Here are some thoughts by Christopher on the efficacy of prayers for his cancer. The obvious conclusion is that we need to double down.

Here is a web site that looks like a promising bundle of theological resources. Kudos to the guys who got this going again.

"Burning lust that overflows is not an example of men getting away from God (as they like to tell themselves); it is an example of the wrath of God catching up with men" (Fidelity, p. 31).

"So why don't churches routinely conduct annual reviews of their ministers? Because ministers don't want to be told that their preaching is disorganized, hard to follow, irrelevant, and poorly reasoned" (Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach, p. 34).

Suppose that an American daisy-cutter bomb had been dropped on Mecca, and blew up their sacred rock. Suppose further that through a series of circumstances, a Southern Baptist gentleman proposed building a Christian chapel on the lip of that crater. We would be justified in suppposing this man to be any number of things, but one of the things he emphatically would not be is a moderate.

The fact that he would not be a moderate would not make him a terrorist, of course. It would just make him not a moderate. He would be doing something provocative, and he would be doing it on purpose. If he denied being provocative, this would simply make him a dishonest non-moderate. A real moderate would have stayed home.

Our secularists tend not to see this because they have made the fatal mistake of believing their own propaganda. All religious differences, they think, are mere denominational differences, and they are prepared to unbend liberally when it comes to such denominational distinctives, considered as such. They say, for example, that a free country should allow their Christians to debate whether to baptize with heads upstream or downstream. And then, with a patronizing pat on the head, we are sent on our way in order to debate how many angels our faith community thinks could fit on the head of a pin.

Religion, to them, is false, irrelevant, and pie-in-the-skyish. That being the case, they will treat forays by believers as believers into the political realm as blasphemous outrage, or as impossible contradiction. As a general rule of thumb, it is an outrage when Christians do it, and impossible when Muslims do it.

"At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore" (Ps. 16: 11)

The Basket Case Chronicles #10

“But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor. 1:24-25).

Left to themselves, the Jews seek after a sign. Left to themselves, the Greeks pursue what they call wisdom. But fortunately, in the grace of the gospel, the very last thing that God would do is leave us to ourselves. But notice here what God is not leaving us with—He does not abandon us to the sinfulness of seeking supernatural omens, or the stupidity of the philosophy class. When we think of sin, we tend to think of strippers and cocaine, while the apostle Paul thought of images of Jesus appearing in the clouds or the collected works of Aristotle. God’s wisdom cannot be made to line up easily with what respectable people believe to be good and wise.

When God is foolish, it is wiser than we are. When God is weak, He is far stronger than we. The reason we are constantly surprised is that not only are we foolish and weak, but we are also very slow learners.

Nancy and I are coming to Virginia about a month from now, and looking forward to it. You can check out the conference info here.

"The desire which we as Christians must battle is not just a 'plain vanilla,' morally neutral, biological desire for sex. We are fallen creatures, and even as Christians our redemption is not yet completed. We must still deal with the fact that we will confront desires, coming from within ourselves, which are attractive to us by virtue of the fact that they are prohibited by God. Paul does not tell us to restrain our sexual desires because, if we don't watch it, they could be put to a wrong use. These members of ours on the earth are not morally neutral; they must be mortified -- put to death" (Fidelity, p. 25).

"What the contemporaneists and emergents have not yet considered, however, is the possibility that such moribund churches are so not because they are doing the wrong things, but because they are doing them incompetently" (Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach, p. 32).

In the beginning are the words. Behind and underneath every civilization are the foundational words. Those words can be false and idolatrous, but when they are believed, they still serve in a foundational way. When they are not believed, that culture has entered a sacrificial crisis. Smoke still ascends from their temples, but no one really believes in the gods anymore. The sacrifices don't work, and the populace continues to unravel. "If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (Ps. 11:3).

Then others come, preaching strange gods, and there is pressure to make a switch -- because human cultures have a deep and undeniable need for efficacious sacrifice. Abandoning ineffectual gods, proven to be such, for ineffectual gods, not yet shown up as failures, can seem like an improvement.

The Ground Zero mosque is an opening gambit, an appeal to secularist America. If Allah is God, then follow Him. And of course, the materialist laughs this idea to scorn -- look at the relative size of the armies and navies, look at the GDPs, look at our cultural achievements. And so the importance of faith is neglected. What is greater -- momentous achievements with no faith following, or tiny achievements supported by blind, unyielding faith? Which one will give way to the other. As Chesterton put it, a man who stands for nothing will fall for anything. The same thing goes for cultures.