Every age has its own accumulation to deal with, along with its own reasons for deciding what stays and what goes. Is substitutionary atonement still useful? How about salvation by faith in Christ alone? Do we really need professional clergy? What about those nineteenth-century hymns? Through it all, the timing remains pretty predictable. In Tickle’s terms, what many of us are taking part in, willingly or not, is Christianity’s “semi-millennial rummage sale of ideas.”3 The last one was called the Protestant Reformation. No one knows what to call this one yet.
