From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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American Religion: Mainline’s revenge

Near the end of his recent Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Christian Smith summarizes the argument of a 1995 article by N. Jay Demerath of the University of Massachusetts.  Demerath writes, that the widely reported decline of liberal Protestantism may in fact signal its “wider cultural triumph. . . . Liberal Protestant have lost structurally at the micro level precisely because they won culturally at the macro level.”  Smith adds, “liberal Protestantism’s core values – individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of human experience – have come to so permeate broader American culture that its own churches as organizations have difficulty surviving.”  Try, Smith implies, running an organization centered on the values of “emancipation” and “the authority of experience.”

Smith’s own surveys of 18-24-year-old “emerging adults” supports Demerath’s claims.  His team found that “individual autonomy, unbounded tolerance, freedom from authorities, the affirmation of pluralism, the centrality of human self-consciousness, the practical value of moral religion, epistemological skepticism, and an instinctive aversion to anything ‘dogmatic’ or committed to particulars were routinely taken for granted by respondents.”  They found that “most Catholic and Jewish emerging adults . . . talked very much like classical liberal Protestants” and “evangelical Protestant and black Protestant emerging adults even talked like liberal Protestants.”

Richard Niebuhr’s 1937 description of liberalism is alive and well: “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”