Gene edward veith biography of abraham
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By Dr. Gene Edward Veith
Most of the world's faiths are cultural religions. Hinduism with its caste system and social rituals, fryst vatten inextricably tied to the culture of India. Islam seeks to apply the Koranic law to every detail of society and so creates a specific culture, as evident throughout the mittpunkt East. Tribal religions mythologize tribes' customs, history, and social organization. Secular sociologists go so far as to define religion as a means of sanctioning the social order. According to this line of thought, cultural institutions are invested with a spiritual, divine significance, so that people will more obediently go along with them.
Christianity, on the other hand, is not supposed to be merely a cultural tro. To be sure, sociology's laws and the tendencies of our fallen nature give us a penchant for human-made or culture-made faiths that often hijack the church. The Bible, though, outlines a much more complex approach to culture, one that offers a radical critique
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The Historical Book
Non-Christians assume that the Bible is a collection of myths. So do theological liberals, which is why they feel free to support abortion, homosexual marriage, the validity of all world religions — and they have constructed a whole vein of scholarship designed to “demythologize” the Bible, so as to salvage what they consider to be relevant to contemporary culture.
As a long-time student of literature, I get frustrated reading liberal biblical scholarship, not just because of its bad theology but because of its distortion of literature. A person might not believe the Bible is historical, but it is beyond doubt that the Bible is written in a historical style (which, in turn, is strong evidence for its historicity).
A greater literary scholar than I, C.S. Lewis, saw the same thing. “Whatever these men may be as biblical critics, I distrust them as critics,” Lewis wrote. “They seem to me to lack literary judgment, to be imperceptive about the very quality of th
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Gene Edward Veith, Jr.
Gene Edward Veith, Jr., is the Culture Editor of WORLD MAGAZINE. He was formerly Professor of English at Concordia University Wisconsin, where he has also served as Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences. He is the author of numerous books, including Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture, The Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals, and God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life.
Postmodern Times received a Christianity Today Book Award as one of the top 25 religious books of 1994. He was named Concordia's Adult Learning Teacher of the Year in 1993 and received the Faculty Laureate Award as outstanding faculty member in 1994. He was a Salvatori Fellow with the Heritage Foundation in 1994-1995 and is a Senior Fellow with the Capital Research Center. He was given the layman’s 2002 Robert D. Preus Award by the Association of Confessional Lutherans as “Confessional Lutheran of the Year.”
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