Author: Paul Nelson

Everybody likes simple answers to complex issues.  If our highly polemicized society reinforces one thing over and over again, it is that the answers we favor are right, and those who disagree with us are at best misinformed or stupid, but at worst are evil or fanatical or fundamentalist.  When we are feeling magnanimous we can pity those who disagree with what is obviously a truly simple and straightforward solution that we can see clearly.  When we are less magnanimous (which is more and more of the time), those who disagree with us can be tolerated only long enough...

 Of all the commandments, I suspect that the third commandment may be the most challenging for Christians to understand and follow. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. What the heck does this mean for us as Christians in the 21st century? How do we make sense of the claims of groups such as the Seventh Day Adventists, who insist that in changing the Sabbath observance from Saturday to Sunday, the Church has committed a grave infraction against this commandment? Martin Luther maintained that we were free in the grace of Christ to honor any day as the...

Simply Christian by N.T. Wright There are no shortage of books that attempt to make sense of Christianity to those who are either unfamiliar with it or perhaps estranged from it.  Simply Christian is a credible entry into this ever-expanding catalog. Wright is an accomplished and controversial theologian.  Lutherans are rightly wary of him for some of other writings and his revisionist ideas about St. Paul’s intent in his writings.  However there is practically none of that here.  Nor is this an intense apologetic effort to demonstrate the rationality of the Biblical Christian truth claims about the universe.  It...