George Herbert “is devoted to the visible church — its ritual, architecture, sacraments — but his theology is Calvinist: he affirms the double predestination (in ‘The Water-course’) and he struggles hard throughout the volume to relinquish any claim to any good thing as emanating from himself” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 25).
Pious for Pay
“There are more secret snares than these, from which we can less easily escape; and of these the worst is the temptation to ministerialism — the tendency to read our Bibles as ministers, to pray as ministers, to get into doing the whole of our religion as not ourselves personally, but only relatively, concerned in …
Our Very Own Massive Contradiction
“No doubt future social historians will find the contradiction between our concern about sexual abuse, on the one hand, and our connivance at and indifference to precocious sexual activity, on the other, as curious as we find the contrast between Victorian sexual prudery and the vast size of the Victorian demimonde” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at …
Men at Church
“Too often the picture of men at church is that of the hapless drone, maneuvered through the doors by a pious wife. He is not exactly spiritual, but he is docile, and that is reckoned to be close enough” (Mother Kirk, p. 236).
Christ Hidden in Your Calling
INTRODUCTION: First we must begin with a statement of our problem. Many glorious truths were recovered in the Reformation, and one of them was the doctrine of vocation. Unfortunately, this is part of our Protestant heritage that we have shamefully neglected, and have almost lost. One of the principal indications that we have lost this …
Let Me Think About It, No
A couple notes. First, please allow me to review what is actually being done to Louisiana Presbytery, all for the sake of getting at Steve Wilkins. And second, I want to explain what I am doing about it here and why. In doing this I am not giving anything away, because for those with a …
Gorgonzola Cheese
Bill Lyle, a member of the Standing Judicial Commission, has posted a comment over at Green Bagginses. Go here, and read comment #8. I read through this comment with great interest. While he doesn’t put the thing quite as starkly as Bob Mattes does, the result is still judicially outrageous. He says: “It will be …
Ransom for Many
As Christians, we must see more than the fact of the cross. We must also come to know and understand the demeanor exhibited by Christ as He went to the cross. This alone enables us to make sense of the glory which follows the cross in the resurrection. “And they were in the way going …
The Beard of Reputation
“But I question, gravely question whether a man who has grossly sinned should be very readily restored to the pulpit . . . Let those who have been shorn by the sons of Ammon tarry at Jericho till their beards be grown; this has often been used as a taunt to beardless boys to whom …
Which Explains a Lot
“The architects thought that modernity was a value that transcended all other virtues; they thought they could wake the country from its nostalgic slumber, dragging it into the twentieth century by pouring what seemed to them the most modern of building materials—reinforced concrete—all over it” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, p. 146).