Versions Compared

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.

...

My answer – again unhesitatingly – is, Yes, it certainly is possible that those who hijack the name "Christian" do more harm than good in communicating the gospel. I'm assuming, naturally, that what is meant in context by "hijacking the name 'Christian!!' is claiming explicitly or implicitly that one's own way of being Christian is the only way rightly so named. But you'll have noted, I'm sure, that both my reformulation of the question and my answer to it allow for the possibility -which I trust the questioner, also, would wish to allow for -that "noisy fundamentalists" are by no means the only, even if, perhaps, the noisiest, Christians who make or imply any such exclusivistic claim.

...

This, as anyone who was here last year may have guessed, is the other question I take to be close enough in meaning to a question I responded to at length then that an extended answer now hardly seems called for. So I simply refer the questioner and all of the rest of you to Question 6 and my response thereto (on pp. 17-21 of my written answers). Whereas that question asked, "Would you like to speak about the afterlife?" (italics added), the present question asks whether I can speak about it. And, of course, I should like to think that what I said in answering the earlier question is sufficient evidence that I indeed can -that I am able to speak about the afterlife, however adequately.

...

But you perhaps noted that there's one thing the current question asks about that I did not specifically go into in my response a year ago --namely, how I understand the concept term, "the Kingdom of God." So just a brief further word on my understanding of how "the Kingdom of God" is understood by normative Christian witness and an adequate Christian theology.

...