“Historians whose sympathies are Roman attribute the catastrophe to the Reformation. But if the cause lies in that quarter at all it must be sought in some peculiarity of the Scotch Reformation; for in England the old religion had no such poetical glories to show and the new had many” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in …
Why There is War in the House of War
“In Islamic law there are only two types of nations—a nation that is of the house of Islam or a nation that is of the house of war” (Mark Gabriel, Islam and Terrorism, p. 47).
Turns Out He Was Holding Back
“We turn now to another point in this list of the various things one has to consider in a sermon whether written or extemporary, namely the place of humour in preaching . . . What makes all these things difficult is that they are natural gifts, or the place of the natural gifts, in this …
The Moral Conscience Has a Chainsaw
“What they got—and by extension what the nation that supported them got—was something that completely surpassed their intentions, but a something which nonetheless substantiated the moral law in a way they could not have foreseen and which they probably would still not admit. To recapitulate the past forty years of film history, which was in …
Jury-Rigged Women
“The answer is that we do not want feminine leadership; we want more feminine leadership. The men in our pulpits for many years have been simply jury-rigged women; when the request come to bring in the real thing, on what principle will the request be denied? We cannot say that we must have masculinity in …
Filling Up the Outline
“Charles Haddon Spurgeon, that great preacher, did not write out his sermons in full; he just prepared and used a skeleton” (Lloyd-Jones, Preachers and Preaching, p. 214).
Slender Assurance
“Western media have poked fun at the Muslim understanding of Paradise (heaven)—virgins for men to enjoy and so forth—but it is much more significant to recognize that dying in jihad is the only way a Muslim can be assured of entering Paradise at all” (Mark Gabriel, Islam and Terrorism, p. 29).
Bait and Switch
“Liberal politics becomes first the incitation to sexual vice, then the colonization of the procreative powers that are indissolubly associated with sexuality, and finally the political mobilization of the consequent guilt in an all-encompassing system that gives new meaning to the term totalitarian” (E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id, p. 221).
Evil “Sinlessness”
From the prologue we might have expected John to begin his “argument proper” with a discourse on the incarnation of Christ. But although his preamble begins with a strong assertion of the Incarnation, when he begins to interact with the teaching of antichrist, he begins at another place entirely. He begins with the moral issue. …
Elizabethan Verve
“They talked more readily than we about large universals such as death, change, fortune, friendship, or salvation; but also about pigs, loaves, boots, and boats. The mind darted more easily to and fro between that mental heaven and earth: the cloud of middle generalizations, hanging between the two, was then much smaller. Hence, as it …