LITMIR.BIZ

Christians of all backgrounds agree that the Bible is the unique sourcebook for our understanding and knowledge of God. Yet reading the Bible is often as neglected in believers' homes as amongst the skeptics. Moreover, there is much evidence that the Bible is as often misread in the modern church as we suppose it to have been widely misunderstood in the darkest days of Medieval superstition. It would be an enormous help to sit with a deeply learned scholar–one devoted to the historic Christian faith, who yet taught with the common touch–to help us mature in our reading of Scripture. Such tutorials might rekindle our desire to read the Bible more skillfully with the humble discipline of daily practice. C. S. Lewis has inspired a generation of readers, both skilled and beginner, to deepen their understanding and enjoyment of Scripture. Perhaps Lewis's unique contribution to reading Scripture is his disciplined use of the imagination as the forgotten cognitive tool of our day. This kind of reading attends to the text's emotional tone alongside the conceptual content in order to engender not just more knowledge about Scripture nor mere entertainment for dulled sensibilities, but to enable a knowledge of God: a reading for discipleship. This is the kind of reading I hope to support in these chapters.

Подробнее

A study tour to Leipzig in the former East Germany (GDR) raised new questions for Roger Newell about the long struggle of the Protestant church with the German state in the twentieth century. How was it possible that a church, unable to stop the Nazis, helped bring a totalitarian government to its knees fifty years later? How did an institution marginalized in every way possible by the state education system, stripped of its traditional privileges, ridiculed by the government and the media as a dinosaur, become the catalyst for a transformation that enabled a great but troubled nation to be peacefully reunited–something unprecedented in German history? What were the connecting relationships and theological struggles that joined the church's failed resistance to Hitler with the peaceful revolution of 1989?
The chapters that follow tell the backstory of the theological debates and personal acts of faith and courage leading to the moment when the church became the cradle for Germany's only nonviolent revolution. The themes that emerge remain relevant for our own era of seemingly endless conflict.

Подробнее