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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.)

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.

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.

...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.

...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.

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.

The Jewish Stake in America’s Changing Demography Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy By Stephen Steinlight The white “Christian” supremacists who have historically opposed either all immigration or all non- European immigration (Europeans being defined as Nordic or Anglo-Saxon), a position re-asserted by Peter Brimelow, must not be permitted to play a prominent role in the debate over the way America responds to unprecedented demographic change.

Not all evangelicals jumped on the anti-Muslim bandwagon. In 2007, nearly 300 Christian leaders signed the “Yale Letter,” a call for Christians and Muslims to work together for peace. Published in the New York Times, the letter was signed by several prominent evangelical leaders, including megachurch pastors Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, Christianity Today editor David Neff, emerging church leader Brian McLaren, Jim Wallis of Sojourners, and Rich Mouw, president of evangelical Fuller Seminary. Notably, Leith Anderson, president of the NAE, and Richard Cizik, the NAE’s chief lobbyist, also signed the letter. 15 Other evangelical leaders, however, voiced strenuous opposition. Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, found no need to apologize for the War on Terror or to confess any sins “against our Muslim neighbors.” It was all quite confounding to him: “For whom are we apologizing and for what are we apologizing?” Dobson’s Citizen magazine criticized the Yale Letter for claiming that the two faiths shared a deity, and for showing weakness and endangering Christians. Apologizing for past violence against Muslims would make Christians in Muslim countries more vulnerable to violence, he reasoned. Focus on the Family urged like-minded critics to register their displeasure with the NAE and included the NAE’s PO box for their convenience. Dobson and other conservative evangelicals pressured the NAE to oust Cizik that year, both for his attempts at Muslim-Christian dialogue and for his activism on global warming. This was easily accomplished the next year, when Cizik came out in support of same-sex civil unions. 16

For medieval thinkers, this was an eye-opening revelation. Side by side with divine truth, Averroës was saying, lay another truth, that of the natural world. This insight earned Averroës an admiration equaled by no other living non-Christian. It is why Dante praises him in his Divine Comedy and why Raphael gives him a prominent place in his School of Athens.

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.

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.

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.

hymns about Jesus; (2) prayer "through" and "in the name" of Jesus, and even to Jesus; (3) "calling upon the name" of Jesus, apparently a ritual invocation of him; (4) the use of Jesus' name in baptism; (5) the corporate "confessing" of Jesus, typically as "Lord"; (6) the common meal as "the Lord's supper"; and (7) prophecy uttered as inspired by Jesus. This constellation of devotional actions is prime evidence of what I have termed a "binitarian devotional pattern" characteristic of earliest Christianity, in which Jesus features prominently and uniquely along with God as the cause, content, and even co-recipient of devotion, including corporate worship.

this far greater frequency and prominence of references to the Spirit in the NT likely reflects the religious life and discourse of early Christian circles generally.

Earliest Christians believed that they were experiencing the fulfillment of biblical prophecies of an eschatological outpouring of "God's" Spirit (e.g., Acts 2:14-33). So it is little wonder that in their religious discourse reference to the Spirit of "God" features prominently.

was a formative presence in global diplomacy.86 Cousin Alice pronounced calling and card-leaving “a Washington mania that no sane human beings should let themselves in for.”87 It was also work: it took patience and stamina and kindness; Alice did not want the authority of donkey work, nor did she have the impulse to be kind. Her object was to be feared—to be the alpha female whose invitations to her own select circle were coveted.88 Eleanor’s authority rested on being in earnest and in her instinct for knowing just when someone needed a bunch of violets or a small present for a voyage to France. She never shirked from the toil of the card case; she never claimed “delicacy,”89 or “a brief illness,” code among official ladies for marital strain, excessive menstruation, or depression.90 She made one exception to her all-in cooperation as a naval wife. To staff the gloomy house on N Street, she had brought from New York four servants, all white, who joined Auntie Bye’s two oldest retainers, both African-American. But Franklin’s boss, devoutly Christian, had also been North Carolina’s all too effective collaborator in resisting Reconstruction’s political empowerment of formerly enslaved African Americans.91 In 1898, as editor of the state’s most prominent newspaper, Daniels served as the propaganda wing of a conspiracy to overthrow the elected multiracial government

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.

