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What Kind of Theological Renewal Does the Evangelical Church Need Most?

By Mark D. Roberts | Thursday, April 1, 2010

The Evangelical Portal of the Patheos website is featuring a new conversation called the Cross Investigations Group. Here’s how Patheos describes this endeavor:

The Cross Investigations series encourages pastors, professors, authors, and bloggers to explore questions of import to the church in a coherent and cooperative manner. Every two weeks, a question will be posed to the group, and individual responses will be featured as they arrive at the Cross and Culture blog on the Evangelical Portal. One week after the question is sent, the answers will be gathered together into a single article. We hope that reflecting together will stimulate thought, focus conversation, and ultimately prove more edifying to online readers and to the church more generally.

The first question posed for Cross Investigations asked commentators to weigh in on the king of theological renewal that is most needed among evangelicals today. Specifically, here’s the question:

“Evangelical churches are showing renewed interest in theology and theological training. If the church in America could recover one area of doctrine or theological tradition (i.e., ecclesiology, pneumatology, doctrine of God), what should it be?”

If you were going to answer this question, what would you say?

I was asked to participate in the Cross Investigations Group, which includes a number of top thinkers and leaders among evangelicalism. So if you visit the Patheos website, you can find my answer to this week’s question. But I would encourage you to read all the answers, and to listen to the video answer provided by Andy Crouch. You’ll find a variety of answers to the question, and some significant overlaps and connections as well. In fact, Christian theology is so interconnected that its impossible to single out any one particular doctrine from others. You can’t, for example, talk about the church (ecclesiology) without also dealing with history and the end times (eschatology), salvation (soteriology), and the doctrine of God (theology proper).

I hope, by the way, that you’ll become a regular visitor to the Patheos site.  I continue to be impressed with the quality of the conversation there about matters of faith and religious practice.

P.S. I have not fogotten that I stopped my conversation about Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC midstream. I’ll pick that up after Easter.

Topics: Theology, Christian Life |

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