Today I want to highlight an article, all too brief, by Alan Roxburgh. He titles it Books In Conversation: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the Book of Acts. Its helpful in the way its “bridges” the conversation on the future of liberal democracies, and the missiological conversation on the future of the Protestant Church in the West by making clear that we need a “different imagination”.
“…The challenge”, Alan writes, “confronting the West (and its churches) is that we remain inside the analyses”. As a consequence “the options [available] are already defined”, such that it therefore makes “…it impossible to address the crises with a different imagination…” As a further consequence we’re therefore left with only three options: “fix”, “reform” or “return”, options which leave us, in Alan’s words, “locked within he choices that shaped the twentieth century, but we no longer live in that world”.
At this point he then brings his lines of argument into conversation with the New Testament book of Acts appropriating some of the themes of a book that sounds fascinating, World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (OUP, 2009).
There’s much to mull over and I recommend Al’s article as a good starting point. You’ll find it online here.
Recent Comments