Chapter 1: Rummage Sales
The Protestant Reformation occurred in 1517. A couple decades later, the Great Schism occurred in 1054. Since the year 1054, there have been rapidly diverging cultures which coexisted in a state of discontent. The main argument was over where, how, and from whom the Holy Spirit comes. There was an important council that took couple centuries after the Great Schism during the time of Gregory the Great. This council, knowing as the Council of Chalcedon, discussed two pressing issues of that time: whether or not Mary could be called “Mother of God” and whether or not Jesus was one “person” of two natures or two “persons” inside one skin.
Chapter 2: Cable of Meaning
Religion is a social construct. We all feel that there must be more out there. Life would be too hard and painful for us to endure, if enduring life is sole purpose. Therefore, humanity has created religion. Within religion lies spirituality, which is internal to the individuals within a society. Our religion is marked by the quality of corporeality which means that there is an overt, physical, and embodies evidence that religion exists.
Chapter 3: The Great Reformation
One main question is where the authority lies in the church. Luther made a principle of “sola scripture” meaning that the Bible should be our sole source of authority. During the Protestant reformation, it made a religious expression and reflection of the processes that existed within its time. Such processes include a newfound knowledge of how the world works and how the human life can be organized. Moreover, during this time, there arose two giant political entities: Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. “The marriage of doctrinal purity with political loyalties is always an unholy union, even in the best of circumstances.”
Chapter 4: Questions of Re-formation
With the progress of science, people stopped assuming that everything was not as miraculous as it looked. During this same time of progress, the Conference of Conservative Protestants took place and issued a statement of five fundamental Christian truths: the inerrancy of the Scripture; the divinity of Jesus Christ; the historicity of the Virgin birth; the substitutionary nature of the Atonement; and the physical, corporeal return of Jesus. These fundamentals were the core of evangelical Christianity.
Chapter 5: The Century of Emergence
Over time, there came the notion that there was no such thing as an absolute truth because everything was seen differently depending o the observer. Heisenberg and his law of uncertainty further supports such a notion that truth is relative to the perceiver. There can be no meaning outside of the circumstances of the observer. With this new viewpoint, people began to wonder whether or not the Jesus of Nazareth was the same as the Jesus of Western history.
Chapter 6: The Gathering Center
According to the cruciform presentation, those above the center axis are placed there because for those Christians, what one does religiously is more central to his or her understanding of Christian living than is what one believes doctrinally. Christians these days either hold on to orthopraxy (right or correct practice) or orthodoxy (right or correct doctrine). Ever since the era of established churches, the house church movement has been unified by one characteristic: that they are incarnational.
Chapter 7: The Way Ahead
The world has worked in which the political structure has always been reflected in and exercised influence upon the organizational structure of religion. One of the most destructive potentialities that can happen to religion is for it to become accepted and become the established religion of the political cultural, and social domains in which the religion lives. An important fact is that every human made institution is bound by limitations of time and space, and thus these institutions will always falter in one way or another.
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