That Was The Week That Was

Posted on by Chris Gehrz

Here…

• As always, the acknowledgments section of a book is both the best and hardest section to write.

• A new book contends that a 1928 diplomatic pact outlawing war was actually effective. Count me dubious.

• And I offered two postscripts to my post on the Nashville Statement.

…There and Everywhere

• Over at The Anxious Bench, I considered what a new survey tells us about Protestants and Catholics in America and Europe, and how they view each other five hundred years after the 95 Theses.

Cohick & Hughes, Christian Women in the Patristic World• Last month at AB I shared seven inspiring women from the narrative of Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture. To dive deeper, read an excerpt from Lynn Cohick and Amy Brown Hughes’ book on women in the Early Church and Beth Allison Barr’s survey of women preachers in the Middle Ages.

• I’ll give final word (for now) on the Nashville Statement to Geoff Holsclaw: “…when you have a instrumental view of human beings (coupled with an overly cognitive view of faith as affirmation) then shooting out a document like the Nashville Statement seems perfectly reasonable.”

• But also consider what John Stackhouse observed about all such statements: “Orthodoxy thus is always exactly what most people, including most framers of such statements, think it isn’t: provisional. Contingent. A product of a particular set of circumstances and actors, orthodoxy is inescapably historical, and thus human.”

• “So why,” asked Ted Olsen, in light of Scriptures like 2 Timothy 2-3, “do we treat arguments and quarrels over secondary issues as the price we pay for nobly ‘contending for the truth’?”

• And why, asked Mara Joy Norden, do we confuse uniformity for unity?

• “We seem to very much need a Reinhold Niebuhr,” wrote Bryan McGraw, “and yet would disdain (or at least ignore) his kind if he were to appear. He would be both critical for and useless to us.”

• How Christians responded to football emerging as America’s “national religion” — a century ago.

• Once more, with feeling: Is “evangelical” so “inextricably politicized” and “essentially divisive” that evangelicals shouldn’t use it? (Is “Kingdom of God“?)

• In any event, about a quarter of Americans are evangelical — and a third of them are persons of color.

• There’s almost no chance you haven’t already seen Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest essay, but needless to say, it’s essential reading.