Reprinted from a 1950 volume, this essay insists the Bible's whole message reduces to one staggering claim: God has spoken. The author argues that making this book truly known to people of our time is not merely a religious task but the supreme cultural one.
At the close of his seventh decade, Burgess takes stock alongside the Bonhoeffer of the prison letters, asking the same question Bonhoeffer asked: who am I? The address is a meditation on identity, ministry, and what we hope to leave the generation that follows.
A century ago Harry Emerson Fosdick stood in a New York Presbyterian pulpit and preached against ordination standards he considered illiberal. Burnett returns to that famous sermon for its centennial, asking what it set in motion, what it cost, and what it still tells us about American Christianity.
A hundred years on, Machen's Christianity and Liberalism still outsells most seminary faculties combined. Burnett examines what Machen actually meant by 'liberalism,' how that target has shifted since 1923, and why the book still feels uncomfortably current to readers on both sides of the line he drew.
Pastors run spiritual formation programs without often pausing to ask what 'spirit' actually means. Vanhoozer treats that question as a load-bearing one for ministry: what we think the human spirit is shapes everything we do to form it. He follows the biblical words to a working answer.
Today's classrooms aim to feel safe. Neder argues theology classrooms must do more than that. Christian theology is an encounter with the living God, and a class that never disturbs anyone is teaching about a different subject than the one its name says.
Bruce Metzger's previously unpublished 1984 Princeton address on the theological stakes of inclusive language in Bible translation, published here for the first time. Translation always trades against itself, Metzger argues, and the trades around gender language are no exception.
Edwards encountered Ernst Lohmeyer's name as a footnote in his doctoral research and was haunted by the cryptic note that a 'higher power' had carried him off to a 'still-unresolved fate.' The piece traces Lohmeyer's witness under three regimes and what his disappearance can teach us.
The secular world has 'come of age' and finds the church unnecessary. Johnson argues that authentic Christian community begins not with our programs but with Christ himself, and walks Bonhoeffer's insight from Nazi-era Germany into the present-day American congregation.
Working interviews Jennifer McNutt about her book Calvin Meets Voltaire, which traces the Geneva clergy who held the Reformed line through the Enlightenment. The Geneva pastors offer a longer view for any congregational leader feeling outnumbered by the cultural moment.
In 1943 Princeton Theological Seminary required apologetics. The next year, it dropped from the curriculum entirely. Dembski traces how rational defense of the Christian faith, once taken for granted as a Christian duty, became theologically suspect, and what the seminary's loss has cost the church.
Ronald Dworkin's Religion Without God argues that morality doesn't need God, an argument as old as Plato's Euthyphro. Smith reads Dworkin against the way religious believers actually think God relates to moral obligation, and finds the recurring secular case rests on a misunderstanding believers can clarify.