In the comments in the previous post, there were a couple of requests for me to amplify just a tad. So here goes. The NPP wants to say that Second Temple Judaism was fundamentally a religion of grace, contra those folks who tend to see it as a first century version of the monkish merit-mongering …
Two Kinds of Blamelessness
In a recent conversation with a friend about the New Perspective on Paul, we were talking about the center of Sanders’ contribution to that school of thought, the point which N.T. Wright regards as “settled.” This is not to say that Wright agrees with Sanders on everything, of course, and you may insert all manner …
Straight Out of Tennessee Williams
This letter to the editor ran in response to some stuff in our local newspaper about Trinity Fest. My comments are interspersed. “Wilson neither honorable nor brave” This is a title calculated to mortally offend the kind of man that Keely Mix takes me to be. And if I were a strutting embodiment of the …
Faith Alone, Faith Always
The reason there is a crisis in Galatia is because the saints have given the time of day to a teacher or teachers they ought to have ignored. Paul brings this basic problem home to the Galatian believers in a very pointed way. O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey …
Idol Place
“If the desert is the place of demons, the city is the place of idols” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 54).
The Closing of the Islamic Mind
“Not even a prime location at the crossroads of the world could supply an antidote to the slow poison of Islamic obscurantism. The Ottoman interlude concealed and postponed the latent tension between the view of world history as the fulfillment of Islam and its triumph everywhere on the one hand, and the reality of the …
That, and Singing Through Your Nose
“The truth is that Dylan, like most of his generation, learned most of his folk music from records . . . But to folkies bewitched by the blues, roughness epitomized authenticity” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 212).
Aluminum Discipline
“We must beware of a too great reliance on a systematic reconstruction of the various references to discipline in the New Testament. matthew 18 is not a paint-by-numbers kits, and we should not assume that when we get to ‘stage two’ in a discipline process that we are at the second rung of a metal …
The Knowledge Drunk
“Wine is good when it goes to the heart to cheer it, but when it fumes up into the head it makes it giddy. Knowledge is good when the strength of it gets to the heart to comfort it, there to breed good spirits to strengthen it in the ways of holiness. But when it …
The Faith of Jesus
We now come to a discussion of a showdown between Peter and Paul at Antioch. The confrontation, the reasons for it, and the solution to it, are all filled with instruction for us. But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed. For before that …