Introduction What does it mean to be pro-marriage or pro-family, or pro-life? In common parlance, we know what such phrases refer to but even here we must be careful. The basic Christian duty is to be pro-God, and align everything else in accordance with this. When we absolutize things like “life,” “marriage,” or “family,” we …
Marriage As Manifest Glory XXXVI
INTRODUCTION: So we are now considering the question of respect, submission and authority. We have looked at love, sacrifice and authority with regard to husbands, and now we need to reflect on the other side of the coin. Remember that authority in the Christian framework is a Trinitarian thing. Authority gladly surrendered is the foundation …
Good Old Justus
In one sense, postmodernism is far worse than a particular heresy, because at least the old heretics made truth claims. The kind of universal corrosive that postmodernism brings with it affects everything, including the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It rots out lies as well as the truth; but since a lie is a perverse tribute to the …
God Among the Gods
Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! You, O God, stand up in the great congregation, You stand among the mighty ones, And judge the gods themselves. You chide them— “How long will you rule unjustly? How long will you accept wasters into your councils? Think for a moment. …
Worship of the Undefined
We are coming into the presence of our triune God, and we do so in order to worship Him. We are coming to worship Him, and we have not come here to define Him. The Latin word for boundary, or limit, is finis. And so when we define something, we set the boundaries of it. …
God the Killjoy
Many of our liturgical practices and beliefs rest upon a slander of God’s character. We say things about Him that are certainly true in the abstract, but in context they are completely out of whack. For example, in the course of Israel’s religious calendar, God appointed for them one fast day, the Day of Atonement. …
Velveeta Evidence
The president of the University of Idaho has, in a maladroit attempt to avoid controversy, created a controversy. He put out a statement the other day that in the scientific departments of the university, the teaching of Intelligent Design was verboten-idea-kind-of-thing. Science is based on evidence, he said, and then issued a decree from on …
More on Race
Jonah Goldberg over at NRO wants to talk about Bill Bennett again, which is fine. We were all doing well with one of our periodic squabbles over race when the president interrupted with his latest Supreme Court nominee. So back to the squabble. In my previous post on this, I noted that blacks were many …
We Can’t Count That High
We will continue this thread under the heading N.T. Wrights and Wrongs even though we are officially off the trail and thrashing around in the bracken. I appreciated all the questions and comments. We are so naturally oriented to “works” that when we discover that an embryo can be saved apart from any works of …
Cooks Who Feed Only Themselves
The problem with asking questions about the “minimum amount” of orthodoxy it takes to get somebody into heaven is that it treats human beings like machines, and ultimately, it tends to reduce salvation to a matter of works. God saves us by His grace, on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and …