Christians are made to be different. Achtemeier follows that New Testament refrain into the abortion debate, arguing that the church's witness on the unborn is finally a sacramental one: people who live by the powers of the triune Lord cannot value human life on the world's terms.
The Bible doesn't supply a roadmap for Mideast policy, but it does offer a framework. Wisdom draws principles from the biblical story: God owns the land, the powerful tend to dominate the powerless, the people of God must act justly toward outsiders, and no political order can be trusted absolutely.
Church and CultureMiddle Eastern Christian minorities have a painful political history, and they've sometimes made the mess worse. Wisdom traces how Arab Christians moved between democratic statesmen like Charles Malik and the nationalist movements that ultimately failed to protect them, and what the record teaches about Christian political alliances.
Evangelical support for Israel is often dismissed as purely theological, a matter of obscure end-times prophecies. Wisdom argues there's plenty of evidence that doesn't require special revelation: a small minority people surviving repeated attempts at extermination is unique enough to read on the surface.
Anyone trying to understand the Middle East has to reckon with the fact that the events of the Bible took place there. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all claim spiritual descent from the same patch of ground. Wisdom unfolds what that overlapping inheritance has produced, and how Christians might think about it.
1 Corinthians 11 has supplied 'regimental colors' for centuries of arguments about women in worship. Bailey reads the passage in its larger literary context (1 Cor 11-14 as a single essay) and offers a careful answer to what Paul actually meant when he addressed women's prayer and prophecy.
Bailey brings thirty-five years of work on 1 Corinthians to bear on chapter 6's strenuous teaching about sexual practice. Paul wrote the letter for the Corinthians and for everyone everywhere on whom Christ's name is called, and the early church through Calvin agreed: he meant exactly what he said.
Two competing answers to what marriage is: a conjugal union ordered toward the bearing and rearing of children, or a romantic partnership defined by emotional commitment. George argues that the disagreement isn't really about same-sex marriage at all but about whether marriage has any inherent structure to defend.
The 220th General Assembly's overtures to redefine marriage are the next logical step after 2011's repeal of fidelity-and-chastity ordination standards. Wisdom walks through the proposed changes, the constitutional process they would require, and what the church teaches that all of them quietly assume isn't binding.
A Q&A summary from Stanton and Maier's book Marriage on Trial: The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting. The piece walks through why no society has allowed a 'suit yourself' approach to family, and what natural marriage between a man and woman accomplishes that nothing else does.
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