Faith That Sees Through the Culture

God’s Word is filled with paradoxes.

It’s tempting to see these paradoxes as either-or statements—one must be true and the other must be false. End of story. Case closed.

But the paradoxes in the Word of God are different. They are both-and statements, at once seeming contradictory but both being wholly and completely true. As Christians, we live in this tension, embracing that two sides of the same coin can be true at the same time.

We live in what is visible and invisible. We have the old man and the new man. We speak to those offered both an inclusive and an exclusive Gospel. We are citizens of both church and state. We live in the now and the not yet. We speak a Word that is both Law and Gospel.

Faith That Sees through the Culture provides lenses to evaluate and bring clarity to these paradoxes. These lenses, when focused, aligned, and coordinated, open whole new vistas for faith to see more clearly and be lived out more effectively in our culture.

About the Author

Rev. Dr. Alfonso Espinosa is a graduate of Concordia University Irvine (BA) and Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana (MDiv). He received an MA in Christian apologetics from Biola University (2001) and a PhD in theology from the University of Birmingham (England) in 2009. He is the senior pastor at Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church in Irvine, California, where he preaches and teaches the Word of Christ for the forgiveness of sins. His most cherished service is being husband to his wife Traci, a father, and a grandfather.