Category: Series: Making the Best of It
-
Best of It: The Story and the Mission (Part 2)
[Series Index] We continue our discussion from Chapter 6 in John Stackhouse's Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World. One of Stackhouse's big concerns (which I share) is the privileging of one portion of the Bible over another. All of Scripture must be held in the context of the rest of…
-
Best of It: The Story and the Mission (Part 1)
[Series Index] Today we begin Chapter 6, “The Story and the Mission,” in John Stackhouse’s book Making the Best of It. “The Bible is fundamentally a story,” Stackhouse writes. (181) It flows from creation to Fall, to redemption, to consummation. Through various genres and authors, we learn what has happened and what will happen. The…
-
Best of It: Methods in Ethics
[Series Index] We have been reviewing John Stackhouse’s book Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World. We now enter part three of the book “Making the Best of It” (Chapters 5-8), where Stackhouse builds his case for Christian realism. Today we will look at chapter five, “Method in Ethics: A Sketch.”…
-
Best of It: Introducing Part III – “Making the Best of It”
[Series Index] With the previous post, we completed our review of the first two parts of John Stackhouse's Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World. Part I (Chapter 1) reviewed Richard Niebuhr's five-part typology from Christ and Culture. Part II (Chapters 2-4) offered resources for thinking about Christian realism by reviewing…
-
Best of It: Dietrich Bonhoeffer – The Christian and the Church in and for the World (Part 3)
[Series Index] Today we conclude our review of the chapter on Dietrich Bonhoeffer in John Stackhouse's Making the Best of It.Religionless Christianity. Here Bonhoeffer is thinking of religion in the sense of trying to find timeless, universal truths in Christianity just as we might in other religions – it is an exercise in getting answers…
-
Best of It: Dietrich Bonhoeffer – The Christian and the Church in and for the World (Part 2)
[Series Index] Today we continue our discussion of the chapter on Dietrich Bonhoeffer in John Stackhouse's Making the Best of It. One Reality. Bonhoeffer rejected the Lutheran notion of two kingdoms in any strong sense. There is one reality, and Christ rules over all. There is the spiritual office and the kingdom of worldly authority,…
-
Best of It: Dietrich Bonhoeffer – The Christian and the Church in and for the World (Part 1)
[Series Index] We've been discussing Making the Best of It by John Stackhouse. So far, we've revisited Richard Neibuhr's Christ and Culture typology, and we've reviewed two of the three theologians Stackhouse believes we can draw on as resources for thinking about Christian realism (i.e., C. S. Lewis and Reinhold Niebuhr.) Today we turn to…
-
Best of It: Reinhold Niebuhr – Prophet of Christian Realism (Part 2)
[Series Index] So what can we learn from Niebuhr’s Christian Realism? John Stackhouse begins his reflection on Niebuhr’s theologian in Making the Best of It with the following observations: Niebuhr is well known for admonishing us for the sin of pride, whether in thinking we can replace the current order with one that will work…
-
Best of It: C. S. Lewis – The Christian Individual
[Series Index] [Today we move into Part 2 of Making the Best of It by John Stackhouse. We will look at three twentieth-century theologians Stackhouse considers resources for recovering Christian realism: C. S. Lewis, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He devotes about forty pages to each of these men. I aim to extract some salient…