Pithy

As any long-term reader of this blog knows, I am a devotee of N.T. Wright. For Father's Day I received a copy of his book Surprised by Scripture. I am only a chapter and a page into it -- it's a collection of essays on the value and methodology of using Scripture in debates current to the modern (or post-modern) world.

All that said, long-term readers of this blog also know that I am fascinated by our context -- by the way in which the debates of (NOTE: All dates are stupidly approximate) the Protestant Reformation (16th Century), the Renaissance (17th Century) the Enlightenment (18th Century) and  Industrialism (19th Century) inform the attitudes of Modernism (20th Century) and our petulant reaction against Modernism, Post-Modernism, which I won't dignify with a date because I don't think it's a real movement yet.

Keeping up?

All that said, I was so tickled with Wright's ability (page 26) to hit the contextual nail exactly on the head with the following quote. As usual, he takes very few words to exactly diagnose a serious problem in the church and suggest a serious solution:

"We must stop giving nineteenth-century answers to sixteenth century questions and try to give twenty-first-century answers to first-century questions."

Love it.