So I am sitting here with my solitary thought — that thought being like a bee in a barn — and I thought to myself, what good is an unblogged thought? If Scott Brown upsets Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate race, I’ll take it. If he turns out to be the vote that defeats …
Warning to Rome
INTRODUCTION:When we fall into the trap of thinking of the Bible as a book to aid us in our personal devotions, we often miss the larger context. We need to remember that this is a letter to a particular church in a particular city, and Paul gave the warning because he saw certain kinds of …
Whatever You Do, Don’t Reify Nothing
When I stand in defense of liberty, as I do, it is fairly easy for those on the Christian left to see and describe this as a concession to, or holdover from, certain Enlightenment ideals, owing more to Adam Smith than to the Pauline sentiment that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is …
Listening to Rosanne Cash
Franke’s last chapter is called “The Many and the One.” It should be called “The Many, the One, and the Excluded.” He wants this whole thing to be a perichoretic dance, to be sure. But before we clasp hands in a mountain meadow, and sing a gentle chorus of inclusivity, we have to do something …
Warriors Not Thugs
“Marry, Sirs, if Merlin who was the Devil’s son was a true King’s man as ever ate bread, is it not a shame that you, being but the sons of bitches, must be rebels and regicides?” (That Hideous Strength). A fight, by its very nature, is not delicate. This is true in spiritual warfare, and …
In Love With This Present World
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) “Do your best to come to me soon. For Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia. Luke alone is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, …
Grace Upon Grace
All Christian living, including the part of Christian living that we call parenting, is supposed to be based on this reality — being before doing. The perennial temptation is to try to scrap our way into being by doing. That is the death trap that the Bible calls “works.” If the Holy Spirit of God …
This Kind of Thought Porridge
Franke begins the next chapter with, “The one truth is, and can only be, expressed in plurality” (p. 115). So that means the sentence bearing that claim, being one, isn’t really true. Of course if we added a sentence saying that truth is sometimes expressed without plurality, then it could have been true. But why …
And From the Department of Creepy . . .
When I first heard the wowza reviews of the eye candy show in Avatar (from what I hear, Pocahantas with Blueskins instead of Redskins), the first thing I thought of was a passage from Lewis who, about seventy years ago, saw all of this coming. How long would it take for bent men to turn …
The Future is the True East
We need to start thinking about church/state relations in eschatological categories. If we think of them in static categories, the Christian church will find it hard to avoid becoming reactionary. That kind of conservatism is the way of death. The Marxists know what they are supposed to be doing right now because they have an …