Theology Today

“Black American spirituality was born in the context of the struggle for justice… When the meaning of sanctification is formed in the social context of an oppressed community in struggle for liberation, it is difficult to separate the experience of holiness from the spiritual empowerment to change the existing societal arrangements.”

“The great scholastic syntheses of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had seen an attempt at integrating all natural, acquired knowledge with the infused knowledge by which divine truths are revealed. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, scholastic philosophy was fragmented. … One reaction to this was a … growing tendency to rely on the direct operation of God in the human soul, and to value religious experience.”

“Unification theology is eclectic, syncretistic, and esoteric. … In whatever phase of its life the Moonist movement is now, it raises crucial questions for those of us who are confessing Christians. Perhaps the Moonies are sending us a message about the nature of conversion and commitment among young adults; about the need for an adequate eschatological perspective; about the need for thoughtful morality and spirituality; and about the hunger in America for community.”

“During the past generation, heirs of the Reformation have paid their respects to textual preaching and its power to change human lives; but we have also seen how familiar texts can serve to confirm people in their prejudices and previous behavior … The ‘literal sense’ becomes a literalist dogma about the text … Preaching becomes over-serious or over-cute … Preaching might become once again an occasion of discovery and transformation if it were conceived as part of a broader art of homiletics (‘homologein’), of ‘coming to say the same thing’ both with the biblical authors and with one another.”

“Annie and ‘Daddy’ were drawn irresistibly to one another. They were both ready to settle disputes with their fists … What was Gray's gospel? … The Christ that Gray really wanted was one who didn't peddle cheap grace or allow himself to be taken in by religious con artists. Forgiveness there should be, but only if accepted in penitent humility; restoration and rehabilitation, but only for those open to moral renewal.”

The Christians Bamber Gascoigne Christina Gascoigne New York, William Morrow and Co., 1977. 304 pp., $17.50.