Check out this very helpful interview with Ryan K. Bolger, one of, if not the most impressive among the various observers of the Emerging church phenomenon. This interview has prompted me to begin work on another article on the emerging church. Here are some of the issues and questions the interview stirred up in my thinking:
1. It […]

Go to Free Theological Resources on this site or just click here to access my article forthcoming in Midwestern Journal of Theology.

I want to work through the implications of my last post in a different way. This is my thinking given my reading of Gibbs/Bolger:
1. Gibbs/Bolger are concerned about the decline in numbers in the church in the West.
2. They believe the shift from the modern world to the postmodern world is the main factor determining the viability of […]

The folowing is an excerpt from my upcoming article on the Emerging Chruch and Southern Baptists: 
 I “had thought” my exposure to Mars Hill marked my introduction to the emerging church only to realize later that Donald Miller’s bestselling book Blue Like Jazz had already brought me into that world. But not so fast. The taxonomy troubles […]

The following excerpt from Christianity and Culture of 1940 is one example among many of Lewis’ fascinating and nuanced takes on the relationship between culture and Christianity (in this case culture understood as study and enjoyment of the arts):
“There is another way in which [culture] may predispose to conversion. The difficulty of converting an uneducated […]

C.S. Lewis was not known for aggressive proselytizing during his tutorial sessions at Oxford and Cambridge. J.I. Packer once had the privilege of attending a Lewis lecture. “There was no clue that the man might be a Christian” Packer reports. There is nothing new here. It has long been known that Lewis, as Packer puts […]

It is well known that C.S. Lewis grieved over the spectacle of public squabbles between professing Christians and took great pains to avoid being drawn into such internecine strife himself. From his conversion forward Lewis exhibited consistent protectiveness of Christian unity. Not at the expense of Christian orthodoxy, but precisely for its defense. Note this […]

How did it happen that C.S. Lewis moved to the right rather than to the left as time passed? The more serious and focused an academic he became, the more seasoned a scholar he proved to be, the less impressed he was with liberalism or perhaps we might say, with the so-called “modern” approaches to […]

A project I contributed to has resulted in a DVD and study guide based on the 1985 book by Robert Ericsksen, Theologians Under Hitler. Ericksen reviews the capitulation of three prominent theologians to the designs of Adolf Hitler. The three infamous scholars are Paul Althaus, Emanuel Hirsch, and THE Gerhard Kittel of the 10-volume Theological Dictionary […]

“Mystery.” I encounter this word periodically in my research of the emerging church movement and the emergent conversation. D.A. Carson is correct that a protest posture shapes many of the leaders and shapers of this broad and diverse phenomenon (I think this protest aspect accounts for much of what is most unattractive in the movement […]