Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! Within my heart, the wicked strut, They have no fear of God at all, Before their eyes, they have no fear. His eyes can flatter, and they do, He flatters his own soul with lies, He does …
God is Great, God is Good
One of the great temptations that confronts believers is that of accepting slanderous caricatures about God. We will be considering this in greater detail in the message today, but it is a point that, frankly, needs to be stated again and again. The wicked say that God is going to rip us off, and so …
Voting With Bread and Wine
This event is a public ritual. It is a sacred meal at the center of the new city, the City that God is establishing in the earth. It is a potent meal, but it is not potent in the way a nuclear reactor is, or a great turbine engine is, or a profound magic spell. …
Some Ligonier Links
The lawsuit against “Frank Vance” has been dropped. Here is the statement by Ligonier, and another one by Tim Dick. Because certain things were alleged about the treatment of Don Kistler, his statement is here. HT: Justin Taylor
Tone Check
One of the more telling points that Peter Leithart makes against desiccated theology is this one: “Theology is a ‘Victorian’ enterprise, neoclassically bright and neat and clean, nothing out of place. Whereas the Bible talks about hair, blood, sweat, entrails, menstruation and genital emissions . . . Ponder these questions: Do theologians talk about the …
Postdrunkenness
The second chapter of Leithart’s Against Christianity is “Against Theology.” There are three aspects of this chapter that I would like to comment on. The first is the troublesome matter of timeless truths. When many conservative Christians hear any kind of critique of timeless truths, the automatic assumption is that some form of relativism is …
A Fourth Decade of Psalms/Psalm 36
Introduction: This is a psalm that clearly contrasts the wicked with the righteous, but it is not a psalm of imprecation. An imprecatory prayer is when we ask God to deal with the wicked in a particular way. This is an “oracle” about the nature of transgression and righteousness; it is teaching, not a request. …
The Man Ain”t Got No Culture
“Culture, like religion, is a name given from outside to activities which are not themselves interested in culture at all, and would be ruined the moment they were. I do not mean that we are never to talk of things from the outside. But when the things are of high value and very easily destroyed, …
Foundational Gratitude
“A biblical aesthetic requires that true creativity be built upon an inheritance. Perpetual revolution is as destructive to the arts as it is to civil order” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 158).
Dying Daily
“[T]he dependence of human culture on revenge and victimage is too fundamental not to survice the elimination of the most grossly physical forms of violence, the actual murder of the victim. If the Judeo-Christian ferment is not dead, it must be engaged in an obscure struggle against deeper and deeper layers of the essential complicity …