What a great thread, thanks so much for posting it and if you have a ping list for it, please add me!
Earlier this spring I finished Ron Chernow’s biography of George Washington: Washington, A Life. All 68 chapters. Well written, interesting, marvelous vocabulary (I read it on Kindle and used that built in dictionary frequently).
So now, I’m finishing up odds and ends that were left hanging while I finished the biography.
C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity” is my current “will be finished before I start something else”.
“...C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity” is my current...”
I’m reading BONHOEFFER: PASTOR, MARTYR, PROPHET, SPY, by Eric Metaxas and its great. The Libs are trying to make Bonhoeffer theirs and try to depict him as a liberal or a pacifist taking a stand against those “conservative” Nazis.
But Bonhoeffer was not a pacifist and he held Biblical liberals in contempt. One of his students noted that “he taught us that we had to read the Bible as it was directed at us, as the word of God directly to us. Not something general, not something generally applicable, but rather with a personal relationship to us...” p. 129
Bonhoeffer also put it, “Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic...Do not defend God’s Word, but testyfy to it...Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity!” p. 272
Bonhoeffer was a conservative strict constructionist and held firm while his liberal (Biblical criticism—Schleiermacher school) countrymen went along with taking oaths to Hitler and bending the church to make it compatible with Nazi philosophy.