A couple years ago, I started posting a series of notes on the Westminster Confession. But I never finished posting them, I didn’t like the format I was using, and there I was, like the guy with the half-finished tower in the gospels. Not to mention the prospect of having to exposit that stuff about …
History is Organic
“We must also recover a doctrine of generations. Our children grow. They do not grow up in a detached way, as though the twig were unrelated to the branch, which in turn is unrelated to the tree. Our children are not interchangeable ball bearings, able to be placed in different machines across the world; they …
Subversiveness Is Bad?
“When a kid watches the animated movie Shrek, he probably doesn’t know about Carl Jung’s theories of psychological types and the collective unconscious, but he is ingesting them nonetheless through those characters and that story adapted after the Jungian model . . . The screenwriters admit Shrek’s Jungian ideas: ‘The book is very clever, because …
One for the Many
“Caiaphas is stating the same political reason we have given for the scapegoat: to limit violence as much as possible but to turn to it, if necessary, as a last resort to avoid an even great violence. Caiaphas is the incarnation of politics at its best, not its worst. No one has even been a …
A Fourth Decade of Psalms/Psalm 32
Introduction: This is categorized as one of the penitential psalms, but the heading lists it as a maskil, a teaching. In one of the other penitential pslams (51), David vows that as a result of his forgiveness, he will teach sinners the way (51:13). It is quite possible that this pslam is a fulfillment of …
Sensibilities and Powers
Let me begin with an outrageous conclusion, and then try to defend it. This is not usually a good procedure because it just gets everybody’s back up, but if the outrageous conclusion is actually the voice of sweet reason, then why not? Here is the conclusion, in a short series of statments. The only genuine …
Why Not?
Bob Dylan gets in a little grumbling about the music of the kids these days. The apocalypse is here. Take one hundred liberals at random, and between them all, they can come up with 147 kids. Do the same thing with a hundred convervatives, and the number of kids is 208. I can deal with …
The History of the Church Is the Center of World History
“In the providence of God, the kingdom of God was preached in the Greco-Roman world, and Christianity spread, for the most part, north and west. The direction of this movement has changed recently but only in the last century or so. Now the kingdom of God is not to be identified with Western culture, but …
Stories As Preachers
“Movies are finally, centrally, crucially, primarily, only about story. And those stories are finally, centrally, crucially, primarily, mostly about redemption.” (Brian Godawa, Hollywood Worldviews, p. 54).
The Uncooperative Psalmist of Israel
“The victim who speaks in the Psalms seems not in the least ‘moral,’ not evangelistic enough for the good apostles of modern times. The sensibilities of our humanists are shocked . . . The display of violence and resentment ‘so characteristic of the Old Testament’ is deplored, and is seen as a particularly clear indication …