All Christians, all churches, are free to improvise their own variations designed to take the music forward. No Christian, no church, is free to play out of tune. To change the metaphor back to the theater: all the actors, and all the traveling companies of which they are part (i.e., different churches) are free to improvise their own fresh scenes.

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It has everything to do with understanding human renewal as the beginning, the pointer toward, and even the means of, God’s eventual eradication of evil from the world and the bringing to birth of the new creation itself. Thus, so the early Christians believed, God’s word was at work by the Spirit within the community, to put Jesus’s achievement in

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The Enlightenment thus offered to the world a new analysis of, and solution to, the problem of evil, standing in radical tension to those offered in classical Judaism and Christianity. The real problem of evil, it proposed, is that people are not thinking and acting rationally, and Enlightenment rationalism is going to teach them how and create the

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One way of understanding this has been proposed, on the basis of detailed study of comparative material in the ancient Near East, by John Walton in his remarkable book The Lost World of Genesis One. Walton insists that in that ancient world anyone reading about something being built by a god in six days or stages would know that it was basically a

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without giving our honored predecessors the final say or making them an “alternative source,” independent of scripture itself. When they speak with one voice, we should listen very carefully. They may be wrong. They sometimes are. But we ignore them at our peril. The study of church history is not, ultimately, a different “subject” from the careful

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To the second point: the creator God is in the business of remaking the original creation, not abandoning it. This principle, so deeply woven into the New Testament, has often been obscured by the legacies of different types of dualism, which have had this in common, that they have seen salvation in terms of humans (perhaps “souls”) being rescued f

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Taken as a whole, the church clearly can’t live without the Bible, but it doesn’t seem to have much idea of how to live with it. Almost all Christian churches say something in their formularies about how important the Bible is. Almost all of them have devised ways, some subtle, some less so, of ostentatiously highlighting some parts of the Bible an

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the Christian claim that in Jesus of Nazareth the creator of the world—the whole world, not a Christian subset of the world!—is being rescued and renewed. Of course, non-Christians will say they don’t believe this. But Christians do, or at least should—and are therefore committed to believing that the new creation launched in Jesus is good news for

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This is the nemesis, at another stage of the argument, of the idea that the main point of the New Testament at least is to chronicle “early Christian experience,” as though such “experience” is the main thing that matters and anything which will enable people to approximate to it, to recover the initial enthusiasm of Jesus’s first followers, is to

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