I have great hope that what Jesus taught was and is true. ~Andrew Sullivan

He has hope, does he?  Well, isn’t that something!  Presumably it would be too doctrinaire to say that what Jesus taught simply is true with no question of hoping involved.  I have read Sullivan’s book, and I have written up a review of it for Intercollegiate Review that I am about to send in, so I will abstain from commenting in any depth right now.  Let us just say that someone who talks of putting the Gospels or church authority “under scrutiny” has got things rather the wrong way round, when what we are called to scrutinise is nothing other than ourselves first and foremost. 

Imagine being lost in a dark wood with just a map and a flashlight, and thinking that the first order of business is to start banging the flashlight on a rock in order to break it open and see how it works and trying to read the map in the darkness without realising that you have it upside down.  That is Andrew Sullivan’s idea of a rollicking good kind of Christianity.