The intellectual life is essentially and constitutively agonistic. It progresses almost entirely by struggle, by challenge and response, by thesis and antithesis, by getting it wrong and then moving, always asymptotically, toward getting it right. Hegel was wrong, so far as I can tell, about most . . . . Continue Reading »
Protestant evangelicalism, it seems, has a symbiotic relationship with American denominationalism. Evangelicals trace their deepest roots to the Protestant Reformation, which was, among other things, a church split. In America, experiential revivalism and disestablishment have combined to liquidate . . . . Continue Reading »
The Church of the future must take up the ecumenical . . . . Continue Reading »
The editorial in our May 1991 issue was titled “Christian Mission and the Third Millennium.” It described the complicated connections between the Christian missionary enterprise and the future of an essentially Western civilization that is, in however ambiguous a manner, a product of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Surveys provide additional evidence that Americans are returning to “traditional values.” Traditional values is usually a synonym for common sense or moral platitudes. Such sense is common and such morality is platitudinous because they are powerfully confirmed and reconfirmed by human . . . . Continue Reading »
From time to time, a set of concerns reaches something like a critical mass. Familiar discontents vaguely felt turn into more focused anxieties, and then, all of a sudden it seems, a passel of scholars arrives at a similar analysis of what has gone so thoroughly wrong—and some similar ideas of . . . . Continue Reading »
Authority is an issue that occupies a central place in current ecumenical discussion among the churches and it is one of enormous social and political importance as well. Accordingly, while the arguments that follow are directed most particularly to the question of authority in the churches, they . . . . Continue Reading »
Demons surface. For most people, demons surface in nightmares, but for us, for Jews, demons seem to surface in history. Pharaoh, Amalek, Nebuchadnezzar, Titus, Torquemada, Chmielnitsky, and Hitler were real demons. They killed real Jews. The night demons can be forgotten, but not the demons that . . . . Continue Reading »
From a Christian point of view, the twentieth century might well be called the century of ecumenism. Several dates serve to mark the crucial stages of development. Among them are 1910, when the World Missionary Conference met at Edinburgh; 1925, the date of the Universal Christian Conference on . . . . Continue Reading »
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