Theology That Bites Back
“In recommending a program of general reading for preachers, I will not be asking for a recrudescence of what Reinhold Niebuhr called ‘pretty sermons.’ Niebuhr appears to have had in mind not just poetry-laden sermons, or florid sermons, but any sermons of highly refined rhetoric. Niebuhr said he wanted to keep his sermons ‘rough,’ instead, ‘just to escape the temptation of degenerating into an elocutionist.’”
Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. 5
“He had once heard his grandfather say, in reference to his grandmother, that she was the butterfly’s boots, and this was a sentiment that Trevor now thought he understood the deeper meaning of. He had fallen for her voice—that voice!—the day of the rally out in front of the college, and then, when he had actually met her, he had decided within minutes that it would be criminal negligence on his part not to be in hot pursuit. Of course, he must not look as though he was in hot pursuit. Some girls don’t go for that. He ought to look like he was sauntering. Sauntering purposively.”
Some friends have drawn my attention to a piece that N.T. Wright wrote for Time on the coronavirus here. Another friend of mine has already replied to him here, and just like my friend I agree that the article was better than the headline, which was gobsmackingly bad. But the article itself was still a …
Letter to the Editor: What is missing is proportion. The all-or-nothing approach to this problem only creates more problems and worse problems. I work in a hotbed of the Corona virus--Oakland ...
“He might end up pondering with his congregation that kindness and laughter in a home are generationally as contagious as abuse, and that they provide acoustics in which the gospel of grace will sound plausible and resonant, even to the children of preachers.”
Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. 2
“It was the kind of family where the young men were expected to go off to school and then to make their own way in the world of great adventures—five years or so was respectable—before coming back and joining the firm in some useful and productive capacity. They were always expected to come back with a dragon head or two, and it was never looked down on if they came back with a beautiful and exotic woman from Ecuador or something. Trevor’s uncle had done that.”
Q. So far you have just been speaking to certain theological truths—God’s sovereignty and God’s goodness, which is good and all. So is it wrong to have practical questions about the authority of quarantines, being a good neighbor, and how to feed your family, and things like that? No, it is not wrong to have …
Lest Anyone Take Umbrage at the Title: I should say at the outset that I am taking care to sharply distinguish two crises, as I have done from the very beginning of this unraveling mess. To those exhausted doctors and nurses who are in the front lines treating those with COVID-19, to those researchers who …
Sermon Video Introduction: In a recent press conference, the president said that his desire was to have our country emerge from this crisis in a matter of weeks, not months, and that it was his ...
“Poets are like preachers: they study how to say a lot in few words.”
Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. xii
