When Jesus comes to His own hometown, He is rejected by the people there. After this, He sends out His disciples to preach on His behalf, but before they return we hear a parenthetical explanation of the death of John the Baptist. “And he went out from thence, and came into his own country; and …
Deep Roots
“My contention [is] that the poetics of much seventeenth-century religious lyric derives primarily from Protestant assumptions about the poetry of the Bible and the nature of the spiritual life” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 5)
Double Witness
“This brings us at last to the fifth aspect of Christian witness, which concerns the preacher . . . We may summarize the biblical view of Christian witness by saying that it is borne before the world by the Father to the Son through the Spirit and the Church . . . This double witness …
Religion of Force
“Clearly Islam is a religion of force which denies basic freedom. It may not be politically correct to say so, but pretending that the Quran is a pacifist document and that Islam has a consistent track record of peace and tolerance is either foolish or deceitful” (Peter Hammond, Slavery, Terrorism & Islam, p. 46).
Don’t Know What We Think Anymore
“Thanks to the sexual revolution, current confusions are manifold. In a society that forms sexual liaisons with scarcely a thought, a passing suggestive remark can result in a lawsuit; the use of explicit sexual language is de rigeur in literary circles, but medical journals fear to print the word ‘prostitute’ and use the delicate euphemism …
Imagine
“In the ancient world, it took some explaining to show the, in the command to love our neighbor, a despised alien fell under the biblical definition of neighbor. But in the modern world, it takes some explaining to show that our neighbors are our neighbors” (Mother Kirk, p. 224).
Through a Child’s Eyes
Quite a revealing conversation. Many years ago, David Chilton took his son Nathan to a special service at an area church. The ensuing conversation was really something.
Jupiterian Amillennialism
Darryl Hart is easy to read, but, in another sense, he is very hard to read. His second chapter “Whose Freedom, Which Liberty?” is a treasure trove of historical information, but his discussion also includes, it must be said, an astonishing oversight. I don’t know what — other than an amillennialism that appears to have …
Efficacious Sacrifice
Introduction to Sacrifice We now come the area where we are going to have the most difficulty with Girard’s approach—but not so much in what he sees throughout the ancient world, but in how far he extends it, and what as a result he excludes from the atonement of Christ. He has a great deal …
All Together Now
We have a tremendous privilege here—two congregations are seated together, partaking of the Lord’s Supper together. This is an emblem, a sign, a small statement of a much more glorious statement—one that actually occurs in the heavenly realms all the time. In the power of the Spirit, all the churches of Christ throughout the world …