As we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we must remember that God is dealing with us here. What we do, what we eat, what we drink, alters us. It does not do this through magical means, but it is done through the power of the Holy Spirit, as He deals us covenantally. One of the …
The Church Is Like . . .
You have perhaps heard the old saying that the church is not a rest home for saints, but rather a hospital for sinners. Like everything else that is true, we must guard against holding this truism falsely. We are the covenant people of God, and we should want to live faithfully before Him over the …
Not Having the Right Categories
“Westerners have become accustomed to think of good and bad government in terms of tyranny versus liberty. In Middle-Eastern usage, liberty or freedom was a legal not a political term. It meant one who was not a slave, and unlike the West, Muslims did not use slavery and freedom as political metaphors” (Bernard Lewis, What …
Mud and Stone of This Earth
“But we have also seen that he [Taylor] was a Puritan after all, that like his fellow Puritans he practiced his religion through metaphoric poetry linking earth and heaven. Like them he saw God’s glory immanent in the world and the flesh, and he never presumed to ignore either or to abjure metaphor. Like them …
False Impressions
[Fairy tales are] “accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world …
Tradition is Contrary to Our Historic Practice
“The unthinking fundamentalist wants to reduce the whole problem to a very simple equation — ‘just stick to the Bible.’ His belief is that fooling around with traditions in the first place is what cause the problem. We may call this the ‘tradition as demon’ position. ‘We don’t believe in tradition. We have never believed …
Locating the Source
“The causes of our divisions from ourselves may be covered under three headings: 1. Dividing principles. Sometimes our divisions come down from our heads to our our heart. 2. Dividing distempers. Sometimes they go up from our hearts to our heads. 3. Dividing practices. These come from head and heart; they foment and increase both” …
Some More Demands from Art
A couple films showing this year at Sundance are poised to top the charts . . . that is, if there are charts for which devotees of one-handed magazines are allowed to vote. Mouthbreathers everywhere, beads of earnest sweat on their foreheads, will no doubt blog their early a.m. approbation of this documentary about bestiality. …
Thanks for the Opportunity to Respond
Editor, In your last issue of The Confessional Presbyterian, I read an article by R. Scott Clark entitled “Baptism and the Benefits of Christ.” There are many issues here, but I would like for reasons of space to limit myself to two. The first has to do with Dr. Clark’s straw man representation of the …
Not An Economic Powerhouse
“Later attempts to catch up with the Industrial Revolution fared little better . . . According to a World Bank estimate, the total exports of the Arab world other than fossil fuels amount to less than those of Finland, a country of five million inhabitants” (Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? p. 47).