Patricia Dallmann's Blog – 7thMo. 2017 Archive (2)

Before beginning a verbatim account of Paul’s sermon, the scripture writer provides some background information about Paul’s situation in Athens: While waiting for two helpers to join him, Paul assesses the spiritual condition of the city and finds its idolatry distressing. He goes to the synagogue to reason with both Jews and Gentiles, and argues in the marketplace with whoever is willing. He preaches the gospel of Jesus and the resurrection, and the philosophers are privately critical and…

In the preface to Christianity and Civilisation, first delivered as Gifford Lectures in 1947, the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner sought “to formulate and to justify [his] conviction that only Christianity is capable of furnishing the basis of a civilisation which can rightly be described as human”(v). A civilization is largely determined by the prevailing answers that its various cultures give to basic questions about being, truth, time, man’s place in the universe, meaning, justice,…