But is it any wonder? The following is a book review that perfectly describes what we are dealing with in terms of the festering sore, the pox, the cancer that is the ELCA. To paraphrase below, what these people want is to make "Tolerance of Tolerance" (no, I am not making this up) to be the CHIEF Christian virtue! What this does is create anarchy. There are no more rules. There is no more right or wrong. Sin isn't really sin. God didn't really say *that*. Does this sound vaguely or not so vaguely like the insinuations of the serpent in the Garden of Eden? Please read below. By the way, Sandra Ellis-Killian was a contributor to this piece of work. She was the pastor who drove us once and for all out of the Lutheran church and into the arms of the Catholic church, thank God.


http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3236/is_1_34/ai_n28699457/



Ian S. Markham, Plurality and Christian Ethics. New Studies in Christian Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. pp. 225. $49.95.



The subject under scrutiny in Markham's book is Christianity's relation to modern culture: specifically, how to meet the secularist challenge that posits that religion must be confined to the personal and private because it is intolerant and cannot cope with plurality. In the first third of his work, Markham judges traditional Christian thinking (exemplified by the writings of V. A. Demant and England's Christendom Group) as an inadequate response to the challenge. With its Thomistic and Natural Law theological presuppositions, its advocacy of a unitary culture and guild socialism, and especially its lack of tolerance for tolerance (one of modernity's crowning achievements), the Group's religious/social analysis is dismissed as an artifact of a previous age. Markham finds hope in the American context. Deemed creditable is Robert Bellah's Civil Religion cultural analysis, which correctly recognizes the interplay between individuals and community and also takes seriously the threat of totalitarian mindsets. Here tolerance is honored as an important element of society. Where Bellah falls short is in his advocacy of what is, according to the author, an unrealistic practical economic policy - welfare/democratic socialism.


Judged most helpful is R. J. Neuhaus's system of Public Philosophy, which seeks to capitalize on covenantal language, affirms the functional role of religion as a source of values, and recommends the most realistic (again, according to the author) practical economic program: rico-conservative capitalism. Tolerance can be embraced and protected by religion. In the present case, what can be protected must be protected, for, Markham contends, the contemporary threats to plurality do not come from religion but from secularism. It is the secularists who have "given up the quest for truth and therefore moral debate and rational dialogue"; it is secular reason that "cannot avoid the danger of nihilism" (p. 194). As the argument goes, truth-claims depend upon the conviction that the universe is intelligible, and that in turn depends upon a belief in a God who intended creation's immense diversity, who demands respect for persons of differing views, and who instilled the necessity of supplementing limited and incomplete personal perspectives with the perspectives of others.



Quite obviously, what is being recommended is a divine portrait that many conservative Christians would find unsettling. However, to dismiss this work as an example of faith's catering to the spirit of the world rather than leading it would be a mistake. If the presentation is carefully followed, the reader should stand to be persuaded that what is being presented is indeed completely opposed to crass relativism and subjectivism, as the author explicitly claims (p. 188). This reviewer suggests that this book be read in conjunction with Bellah's most recent writings on religious witness as being relative but not relativistic.

Markham's propositions regarding the revisioning of God and religious witness find both their disposition and their critique in Christian Ethics in Ecumenical Context. Presented in three parts - "An Ecumenical Journey," "Theology, Ethics, and Society," and "Religion, Culture, and Politics" - this is a worthy twenty-one-scholar salute to the person and work of ecumenist, missionary, and educator Charles Converse West. Among his many services, West contributes as theological consultant to the Gospel and Our Culture Network (G.O.C.N.), a project headed by a group of theologians, pastors, and lay

believers who are united by the perception that the Christendom model had become outdated and a radical reformulation of the gospel message is now required of churches and denominations.



Mark K. Taylor's contribution, "Immanental and Prophetic: Shaping Reformed Theology for Late Twentieth-Century Struggle," suggests that God's sovereignty be recast so that divine transcendence is envisioned less as a matte