ken wilson online

Evangelical, what’s in a name?  It’s funny how you get these names.  I don’t recall signing up to be an evangelical.  It just happened.  Well, not quite.  I was a Jesus freak.  But  you can’t escape history, especially not with a religion whose founder was God coming into history and wearing it like a tool apron.  Who would want to take off what he put on? So you find yourself or that community of people that you’re part of, I don’t know, slowing down just long enough to let history catch up with you.
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Something is happening.  After centuries wrestling with the “doctrine of biblical inspiration” believers have worked themselves into an exhausted lethargy about this book.  We’ve been so busy either debunking or defending it, that we’ve forgotten to simply enter it on it’s own terms to know what punch it packs.  But what I see happening is a growing body of people who have no dog in that old fight.  They don’t approach the Bible with any pre-conceived notions about its inspiration or lack thereof. They could care less about words like inerrancy or form criticism.  They may be completely uninformed about the Jesus seminar and reactions to it. They are outside the camp of insitutional religion, but not outside the reach of Jesus.  They are simply readers without rubrics, responding to the text as it is given to them and they are as disparate a group as Reynolds Price, the novelist, Leon Kass, the bio-ethicist at University of Chicago and Layzie Bone, the rapper.
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