Josephus does not tell us that Christianity is true, and Christians do not need Josephus to tell them that Christ is risen. But Christianity makes claims about things that happened in public history under identifiable rulers, priests, and governors. For that reason, testimony from outside the church matters.
Today, the longing for cultural Christianity on both the left and the right hearkens back to an older version of Christendom that was a mixed blessing for the church in the western world. The cultural mediation of Christian views on created order has certainly benefitted the civilization we’ve inherited. But the gospel itself isn’t something that can be reduced to cultural mediation either. Instead, the gospel as a message stands apart from all human accomplishments and achievements, no matter how beneficial they might be.
The student of Scripture should always have a map open next to their Bible as they read. If possible, they should also travel to Israel, not to make a pilgrimage, but to see the context of the land in which these stories took place. These are not fairy tales made up about fictional fantasy lands; these are stories about real people in real places interacting with a real God.

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How can he say it? How can he say that Christ is after all the entire meaning of life for him, and that death is no real worry?
We live for the most part, on the strength of our moral fiber, under the law, by our zeal for God and all that which tickles our proud fancy.
Dear hearers of the word of God, you are finished. You cannot be the same now. All that is ended, over.
This sermon was originally given at Luther Seminary chapel on May 20, 1986.
Fullness, truth, reality – all this God gives us as his gift in Christ.
It is terribly easy to set up our theology as a buffer against the real coming of the Lord and its consequences.
Even though All Saints is a day for remembering the dead, it is not a day of mourning.
It seems to me that our greatest task is not that of seeking skills and methods whereby we can inject power into the gospel, but simply to beware lest we obscure the power that the gospel is
Good, we tend to think, is the absence of evil. But this reversal of the formula can only have disastrous consequences.
If you are going to lose your life for the gospel’s sake, you must begin by hearing it.
It’s God’s power that we are dealing with here that is made perfect in weakness, not ours. God’s power is made perfect in the weakness of the cross.
We worry about the fact our days are as grass – so we try to scratch out a place for ourselves, to make a permanent, lasting place, to climb to higher places and succeed, more often than not, only to hurt each other in the process.