MARIETTA, Ohio, April 27 /
Christian Newswire/ -- Request a review copy of Varsy Arsy--Proclaiming the Gospel in Second Corinthians, by Phillip A. Ross, Pilgrim Platform, Marietta, Ohio, to be released July 2009, 326 pages. Varsy Arsy is volume two of Ross's examination of Paul's letters to the Corinthians. Volume one, Arsy Varsy--Reclaiming the Gospel in First Corinthians, was published in 2008.
The Corinthian church had been captured by a false teaching that brought it wealth, success and influence. Oddly, the false, Gnostic spirituality being taught was based on popular, Greek wisdom and had produced worldly success. But Paul saw through the charade and called the Corinthians back to ordinary faithfulness that stood in opposition to the false wisdom of Greek culture issuing from the academy. What the successful Corinthians called wisdom, Paul called foolishness.
Unfortunately, in our own day the Christian faith has again been blunted and inflamed by the forces of worldly success and academics. Seeing the gospel rightly--in the light of Christ--requires an adjustment of our expectations. And that adjustment can still turn this fallen world upside down.
People today know that something is very wrong in our contemporary world, that history and Christianity have taken a wrong turn somewhere, that our current culture, lifestyles and values are fundamentally unsustainable. People know it and the market knows it.
President Obama's rally cry for hope and change has ignited this concern across the globe. This hope for change is a good thing, a necessary thing. But it is fraught with both danger and opportunity. We are very much like those ancient Corinthians in that our concern for worldly success has blinded us to the actual gospel.
Ross takes a presuppositional approach to this study of Corinthians, which is different from the usual evidential approach in that it assumes that faithfulness requires a completely different mindset than unfaithfulness, that what is usually thought to be an intellectual common ground between believers and unbelievers isn't common at all.
The integration of trinitarian categories regarding human nature as a genuine reflection of God's trinitarian image reveals important subtleties in the biblical text, yields richer accounts, more diverse applications and a more complete integration of spiritual gifts regarding both the lives of individual Christians and the biblical structure Christ gave to the church.
