Beyond Common Ground

Alden Thompson was one of my professors when I was an undergraduate at Walla Walla University (then Walla Walla College). He was and is a challenging teacher and speaker. The book in the video I embed below is from Pacific Press, a Seventh-day Adventist publisher, and it addresses a denominational audience. But I know both from personal conversation and from times when Alden has spoken at events in United Methodist Churches that he believes the principles and the conversation he advocates apply much more broadly than his own denomination.

“Liberal” within Adventism often applies to people much more conservative than we might find elsewhere. An SDA such as Alden, who would regard himself as an evangelical Christian at the same tie as he cherishes some of the distinctives of his own denomination, might well be called liberal. I think many of my moderate and liberal Methodist friends would regard Alden as conservative. (I’ll be sure he has a link to this post so he can correct me if I’m wrong.)

In any case, some of the concepts he includes in Beyond Common Ground have come into my own thinking, especially as it comes to distinguishing essentials from non-essentials.

I hope you hear the call for conversation.

(Energion Publications is making a practice of publicizing books by our authors that are published by other publishers. I regard this as part of encouraging conversation. Alden Thompson is author of Energion title Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?)