I don’t believe we modern Christians should always be comfortable with thinking of our God as an absolute monarch. It goes against important values I insist we should still cherish, even if those values have been given to us more by modern liberalism than by traditional religion, values such as equality, freedom, and democracy.

Part of the claim of the early Christians, in fact, was that in and through Jesus they had discovered both a totally different way of being human and a way which scooped up the best that ancient wisdom had to offer and placed it in a framework where it could, at last, make sense.

Within the church, the challenge of the skeptics put the church on the defensive. Was Jesus really divine? The eighteenth-century church was concerned to prove that he was. This resulted in a reading of the gospels looking for the wrong thing.

Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men;