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.

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.

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

Try to fancy poor Jesus, for example, coming to life again (actually, not doctrinally), and learning that he was the founder, the teacher, the exemplar, the very God of Christendom; fancy him searching for some trait of his own life and ruling principles in the lives and ruling principles of the millions who call themselves Christians; fancy him in spiritual communion with the Pope, the cardinals, the bishops (though their lackeys would never admit him to the presence of any of these), the most prominent ministers of the various Christian sects. He would find himself an outcast in his nominal kingdom, denounced and reviled as a madman, an idiot, an impostor; the moral and intellectual life of Christendom would be as alien and bewildering to him as its steamboats and railways and telegraphs. Paul and the other early apostles, the ancient heathenisms of Greece and Rome, of the East and the West, old philosophies and older superstitions, national characteristics, physical and other circumstances, the growth of science, the ever-varying conditions of life and modes of thought; everything, in brief, affecting the character of the converts, has affected the religion. By the time a doctrine gets embodied in a Church or other institution, its original spirit has nearly vanished. Its progress may be well compared to the course of a great river, rivers being remarkably convenient things for all such analogies. Some remotest mountain–rill or rocky well–spring has the honour of being termed its source; and the name of this tiny trickling is borne triumphant down a thousand broadening leagues to the sea. The rill is soon joined by others, each very like itself. As it flows onward, ever descending (for this is the universal law), it is joined by streamlets and rivers more and more unlike itself, they having flowed through unlike soils and regions; and more than one may be greater than itself, as the Missouri is greater than the Mississippi; and its own original waters are more and more modified by the new and various districts they traverse. As it proceeds, growing deeper and wider, villages and towns arise on its banks, and it receives copious tribute not merely of natural streams, but likewise of sewage and the pestilent refuse abominations of manifold factories and wharves. When it is become a mighty river, crowded with ships and bordered by some wealthy and populous capital, it may be a mere open cloaca maxima; and at any rate it must be as dissimilar in the quality of its waters as in their quantity and surroundings from the pure rill of the mountain solitudes, from the pure brook of the woodland shadows and pastoral peace. The waters actually from the fountain-head are but an insignificant drop in the vast and composite volumes of the thick bronze or yellow flood which finally disembogues through fat flat lowlands, in several devious channels with broad stretches of marsh and lagoon, into the immense purifying laboratory of the untainted salt sea. The remote rill-source is Christ or Mohammed, the mighty river is the Christian or Mohammedan Church; the sea in all cases is the encompassing ocean of death and oblivion, which makes life possible by preserving the earth from putrefaction.

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.

The spectacular torchlight processions and pagan festivals that formed such a prominent feature of the Third Reich were naturally much remarked on by foreigners. Some were repelled but others thought them a splendid expression of Germany’s new-found confidence. To many it seemed that National Socialism had displaced Christianity as the national religion. Aryan supremacy underpinned by Blut und Boden [blood and soil] was now the people’s gospel, the Führer their saviour.

There are a few things I love about the first week of February. There is Candlemas, or Saint Brigid’s Day, on the 2nd. Candlemas is the first cross-quarter day of the new year, midway between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. I love Candlemas because before it was a Christian observance, it was a Pagan Holyday, the day to celebrate Brigid, the prominent female deity from the Tuatha De Danaan, the pre-Christian Gods of the Celts of Ireland. So pervasive was her worship, that the Christians couldn’t stop the Irish from honoring her, so they adopted her into their own mythology as St. Brigid. February 2nd is close to the end of winter, and Brigid, among other qualities, is the Goddess of the hearth. Celebrants light fires and candles to ward off the dregs of winter and await the coming spring. I have celebrated Candlemas over the years by organizing a candle dance event, where people would gather to learn a few simple folk dances done with candles in our hands. It is at once solemn, graceful, and joyful, as we hold onto the light and step towards spring. Another thing I love about the first week of February is the Superbowl. Yes, that’s right. People are complex, you see. We are creatures of both spirit and banality. We celebrate with ancient dance, and also gladiatorial contest.

