Christians and Digital Media: Benefits and Burdens by C. Ben Mitchell We were having an early dinner at one of our favorite mom-and-pop restaurants in a sleepy little Southern town just outside where we live. As Nancy and I were talking about our day, a lad about 10 or 12 years old came through the door with an older woman who appeared to be his grandmother. It was as close to a Norman Rockwell scene as one might imagine. Grandmother and grandson were out for a quiet meal together on a Friday evening. One could even imagine this being a weekly treat for them both, a regular liturgy of life in this tiny community. Bob, the owner of the restaurant, is also the cook. The owner’s wife waits tables, delivering daily specials, superb hamburgers, or house-made pizzas to mostly local customers who sit at formica-top tables while drinking sweet tea and watching the sparse traffic pass by on the other […]

Who Chose the New Testament Books? Politics, Praxis, and Proof in the Early Church C. E. Hill1 I. POLITICS A. Introduction: Encounters with the Cultural Myth In the ongoing interaction of Christianity with its surrounding culture, the issue of “How We Got the Bible” has become one of the flashpoints of our day. The popular narrative that has sprung up and taken root has become so often repeated, so widely adopted, and its explanatory power has become so effective, that it could probably now qualify as one of our cultural myths: a grand story that serves to explain for a culture a set of phenomena important for its self-understanding. Such a grand story must be simple in its broad strokes, but have enough historical correspondence to make itself plausible to great numbers of people. Why is such a story about how we got the Bible needed as part of our cultural mythology? That Christianity and its Bible have played a […]