In American culture today, there is a deep inability to communicate across the barricades, especially when the gospel interfaces with politics, the media and academia. In On Common Ground, theologian and proto-apologist John C. Rankin offers six biblical principles to bridge the values gap between believers and skeptics. The six principles: the power to give, the power to live in the light, the power of informed choice, the power to love hard questions, the power to love enemies and the power to forgive are biblically comprehensive and rooted in timeless truth. And when used as the shared language in faith dialogue, Rankin contends, they allow believers and skeptics to move forward together on common ground. Rankin suggests that biblical theology in its essence deals with ethics, how we treat each other and is intensely practical for individuals and communities. The biblical story line is set between two bookends the power to give and the power to forgive. Or to put it another way: God gives, we blow it, and God still gives to us in spite of ourselves, which means, he forgives. These bookends are evident when looking at the six pillars of biblical power pillars that give us the key to understanding the whole Bible: 1. The power to give. 2. The power to live in the light. 3. The power of informed choice. 4. The power to love hard questions. 5. The power to love enemies. 6. The power to forgive. Too often we look at the Bible through the prism of doctrinal structure. But first the Bible is a story line the only fully true story ever told. This story line is the history of God s relationship and conversation with us, and ours with one another. Only when we fully understand this story line and live according to its premises will true power emerge in our lives. For those of us who are believers in the gospel, living out the six pillars produce in us honest lives in the presence of all people believers and skeptics alike. Even a burned-out skeptic of the Bible finds these pillars attractive to the human soul. John C. Rankin was raised an agnostic Unitarian prior to his conversion to evangelical faith in 1967. Educated in theology and public policy at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and Harvard Divinity School, he founded the Theological Education Institute (www.teihartford.com) in 1990 and the Mars Hill Forum, which hosts tough questions from leading skeptics on university campuses, in 1993. Rankin calls himself a proto-apologist, seeking to be a roto-tiller in the toughest soil I can find so that the seed of God’s Word can take root.