship remained the possession of the Church until it was slowly lost with the passing of the years. Then the natural legality of the fallen hearts of men began to introduce the old distinctions. The Church came to observe again days and seasons and times. Certain places were chosen and marked out as holy in a special sense. Differences were observed between one and another day or place or person, "The sacraments" were first two, then three, then four until with the triumph of Romanism they were fixed at seven. In all charity, and with no desire to reflect unkindly upon any Christian, however misled, I would point out that the Roman Catholic church represents today the sacred-secular heresy carried to its logical conclusion. Its deadliest effect is the complete cleavage it introduces between religion and life. Its teachers attempt to avoid this snare by many footnotes and multitudinous explanations, but the mind's instinct for logic is too strong. In practical living the cleavage is a fact. From this bondage reformers and puritans and mystics have labored to free us. Today the trend in conservative circles is back toward that bondage again. It is said that a horse after it has been led out of a burning building will sometimes by a strange obstinacy break loose from its rescuer and dash back into the building again to perish in the flame. By some such stubborn tendency toward error Fundamentalism in our day is moving back toward spiritual slavery. The observation of days and times is becoming more and more prominent among us. "Lent" and "holy week" and "good" Friday are words heard more and more frequently upon the lips of gospel Christians. We do not know when we are well off.

Because God has been reduced in the minds of people, they do not have that boundless confidence in His character that used to be prominent among Christians. Confidence is necessary to respect. You cannot respect a man in whom you have no confidence. Extend that respect upward to God and if you cannot respect God, you cannot worship Him. You cannot have confidence in Him, because where there is no respect there can be no worship.

Instead of worrying about hypothetical slippages awaiting egalitarian believers, like sliding into secular feminism, theological liberalism, or homosexuality, they would do better to deal with brutal violations of their “family values” that are actually happening today within their hierarchy-driven allegedly Christian homes.

But is not the sourcebook of all valid theology the canonical Scriptures? Yes, and in that, as the spaceman found, lies the continuity of the Christian faith. But, as he also found, the Scriptures are read with different eyes by people in different times and places; and in practice, each age and community makes its own selection of the Scriptures, giving prominence to those which seem to speak most clearly to the community's time and place and leaving aside others which do not appear to yield up their gold so readily. How many of us, while firm as a rock as to its canonicity, seriously look to the book of Leviticus for sustenance? Yet many an African Independent Church has found it abundantly relevant. (Interestingly, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the great nineteenth-century Yoruba missionary bishop, thought it should be among the first books of the Bible to be translated.)

Syriac ... was not a prominent element in the language of Palestine in pre-Christian times.

Historians ancient and modern alike are selective in the material they report. Data the reporting historian deems uninteresting, unimportant or irrelevant to his or her purpose in writing are usually omitted.'9 For example, Lucian complained when he heard a man tell of the Battle of Europus in less than seven lines but afforded much more time to the experiences of a Moorish horseman .2' Amazingly neither Philo nor Josephus, the most prominent non-Christian Jewish writers of the first century, mentioned Emperor Claudius's expulsion of all Jews from Rome in ca. A.D. 49-50. Only Suetonius and Luke mention the event, and each give it only one line in passing.2

Walker had traveled to London on a mission to promote Wisconsin for trade purposes, and an interviewer had asked him the tiresome and irrelevant question whether he believes in evolution. Walker refused to answer the question. “That’s a question politicians shouldn’t be involved in one way or another,” he said. “I am going to leave that up to you. I’m here to talk about trade, not to pontificate about evolution.” Asking a Scott Walker whether he believes in evolution when only 19 percent of the American populace believes it to be the only explanation for why we are here is a device for measuring his membership in the smart set. After all, Walker isn’t the only prominent American without a college degree. Take NBC News, for example. Its outgoing serial fabulist anchor Brian Williams never graduated from college, and neither did Williams’ replacement Lester Holt. But both Williams and Holt would dutifully parrot the “pro-science” viewpoint that yes, yes, evolution explains the origins of mankind. It’s only those knuckle-dragging white Christian rednecks from flyover territory who believe otherwise. And since Walker lacks an Ivy League pedigree or in fact even a degree at all, if he can be engaged to spout bible-beating hokum on foreign shores that surely would be the end of him.

When the Ku Klux Klan burns a cross in a black family's yard, prominent Christians aren't required to explain how it isn't really a Christian act. Most people realize that the KKK doesn't represent Christian teachings. That's what I and other Muslims long for--the day when these terrorists praising Muhammad or Allah's name as they debase their actual teachings are instantly recognized as thugs disguising themselves as Muslims. It's like bank robbers who wear masks of Presidents; we don't really think Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush hit the Bank of America during their downtime.

