You will no doubt notice that all the songs we are singing this morning are old and familiar to us. This is because we are now at the point in our musical reformation where we want to regularly reinforce what we know, and review what we have learned just a few years ago. This is …
Trying to Destroy the West
“But, like the Oedipus Complex, Bauhaus architecture, moral relativism, contraception, deficit spending, the automobile, and cubism, saturation bombing was used as the twentieth century’s revenge on the cultural legacy of the West. It was an attempt to use the power of the West in order to destroy the West.” [E. Michael Jones, Living Machines (San …
You Can Say That Again
“The second thing, to wit, what order and manner is to be observed in the following of public scandals, is not easily determinable, there being such variety of cases in which the Lord exercises the prudence and wisdom of his church officers” (Durham, 53).
Not An All-Purpose Disinfectant
“A Christian worldview does not somehow automatically ‘sanitize’ the world so that we can all go watch any R-rated movie we want now, for any reason we want, because ‘we have a Christian worldview.’ Put bluntly, a Christian worldview is not an excuse for compromised sinning. A Christian worldview is not an all-purpose disinfectant” (The …
A Moon-Sized Crater
I suppose that is a provocative title, but still it is nothing close to the provocative times we live in. Context is everything. Words take their meanings from the times. When certain things are done in a certain way, and at a certain time, there is no way to alter their impact or meaning by …
This Is A Great Mystery
As we meditate on the Word of God that accompanies the sacrament, we have to take care that we pray for the Word to teach us fully, which is to say, richly and mysteriously. You commune with the Lord, one with Him through the agency of the Holy Spirit, and in this communion, this partaking, …
Songs of Harvest Home
We sing before the Lord a new song. As we will sing in the ninety-eighth psalm later today, we do this because He has done great wonders. One of the wonders is the fact we can bring forth deep gratitude for those songs which we used to sing. We cannot want to grow up into …
Machines for Living In
“By the time the rhetoric of modern architecture had been assembled into a modern ideology—let’s say by 1925—the form and the structure of the modern apartment, which was to replace the more traditional one-family dwelling as the preferred dwelling of socialist man, had become full of sociological meaning. Instead of man’s home being his castle, …
Private Discretion
“Scandals that are so circumstanced, and they only, are to be taken notice of by church judicatories as the proper object of church discipline. Hence we may see a great difference between offense as it is the object of private discretion, and as it is the object of church discipline” (Durham, p. 50, emphasis mine).
Trying to Cover the Smell
“A Christian worldview is not a condiment added to a plate full of neutral food in order to flavor it. The faith of our fathers is not an educational afterthought. The ‘potatoes’ always come from somebody’s kitchen. Sometimes Hindus, Muslims, and atheists can be induced to eat Christian potatoes (because the Christian education provided at …