One of the ways that we avoid biblical balance in speaking is by assuming some kind of distance between truth and kindness. But Scripture says, “Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart” (Prov. 3:3). Merciful kindness and truth go together. They are …
And I Will Fill It
As we seek to be brought to maturity through this Table, by the Lord who presides over this Table, we must take care to head His teaching. The Word always accompanies the sacrament, and as we sit at this table, we do not sit in silence. The Lord from His position at the head of …
Part of the Temple Wall
God is at work in our midst, and when God works in a fallen world, He does two things. The first is a work of tearing down, of shaking, of demolishing that which rests upon the wisdom and knowledge of carnal man. He throws down the work of the fleshly man, He throws down the …
The People Had a Mind to Work
In the latter part of the Old Testament, some of the characters and dates start to run together for us, and it is sometimes hard to keep the details straight. If you couple this with the general ignorance about secular history of this time, the result—even for Bible readers—is a random collection of historical facts …
One Kind of Satire
“The Juvenalian approach can be harsh or buoyant. When Jesus describes His adversaries as vipers, the tone is a straightforward denunciation. But if someone were to describe a bureaucrat as one asleep at his desk so long that one side of his head was flat, this would be Juvenalian also — the point being most …
One Other Thing
I should have said one other thing about the two-fold authority of Scripture. It is not the case that the raw propositional truth has the two-fold authority (both rerum and verborum), but rather that only Scripture in the original languages had that two-fold authority. To translate a Scriptural passage into “pure” propositional notation would result …
Declarative Sentences and the Spirit
The problem is an obvious one for Protestant Christians, who place such a high value on translating the Scriptures from the original Hebrew and Greek into the vernacular. What does it mean to translate something? What does it mean to translate something that has divine authority? And doesn’t this require a propositional meaning distinct and …
Honest Prices
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 64 “A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight” (Prov. 11:1). Doing business biblically presents many challenges. One of them is to resist the prevailing dishonesty in many portions of the business world …
Propositions Rock
All right — we need to talk for a moment about propositions, and tie it in with the point of my previous post. Emergent advocates consistently oppose the importance of “story” to the land of arid “propositions,” whence they are departing. I have argued that this is simply a profound category confusion — stories are …
Painting the Couch
One of the most exasperating features of emergent church thinking is the constant tendency to set propositional statements over against narrative. Abandoning propositions, they are trying to recover the idea of pastor as story-teller. As I have pointed out before, this is like abandoning verbs and nouns in favor of sentences, or lumber for houses. …