The contemporary church exhibits an elasticity and divercity of doctrine that at times sits oddly with biblical foundations. The presuppositions that God is and that God has spoken too often give place to the assumed priority of the explanatory competence of human reason. In that, the theology of the church is captive to the thought forms of an Englitenment rationalism on one hand, or the looseness of postmodernist assumptions of individual autonomy on the other. In those respect, theological argument proceeds from man to God, and not--as in its biblically revealed contours--from God to man. The Divine purchase calls the church back to a clear commitment to the gospel of redemption. The kernel of the gospel resides in the apostolic statement that Christ "Purchased the church with his own blood." that ordained accomplishment projects the only remedy for the human condition in the present decaying culture and its intellectual uncertainty and confusion.