Biblical utterance, in contrast to the sounds of power and certitude, offers imaginative probes into the mystery of God's creation and into the hidden complexities of human hurt and human hope. Thus the dialect of the Bible is offered in relational terms, so that the key ingredients to lived reality characteristically concern justice and righteousness, steadfast love, faithfulness, and compassion. Insofar as the church relies upon and attests to this dialect, we may expect that in church we will speak in a different rhetoric, and consequently we will speak about different subject matter. To be sure, the church is sometimes seduced away from this relational dialect to speak in cadences that are elementally alien to the Bible and to the claims of the gospel. Such seduction of the church takes place, for example, when our nation is at war and the church is tempted to reflect and reiterate the force of that social reality. Or such seduction occurs when the church is captured by any ism, notably in our time, racism or nationalism. Or alternatively, ideological conservatism that craves the language of certitude or ideological liberalism that is easily bewitched by the rhetoric of psychology or the market. When the church is domesticated to such alien claims, it loses its distinctiveness, and consequently loses its nerve and its courage for serious mission. Thus attentiveness to our peculiar dialect is an important investment. --from the Preface
