“In the limited vocabulary of the architect, there are only a few terms available to express an attitude toward the transcendent, and the roof is one of the more important. The flat roof was an article of faith with the modern architect, no matter what the practical consequences . . . Whether it leaked or …
Public Rebuke
“If the offenses are of that nature that a public rebuke is necessary in respect of the circumstances and aggravations thereof, it is not to be neglected. Yet it is not necessary that every offense that comes to the eldership, yea even these that are known to many, should at all times be brought to …
Thinking From the Chest
“The Scriptures speak of God as the One who tries the ‘heart and reins’ of men. Our metaphor for this would be God testing the ‘head and heart,’ the reason and emotions. But in the ancient Hebrew metaphor, the heart was the seat of the intellect, and the reins — the kidneys — were the …
The Surrender is Settled
In the previous post, I was (what is it we do these days? I forget) interfacing with James Smith’s book Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? This book is part of a series by Baker Academic, a series called “The Church and Postmodern Culture.” In the series preface, this is what we read: “How should concrete, in-the-pew …
What We Need Around These Parts Is A Good Dose of Van Til
I recently spent a goodish bit of time being exasperated by Richard Rorty, who doesn’t believe that we should view nature in the mirror of some glassy essence in our brains, which is fine with me, but he then spends many, many pages holding up his mirror for us to see philosophy in. But if …
Last Night’s Discussion
Last night I had a discussion on the radio with a fellow Christian and Christ Church critic, Keely Emerine-Mix. This was my opening statement, more or less, but, because I ran out of time, I did not get all the way through it. For those who want to check it out, the entire discussion can …
A Worldview Wheel 3
Introduction: We are considering in turn each of the “spokes” on our worldview wheel. Thus far we have seen how all four spokes work together, and we have considered the spoke of revealed and objective propositional truth. We come now to the second spoke, which is the way we actually live. The Text: “But be …
God Continues to Deal With Us
Since we have begun the practice of weekly communion, sometime ago now, we have periodically said that one of the blessings that comes from this is the identification of sins, the flushing out of sins. This is never pleasant, and we are sometimes tempted to think that before the sins were revealed to us, they …
Learning the Whole Psalter
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 …