Yesterday a blogger commented that Fitch got him to recall, in his chps 4-5, that IH Marshall had written an article back in 1985 that argued that the NT evidence does not suggest the Christians got together for “worship” (as we tend to define it) but to learn and to exhort and to fellowship. This…

Let me risk venturing into the realm of politics. There has been a call for more Christians, especially those of us who are smitten with the idea of a generous orthodoxy, to engage in a “purple” politics — and by that is meant a politics that absorbs the good in “red” and “blue” so that…

The principle of 6:1 is now fleshed out for “almsgiving” — the Jewish practice of compassion on the poor and needy. After the Temple was destroyed, almsgiving was sometimes depicted as a replacement for sacrifices. The word for “almsgiving” in Hebrew is a near-equivalent to “righteousness”: the transition from 6:1 to 6:2 then is verbal…

The seventh chp in David Fitch’s The Great Giveaway concerns spiritual formation. The primary direction of the chp is to return counseling to the church and to get more church in the psychologist’s office. [Now he’s meddling with my wife’s vocation.] He challenges the authority inherent to Christian therapy and the narrative structure that many…

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