"Ultimate reality" is the highest, deepest, eternal, unchangeable, source and ground of everything we see, touch, and experience with our five senses. It's that which gives being and meaning to everything finite, mortal, changeable. It's also that toward which we creatures look and live - whether we know it or not - our telos; our goal and purpose.

Human beings are special, of higher dignity and worth than other animals, because they're created in God's own image and likeness. It's actually true humanism.

Scripture is our norming norm and tradition is our normed norm and that in a doctrinal controversy Scripture alone has absolute veto power while The Great Tradition (orthodox doctrine) has a vote but not a veto.

We're creatures, so we have limits.

Only a loving and covenant-making personal God can provide humans with unique dignity, worth, and rights. Blind nature cannot do that. So, for the Christian, "secular humanism" is an oxymoron.

We, including many Christians, read the Bible through "eyes" conditioned by, and even accommodated to, modern Western culture plus the influences of messages and ideas from other cultures that are alien to the worldview of the biblical writers. Therefore, in order fully to understand the Bible and allow the Bible to absorb the world (rather than the world - culture - absorb the Bible) we must practice an "archaeology" of the biblical writers' implicit, assumed view of reality.

Today we cannot assume people, even all Christians, understand the Bible's implicit, underlying view of reality. We have to dig it out and show it to people, including Christians, and ask them to "see reality as this" rather than "as that" - where "that" refers to any number of unbiblical ideas about reality.