Dr Paul Allen

Karl Barth (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) It’s not just what we say, but how we say it, that matters. Peter reminds us to be “always prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame” ( 1 Pet 3:15-16 ). We have to be ready with arguments and reasons, but we have to give thought also to how we present them. Good Arguments First and foremost we need to avoid the ubiquitous ad hominem (“to/concerning the person”) variety—otherwise known as “personal attacks.” Poor papers often focus on the person: both the critic and the one being criticized. This is easier, of course, because one only has to express one’s own opinions and reflections. A good paper will tell us more about the issues in the debate than about the debaters. (This of course does not rule out relevant biographical informat...

Image via Wikipedia Jesus answered, “It is written: Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God ” (Matthew 4:4). Early in the twentieth century, two European theologians mounted an assault on nineteenth-century liberalism. The nineteenth-century liberals had tried to find the “historical Jesus” by discounting the testimony of the Bible and filtering the biblical evidence through their own conceptions of what must have happened. They had used “literary science” to “prove” that the Bible is merely a collection of human opinions about God and not the Word of God at all. The two theologians who attacked this idea, Karl Barth and Emil Brunner , were called “neo-orthodox” because they seemed to be affirming the orthodox Christian faith against the more liberal mind set. They maintained that the Bible was the Word of God and that God inspired it—but what they meant by these statements was radically different from true Christianity. Barth and Br...