{"id":17043,"date":"2015-02-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-17T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1869"},"modified":"2015-02-17T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-17T00:00:00","slug":"on-missing-the-main-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/02\/on-missing-the-main-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"On Missing the Main Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\">\n<\/head><body><p>In his 1959\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Luther-Expositor-Luthers-Works-Companion\/dp\/B000O2KZWM\/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1424194804&amp;sr=1-2&amp;keywords=luther+expositor%20tag=leithartcom-20\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Luther the Expositor<\/a>, Jaroslav Pelikan remarked on the tendency of church historians to neglect the main thing in theologians of the past:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEntire histories have been written \u2013 histories of a whole section of the  church, of an era in church history or of a major theological problem\u00ad which do not seriously consider the possibility that at least one of the  decisive elements in the thought and action of a Christian man or group  may have been the way they interpreted the Bible. And this in the face of  the fact that these men and groups frequently made the claim they were  speaking and acting as expounders of the Sacred Scriptures. Historians  have sought to assess the influence of everything from the theologian\u2019s  vanity to the theologian\u2019s viscera upon the formulation of theological  doctrines, meanwhile regarding as naIve and uninformed the suggestion  that the Bible may be a source of these doctrines.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his 1959\u00a0Luther the Expositor, Jaroslav Pelikan remarked on the tendency of church historians to neglect the main thing in theologians of the past: \u201cEntire histories have been written \u2013 histories of a whole section of the church, of an era in church history or of a major theological problem\u00ad which do not seriously consider [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,1199,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible","category-church-history","category-theology"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>On Missing the Main Thing<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In his 1959&nbsp;Luther the Expositor, Jaroslav Pelikan remarked on the tendency of church historians to neglect the main thing in theologians of the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/02\/on-missing-the-main-thing\/\" \/>\n<meta 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