Contending for the Faith: The Church’s Engagement with Culture

This book calls for churches to offer an unapologetically Christian witness to a post-modern world. It asks whether we are witnessing - due to the triumph of the autonomous and unattached self - the complete destruction of those institutions and practices that once shaped human character toward fulfillment in goods larger than our own self-interest; the chief of these being the worship and service of God. The answer the book offers is that Christian existence can never be taken for granted so churches must seek to create a Christian culture that will offer the world a drastic alternative to its own cultureless existence. Among the ways the book suggests this task might be accomplished are the following: (1) by reinvigorating an often sentimental and anti-intellectual evangelicalism. (2) by developing a Christian understanding of church-based education. (3) by avoiding the twin dangers of conservatism and liberalism. (4) by focusing Christian worship on the beauty and holiness of God, (5) by understanding the relation of Christian marriage to Christian singleness, and (6) by stressing the dependence of Christian spirituality on Christian doctrine.