“When the people of God are praying to God, the one offering up prayers on their behalf should not start (or continue) preaching to the people. If a pastor did not get his last point of the sermon in, he must not shoehorn it into the closing prayer. The one praying should never forget who …
What Makes Men Go
“I think I may say that, in most men, will is the axle and lust and passions are the wheels whereupon almost all their actions are carried” (Burroughs, Irenicum, p. 197).
Who’s Theo?
I have been occupied with an unusual number of responsibilities the last several weeks, and so have not gotten to everything I need to. Responsibilities are like grapes; they come in bunches. One of the things I have needed to do is finish my review of Crunchy Cons — there are only two chapters left. …
Liturgicide
For those who want to do it, one of the best devices for hiding from God is something called liturgy. I say this as one advocating liturgical reform in the Church, and as one who has taught repeatedly that liturgy is inescapable. But developed liturgy, researched liturgy, biblical liturgy, remains a snare. A certain kind …
These Are Your People
We are here primarily to eat and drink. This do, our Lord said. Now it is important for us to remember certain things as we do this, of course, but we are not here primarily to remember. We can do that without the bread and wine. We should of course be clean from all known …
Whoa
A little less than ten years ago, we had quite a thunderstorm head toward our house, coming from the southwest. It was a thunder-bumper of magnificent proportions. It was the kind of thing the Midwest would not need to be ashamed of. Our family started out sitting on the front porch, watching it come our …
The Argument from Gratitude
Students of apologetics are familiar with some of the traditional arguments for the existence of God – the teleological argument from design, the cosmological argument from first cause, and so on. I would like to suggest another one. I do not really know what to call it, but the argument is directed against one of …
Apropos of Nothing
In the tension-filled room full of systematic theologians and biblical theologians, it is perilously easy to juxtapose “timeless truths” to “story.” But this is not necessary, and this is another plea to all get along. It should go without saying that I affirm what the Reformed systematicians have distilled out behind their magisterial barn. And …
Oriented by the Second Coming
We rarely notice our bones, and consequently, we rarely notice what is in them. Certain assumptions have been with us in the West for so many centuries now that we readily hold that this is just “how things are.” We think it is all so obvious, forgetting that our culture at one time was taught …
Not All “One True Gods” Are the One True God
“The proponents of an ‘Ecumenical Jihad,’ from President George W. Bush and Professor Forte to a Christian conservative like Peter Kreeft, share two fallacies. Their faulty understanding of Islamic theology leads them to imagine that ‘Allah’ is more or less interchangeable with the ‘God’ of other monotheists. Their incomplete understanding of the phenomenon of secular …