In contrast to much of northern Europe, where Jews faced persecution, Spain was a haven. From the eighth century onward, Jews there prospered under Muslim and, later, Christian rule. By the fifteen century, Spain had the largest Jewish population in the world. One out of every ten individuals in Spain was a Jew or of Jewish descent. Jews were prominent in trade, medicine, the arts, and even government. And yet in 1492, Spain expelled its entire Jewish population. The expulsion shows how precarious life was for outsiders, particularly Jews.

A part of the answer to these questions is that Christians have no more moral duty to read and study Greek and Roman literature than ancient Israelites had a duty to study the myths of Baal and Asteroth. Nor should Christian homeschoolers think that they can have a good Christian education only if the "classics" are prominent in the curriculum. The goal of Christian education is to train a child to be faithful in serving God and His kingdom in a calling, and certainly this goal can be achieved by a student who never cracks the cover of a Homeric epic. page 18

The notion of a sexualized Jesus may make modern worshippers cringe, but the most prominent early Church fathers did not shrink from the concept. They embraced it fully and made it the basis of many of their writings. For example, Origen, head of the catechetical school in Alexandria, wrote a commentary on Song of Songs. In the introduction to this work he discusses the Christian transformation of sexual desire from that of a man for a woman—or harlot—to that of a man for Jesus. Origen makes it clear that Jesus takes the place of the woman in an explicitly sexual context. The shift from “lust” to “love of Jesus” takes place at the age of sexual maturation, under the guidance of the Church: “For everyone who comes to what they call the age of puberty loves something, whether less than rightly when he loves what he should not [which Origen has previously said is a woman or harlot], or rightly and beneficially when he loves what he should [which is Jesus, as sexual love],” writes Origen in his Commentary on the Song of Songs.

David Pawson, a prominent Bible teacher and author from England, recalls the experience of one of his friends: A Christian friend of mine is a counselor in a state school. He was delighted when a boy he was trying to help find a purpose in life told him he had become convinced that there was a personal God in whom he could believe. To his surprise and disappointment this English boy told him some weeks later that he had become a Muslim. He was one of many thousands who had made the same choice.15 As Islam grows in the West, this story is sure to be repeated many times.

It is worth noting that the first statement of the salvation covenant speaks in terms of families rather than isolated individuals or nation-states. The heavenly Father, "from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named" (Eph. 3:15), desires that the family structure, so basic to human society and yet now so marked by the effects of sin, should be a primary sphere for the revelation of the redeeming action of his grace. This family emphasis, so prominent in the Scriptures, has not always been adequately recognized in evangelical understanding of the plan of salvation.

They want Christians to believe this is about justice and equality. But it’s not. Take, for example, the Gay Liberation Manifesto of 1971. It said, “Equality is never going to be enough. What is needed is a total social revolution, a complete reordering of civilization. Including society’s most basic institution, the patriarchal society.”22 Along the same lines, there is the key leader in the second wave of feminism in America, Kate Millett. She was a homosexual woman and author who held meetings in one of which the following call and response were heralded: “Why are we here today?” “To make revolution,” the group answered. “What kind of revolution?” “The Cultural Revolution,” “And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” “By destroying the American family!” “How do we destroy the family?” “By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly. “And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” the leader replied. “By taking away his power!” “How do we do that?” “By destroying monogamy!” they shouted. “How can we destroy monogamy?” “By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, and homosexuality!”23 The goal of the sexual revolution was a complete leveling of authority. The adherents of the sexual revolution didn’t really hate men. They hated hierarchy. They hated order and objectivity. They did not hate fathers; they hated the Father. The agenda of the sexual revolutionaries is often lost on Christians. For example, a very prominent Southern Baptist pastor recently said in a message on homosexuality that to be like Jesus, “churches must be known as the friends of the LGBT community.” It is just here that our present challenge comes into high relief. Christians should certainly be friendly to LGBT people. Jesus was a friend of sinners. My family and I have had homosexual neighbors with whom we enjoyed a friendly relationship. But my concern is the claim that “churches must be known as friends to the LGBT community.” In our times, there is a world of difference between being a friend and being recognized as a friend by those who don’t know Christ. If your goal is to be known as a friend, you may end up being no real friend at all.

There is something else going on here, explored by Ernest Clark in his groundbreaking dissertation.13 Clark, through an exhaustive survey of stoicheia in the Greek world, highlighted the medical literature (with writers like Galen prominent but by no means unique). It was a commonplace among ancient doctors that human beings were composed of the four stoicheia, earth, air, water, and fire. This was explored in different ways by different philosophies. But the point here is that illness was diagnosed in terms of an imbalance in the stoicheia, rather like the “humors” in medieval European medicine. When the diagnosis has been made, and it turns out that the patient’s stoicheia are out of balance, out of harmony, what is needed is some kind of medical regime, a course of treatment. Such a “regime” would be a nomos, a “law.” And this nomos would regularly function as a paidagōgos, to lead the patient back to health, like the child being taken to school by the household slave. This observation is a central feature of Clark’s thesis.