The Apocalypse of Jon

We must all preach to our age, but woe to us if it is our age we preach, and only hold up the mirror to the time.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of classes, our ancestors.  It is the democracy of the dead.  Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

My mind through the power of Truth was in a good degree weaned from the desire of outward greatness, and I was learning to be content with real conveniences that were not costly, so that a way of life free from much entanglements appeared best for me, though the income was small...

The Christian way of life is in Africa to stay, certainly within the foreseeable future, [and] much of the theological activity in Christian Africa is being done as oral theology ... from the living experiences of Christians. It is theology in the open, from the pulpit, in the market-place, in the home as people pray or read and discuss the Scriptures...African Christianity cannot wait for written theology to keep pace with it...Academic theology can only come afterward and examine the features retrospectively in order to understand them.

Everett Cattell’s Passion for Unity

There is no telling what may happen when people begin to read the Epistle to the Romans. What happened to Augustine, Luther, Wesley and Barth launched great spiritual movements which have left their mark in world history. But similar things have happened, much more frequently, to very ordinary people as the words of this Epistle came home to them with power.

Christian diversity is the necessary product of the Incarnation.

Incarnation is translation. When God in Christ became man, Divinity was translated into humanity, as though humanity were a receptor language. Here was a clear statement of what would otherwise be veiled in obscurity or uncertainty, the statement 'This is what God is like.' But language is specific to a people or an area. No one speaks generalized "language"; it is necessary to speak a particular language. Similarly, when Divinity was translated into humanity he did not become generalized humanity. He became a person in a particular locality and in a particular ethnic group, at a particular place and time. The translation of God into humanity, whereby the sense and meaning of God was transferred, was effected under very culture-specific conditions.

...Bonhoeffer argues that in the present historical situation good and evil are often difficult to distinguish, not least because evil often masquerades, quite effectively, as good. Ethical theory is unable to discern good from evil and right from wrong because... it depends upon 'preconceived concepts' that do not always apply in a given instance and sometimes blind people to the true reality of a situation.

[F]or Bonhoeffer, the best example of this participatory prayer is the Psalter, which expresses the full range of petitions or thanksgivings one might offer to God. Because the Psalter is both God's word addressed to humanity and also human words addressed to God, the only person who can truly pray the psalms is the divine and human Christ, who alone can speak a truly divine word and a truly human word simultaneously. Thus, to pray the psalms is to participate in Christ's prayer and to recognize that Christ - not the self - is the ultimate origin and ground of one's spiritual life.

[For Bonhoeffer] conformation to the risen one is about hope and trust and it affirms the reality of Christ's image inside a person even as he or she continues in the world of pain and death in the present... Christ's victorious resurrection radically reconstitutes creation: it is no longer a fallen creation devoid of any hope; it is a redeemed creation, still bearing the marks of its falleness, but moving slowly toward its final consumation.

...the interconnections between American Pentecostalism and Nigerian Pentcostalism do not necessarily result in what could be considered as an ideological or a doctrinal imposition within the Nigerian context, given that Christianity as a world religion shares certain features in common across cultures and boundaries. In the contemporary global world, these increased interconnections between religious groups may be self-initiated, direct contacts between religious groups or may be facilitated vicariously through the media. Global Pentecostalism thus falls into the realm of what Karla Poewe has described as a form of global culture. America-centric scholars have sometimes adopted a Western anthropological approach that suggests external influences account for the vibrancy of contemporary Pentecostals in Africa. In this way they imply that influence merely flows one way - from the United States to Africa - while ruling out other possible directionalities. It is important, therefore, to more from a superficial analysis of African Pentecostalism as a derivative of American capitalist and corporate culture and examine, instead, the internal dynamics of African Pentecostal movements...