The Christian Century

"Avoid abstraction," I was told as I prepared to speak to a group of junior high school students. "Seventh graders are still mostly concrete thinkers." The story of David seemed absolutely nonabstract and concrete, so I decided to use it as the basis of my talks.

Today, as the center of gravity of the Christian world moves ever southward, the conservative traditions prevailing in the global South matter more and more. To adapt a phrase from missions scholar Lamin Sanneh: Whose reading—whose Christianity—is normal now?

Christians of good heart and good faith sincerely disagree about whether or how biblical passages regarding homosexual behavior relate to the current debates. Exegesis is not solving the problem.
What to do? One way is to seek help from a parallel situation in the Bible, like the one Israel faced following the exile. The question was how to reconstitute the nation. With its institutions shattered, how would Israel move forward?

Most Americans have a literal understanding of biblical stories such as Moses parting the Red Sea, says an ABC News poll that also showed the vast majority do not blame Jews for the death of Jesus.

It seems to me a wonderful irony that Christians in America are preoccupied with debates about biblical authority just when all parties to the debates are less knowledgeable about the content of scripture than many of our predecessors were.