Monday, December 23, 2013

Why All The Niebuhr Posts?

...because the man was freaking brilliant, that's why. He remains my favorite theologian of all time. I go back and re-read some of his stuff sometimes, and it just blows my mind how right so much of it seems. I think 'here is what makes Christianity makes sense, this is why we can say with confidence that our faith is the truest, the most consistent with the facts of the world.' Niebuhr never intended to do apologetics, but in the end that is what he was doing, consciously or not. His work shows that Christianity is reasonable, consistent with the fullest range of human experience. He understood the importance and proper use of scripture better than most. His words are like food and water to me, getting to the heart of passages and showing how a single line of the Bible can say more than we can possibly imagine. BEYOND TRAGEDY is a book of 150 or so pages which are reflections on maybe a total of 10 pages of scripture. He got it, he's got more figured out than most, he's just right most of the time. Brilliant, and right. You can't get much better than that.

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