In his book Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis argues that the value of a book is to be measured by how many times a reader returns to it. If a book is simply a consumption item, then it should be evaluated as such, which is to say that it is not valued very highly. It …
A Holy Ghost Mashup
At the beginning of his Republocrat, Carl Trueman says quite rightly “that religious conservatism does not demand unconditional political conservatism.” The word conserve is a transitive verb, and there is no virtue or vice in any transitive verb. So you love, but what do you love? God? Ice cream? Child porn? The church you were …
Unitarian Sexuality
“And all men, single or married, should recognize that solitary sex is not the normative biblical pattern. Recalling that the love between a man and woman is a picture of Christ and the church, we should note that, quite apart from the moral and self-discipline issues involved, masturbation is lousy theology” (Fidelity, p. 113).
Don’t Toy with the Text
“Moderation is not the virtue of many. If one man casts a sprinkling of the salt of wit into his sermon straightway some half idiotic brother must set the people grinning all the sermon through. If one, to whom it is natural, is so carried away by his earnestness that his action becomes at time …
The Holy Spirit and Sermon Prep
We must first smite and slay the extempore bias. From at least the time of Rousseau, we have been taught that that which is spontaneous is that which is honest, fresh, sincere, and untrammeled. On the other end, we have been taught that that which is prepared beforehand is stiff and insincere. But like many …
Pulpit Sins
Pulpit sins can be divided into two general categories — sins of attitude and sins of delivery. Mechanics of the pulpiteering arts want to reduce everything to the latter, but the real adjustments in our day have to begin with the former. This is nothing less than the classic Pauline division between credenda and agenda, …
Preaching and Cultural Transformation
Early on in Moby Dick, Melville has this great statement about preaching, comparing it to the bow of a ship. “What could be more full of meaning? — for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm …
What Preaching Is
Preaching is the authoritative declaration of the Word and will of God, with the intention of revealing Christ to the hearers. Christ is seen through a window, and not painted on the wall. The medium of the preacher is to be Windex, not oil base paint. This definition has three components — the manner, the …
Life Outside the Confession
The hurly burly of life is exasperating to the tidy-minded, and the tidy-minded always want to carve out a niche where that exasperation can be ameliorated. That carved out niche is an artificial world where the rules can be enforced — as they can be enforced in a chess game. For Reformed Christians who are …
That Half Pint Nietzsche
Modern secular academics are like the benign nihilists back in the early sixties who taught the next generation all sorts of cool stuff, which the younger radicals then went on to apply, much to the consternation of their mentors. Some postmodernists are like those radicals, being actual anarchists who want to burn the place down. …