Top Highlights

• The risen Christ said to his disciples, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto me.” With his wry British wit, N.T. Wright reminds us that Jesus did not say, “All authority in heaven and on earth is given unto a book you chaps are going to write.” The irony of Biblicism is that for all its claims about giving final authority to th...
• remain their own private authority. So if you don’t like Jesus’ explicit call to an ethic of nonviolence, you can always appeal to the wars of Joshua and David to countermand the Sermon on the Mount. This is how you use Joshua to trump Jesus. Perhaps the most clever way to ignore the commands of Christ is to cite an opposing chapter and verse.
• Christianity is not a slave to the Bible—Christianity is a slave to Christ!
• To say that Christian faith is forever rooted in Scripture, yet distinct from Scripture, is both conservative and progressive. Conservative in that it recognizes the inviolability of Scripture. Progressive in that it makes a vital distinction between the living faith and the historic text. But to claim that Christian faith is one and the same with ...
• “IT IS CHRIST HIMSELF, NOT THE BIBLE, WHO IS THE TRUE WORD OF GOD. THE BIBLE, READ IN THE RIGHT SPIRIT, AND WITH THE GUIDANCE OF GOOD TEACHERS, WILL BRING US TO HIM. WE MUST NOT USE THE BIBLE AS A SORT OF ENCYCLOPEDIA OUT OF WHICH TEXTS CAN BE TAKEN FOR USE AS WEAPONS.” —C.S. LEWIS