The dominant ideology of our culture is committed to continuity and success and to the avoidance of pain, hurt, and loss. The dominant culture is also resistant to genuine newness and real surprise. It is curious but true, that surprise is as unwelcome as is loss. And our culture is organized to prevent the experience of both.

Jesus astonishes his contemporaries by his capacity to see and act beyond conventional assumptions.

A student of Old Testament theology must be alert to the problem of conventional thinking about ontology, thinking that is essentially alien to Old Testament testimony.

4. There is a text that looms in resilient power. There is a waiting congregation, perhaps not tired out, but too sure of self, pretending buoyancy where there might have been transformation. There is the voice that takes the old script and renders it to evoke a new world we had not yet witnessed (cf. Isa. 43:19). The fourth and final partner is this better world given as fresh revelation.

He became an obedient human person, and because of his passion for God's will for him, he collided with the will and purpose of the Roman Empire and with the Jews who colluded with the empire. He is not crucified because of some theory of the atonement. He is crucified because the empire cannot tolerate such a transformative, subversive force set loose in the world.

Clearly, human transformative activity depends upon a transformed imagination. Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a quite parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity.

In practice, I suggest that it is the liturgy that is to enact the settled coherence of church faith, and the sermon that provides the "alien" witness of the text, which rubs against the liturgic coherence.118 There can, in my judgment, be no final resolution of the tension between the systemizing task of theology and the disruptive work of biblical interpretation. It is the ongoing interaction between the two that is the work of interpretation.

The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act.

We can recognize, moreover, that a move beyond our tribalism never happens in the ordinary. It takes a miracle, or a jolt, or a gift, or killing (as in Charleston) to awaken us from our tribal numbness, to see and act afresh.

If one is linked to a flat, one-dimensional faith, then this verse is a bitter loss of faith . But if we think in terms of obedience on its way to risky imagination, then this verse is an opening for new faith beyond the conventions and routines that secure but do not reckon with God's awefulness .

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.

There is no practical area in the life of the church in which reform is more urgent than in the church's propensity (in all of its manifestations) to silence. Such reform, like every moment of reform, means a return to the core claims of the gospel. In this case, it is the core claim of the baptismal formula of Galatians 3:28 concerning the third element of "male and female.