The pagan philosopher Celsus, a prominent second-century opponent of Christianity, raised a number of objections to the resurrection. For example, he claims that discrepancies are present in the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ resurrection which render them historically unreliable and suggests that the supposed eyewitnesses had hallucinations of Jesus (Origen, Contra Celsum 2.60).

From the mid-1970s, Christian organizations would begin to play a more prominent role in international politics, supporting causes associated with America’s resurgent nationalist right. Some worked with the American Security Council to oppose disarmament treaties and defend Ian Smith’s white government in Rhodesia.

The emphasis by Christianity on responsibility for our behavior has had the consequence that the difference between man and animal are perceived too prominent.

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.

Billy Graham (William Franklin Graham Jr.) was an American evangelist and an ordained southern Baptist minister who became well-known internationally in the late 1940s. He was a prominent evangelical Christian figure, and according to a biographer, was ‘among the most influential Christian leaders’ of the 20th century. “When God forgives us and purifies us of our sin, He also forgets it. Forgiveness results in God dropping the charges against us.

explains the problem with many today. They think they can enjoy the promises of God while still living in the evil land. Such is simply not the case. One thing we need to comprehend is that God saves us out of to bring us into. God saved Israel out of Egypt in order to bring them into the promised land. From my point of view, many gospel Christians today accept the importance of getting people saved out of Egypt. That is the real focus for them. And it is true—God saves us from our past sins, from our worst habits, and above all else, He is to save us from hell. Coming to Christ means that. And people think, Now I don’t have to worry about those things. I’m not going to hell when I die. I will go zooming off into heaven. Now I can just enjoy life because I know where I’m going when I die. However, almost nothing is said about what we are saved unto. Yes, we know what we are saved from, and we can glory in that, but that needs to be a temporary glory. We need to know what we have been saved unto. I want you to know that this is not automatic. Once we are out of Egypt, we do not pitch a tent and say, “Well, I have arrived.” No, the truth is effective only when we emphasize that we have been saved not only from something, but we have been saved unto something. Then the description of what we have been saved unto is important for us to be motivated to go in that direction. Christians will not seek to enter a land of which they have not heard. How can I go somewhere I’ve never heard about? What is it? How do I get there? The evidence is quite prominent. We have a decaying Christianity, rotten from head to foot, as Bible scholar William Reed Newell wrote in his commentary on Romans. I could not agree more. So what is this land of promise? What is it that God has set before us? How can we enter in with all of His blessings and receive all of His promises? The things in the land of promise are those chosen for us by God out of the goodness of His heart. This land of promise has been secured by God’s oath and covenant. All the infinite resources of God are behind the covenant. What God has promised He can deliver because He is God.

It is hoped that the discussion of money and salvation in this book will encourage the leaders of parishes and Christian organizations to imitate the soul-centric approach of Jesus and Paul in all financial discussions. It is also hoped that they will restore the spiritual pillar of almsgiving, including tithing, to its traditional place of prominence alongside prayer and fasting in Orthodox life. This would greatly assist all the faithful in their journey to experience more deeply the love God has for us, both in this life and in eternity. Far more importantly, it would help satisfy God’s astonishingly great longing for our salvation.

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.

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.

Whether pro or con, slavery was always the primary issue. Had the South not threatened secession since before there was a Union, since the earliest of the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention, over this very issue? Had it not recurred in nearly every major national debate since then? Had not the arguments over its expansion and practices, the rights of owners, the return of fugitives, etc., spanned and punctuated every decade since, often multiple times? Had not the most prominent of southern leaders like Calhoun sounded the highest alert and direst threats repeatedly since the rise of abolition? For his part, Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens made it unmistakably clear what role slavery played for the newly-seceded South:

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Babylonian Jews in the Sasanian Empire, living in a non-Christian and even progressively anti-Christian environment, could easily take up, and continue, the discourse of their brethren in Asia Minor; and it seems as if they were no less timid in their response to the New Testament’s message and in particular to the anti-Jewish bias that is so prominent in the Gospel of John.