Jesus Cropped from the Picture

Jesus Cropped from the Picture

these two essentials because they represented the core principles of Christian faith. To live for Christ became equivalent to defense of this consensus ( the Bible and the Cross ).

The First Shaping Force: Cultural Assumptions The Traditional Method’s selection of the Bible and the Cross as its distinctives was partially influenced by the cultural assumptions of Rationalism and Individualism. Rationalism It can be argued that the focus on The Cross began around 1000 A.D., when the Christus Victor view of the atonement (all the saving acts of Christ) was supplanted by various one-dimensional views of the atonement. First, Anselm described Jesus’ work on the cross, as a legal exchange for man’s justification, based on the feudal culture of the day. The Cross began to take on a legal and rational quality. Later, other one-dimensional views of the atonement (such as Abelard’s and Hodge’s) emerged as well (see Appendix 5, “Views of the Atonement”). During the Reformation, 71 the Bible was emphasized as God’s authoritative Word, supplanting the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time, the printing press allowed the wide distribution of the Bible to the masses. As Rationalism became widely accepted, the individual Bible student emerged for the first time. Later, the Age of Reason (or Modernity) made Rationalism the norm in Western culture, especially in the Protestant church.

By the 1800s, Rationalism became further entrenched after the splintering of Protestantism. As liberals attacked the Bible’s authority,

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