Books and Culture is a wonderful product done by the CT people. Today I finally got a chance to read Dale Van Kley’s review of Brad Gregory’s “Unintended Reformation”. http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2012/marapr/rotstarted.html?paging=off . My apology for the pay-wall. I like books and culture and find it worth subscribing to. Amazon should give it to me free thought because it usually prompts me to buy more books.

Chuck De Groat from City Church SF is doing a nice Lenten series. Today’s was another good one. http://www.drchuckdegroat.com/2012/03/the-gospel-way-lent-13/ The cross is what you get in the age of decay but the cross leads to life. This runs counter to our energetic, optimistic assumptions about how motivation works and what we imagine our job is.

Here are some good quotes from the piece:

Science itself, however, has been unable to occupy this religiously denuded public space because, though dominant in public and even private universities, the various sciences have not sought to relate themselves to each other as a coherent whole or even addressed, much less answered, the sorts of questions that define human beings and once lent ultimate meaning to their lives. What has taken the place of religious commitment is the “economy” in the form of an ever greater consumption of the goods that science in the service of technology and industry delivers. Combined with an ever more malleable and mercurial “self” defined in terms of the fulfillment of material desires, the urge for infinite acquisition has become the default religion even of believers. This “religion” prevails even though in acting it out Christians violate their own religion’s claims that self-love and covetousness are close to the essence of sin.

The chosen areas for analysis are the perceived incompatibility of religious belief and all forms of “science,” the relativization of all forms of belief, the subjectivization of morality, the secularization of knowledge in the academies, the gradual subjection of all churches to the modern state, and the increasing subordination of both to the market.

That sola scriptura would not prove to be the epistemological polestar that the reformers hoped it would be is the understatement of several centuries.

To be sure, they also invoked the reformational principle of sola scriptura. But so in the end did John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Pierre Waldo, Arnold di Brescia—indeed, a whole succession of radical medieval reformers from the 12th century on who, struck by the discrepancy between the life and message of Jesus and the apostles as revealed in the Bible on the one hand and the example of the contemporary clergy on the other, typically rejected the sacraments administered by this clergy after the prospect of becoming a new religious order failed to materialize for one reason or another. Much of what is called the “radical” Reformation would seem to be a continuation and expansion of a centuries-long medieval heretical latency that, always already prepared to invoke Scripture and the apostolic example, spectacularly if temporarily occupied the space newly created by the defection of entire states from the papal fold. What principally motivated the magisterial reformers, in contrast, was less the discrepancy between evangelical precept and clerical practice than—as Denis Crouzet has argued—the anxiety created by the precarious balance between penitential debits and credits of which the late-medieval proliferation of indulgences was a symptom and to which the doctrine of justification by faith alone a response.

Got this from Voices from Pete VanderBeek and shared it with my council on church budgeting. http://www.alban.org/conversation.aspx?id=9893 I thought it was helpful.