The confession the church makes to the world sits oddly in the contemporary cultural complex. Intellectual fashions in the marketplace of ideas have moved beyond an accommodation of biblical-theological categories. Philosophy is unsure of its status in an amorphous postmodernism, and theology threatens to degenerate into intellectual experimentation. They have become mutually suspicious and hesitant of conversation. But a heavy fault lies with the church's own confessional status. For what is it the church has to say to the world? Has it preserved confessional continuity with the Reformation...

Description: Competing worldviews cast their impact on the church and the Christian confession. What does it mean to be a Christian in an age that threatens cultural dissolution? Related questions press on a calm consideration of the meaning of the Christian life. Who is Jesus Christ of whose salvific work the Christian confession depends? Why did Jesus Christ come into the world? What is to be said of the human condition following the Adamic fall, which, as John Milton says, "brought death into the world and all our woe"? What is the Christian's highest good, the grounds on which it has...

The contemporary church exhibits an elasticity and diversity of doctrine that at times sits oddly with biblical foundations. The presuppositions that God is and that God has spoken too often give place to the assumed priority of the explanatory competence of human reason. In that, the theology of the church is captive to the thought forms of an Enlightenment rationalism on one hand, or the looseness of postmodernist assumptions of individual autonomy on the other. In those respects, theological argument proceeds from man to God, and not--as in its biblically revealed contours--from God to...