Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture

A person who wields power cannot see truth; that is the privilege of the powerless.

The attempt to interpret human behavior in terms of models derived from the natural sciences eventually destroys personal responsibility.

This withdrawal of theology from the world of secular affairs is made more complete by the work of biblical scholars whose endlessly fascinating exercises have made it appear to the lay Christian that no one untrained in their methods can really understand anything the Bible says. We are in a situation analogous to one about which the great Reformers complained. The Bible has been taken out of the hands of the layperson; it has now become the professional property not of the priesthood but of the scholars.

The resurrection is the revelation to chosen witnesses of the fact that Jesus who died on the cross is indeed king - conqueror of death and sin, Lord and Savior of all. The resurrection is not the reversal of a defeat but the proclamation of a victory. The King reigns from the tree. The reign of God has indeed come upon us, and its sign is not a golden throne but a wooden cross.

Part of the terrible irony of war is that it enlists the best in human nature for purposes of mutual destruction.

bureaucracy is the rule of nobody and is therefore experienced as tyranny.

Since total skepticism about ultimate beliefs is strictly impossible, in that no belief can be doubted except on the basis of some other belief, indifference is always in danger of giving place to some sort of fanaticism that can be as intolerant as any religion has ever been.

A conscience that is forbidden to operate in the choice of goals for economic activity is not conscience in the sense in which any moralist, pagan or Christian, has every understood the term. And the family (which [Michael] Novak regards as vital to the spirit of democratic capitalism) is precisely the place where the noncapitalist values have to be learned, where one is not free to choose his company and where one is not free to pursue self-interest to the limit. Because capitalism pursues the opposite goals - freedom of each individual to choose and pursue his own ends to the limit of his power - the disintegration of marriage and family life is one of the obvious characteristics of advanced capitalist societies.

In the attempt to be "relevant" one may fall into syncretism, and in the effort to avoid syncretism one may become irrelevant.

The value of the word contextualization is that it suggests the placing of the gospel in the total context of a culture at a particular moment, a moment that is shaped by the past and looks to the future.