Dear Joel, Thank you for bearing with my delay as I have been doing two things. First, I have been assembling my thoughts on this complicated issue, and secondly, I have been looking for an opportunity to lay them out in systematic fashion. In the letters that follow, I am not assuming that every issue …
Benedict XVIII
I have opened a new category for my blog here. Under Roman or Catholic? I hope to post my thoughts on the Roman Catholic Church (in the form of letters to a friend thinking about returning to Rome). While some of these letters are not fictional, some of them will simply be in that form …
Authoritative Story
In a lecture delivered in 1989, N.T. Wright offered a number of provocative thoughts on what it means to say that the Bible is authoritative. While I want to offer some criticisms of some of his points and/or applications, I should say at the outset that some of his points were superb, and were exactly …
Marriage as Manifest Glory XIX
Introduction: Learning is awkward. Even assuming good motives, and a desire to learn, and no rebellion against God’s pattern, there are still difficulties. G.K. Chesterton once said that the “chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.” Couple this with the fact that what we must unlearn is frequently what …
Takes the Breath Away
Bob Dylan once said that you don’t have to be a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing. Seeing that there is a concerted campaign of harassment against private education in Moscow is about as difficult as one of those test-your-smarts questions in kids’ magazines. Three triangles and a circle in a row. …
Government in the Church
The Lord Jesus has established a government in His church. A few in history have attempted to abandon all government in favor of the “leading of the Spirit” but such attempts always end in anarchy or in a submerged or disguised government. Such attempts spring from a lack of understanding the Word. The Lord has …
Provisional Thinking and Dogmatism
“Over against both of these positions, I propose a form of critical realism. This is a way of describing the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence ‘realism’), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the …
New Hearts or Old?
“We are not born again because we have repented and believed. Rather, we have repented and believed because God has given us the new birth. If our old hearts were capable of repentance and belief, then we would not need new hearts” (Future Men, p. 139).
Poking Fun
Dear visionaries, My faults are many and grievous. But I am not guilty of all vices, and one of the places where I do just fine is in not taking offense when someone “pokes fun.” If you stick your head through the canvas in the booth at the county fair, you can’t act surprised when …
Altruism and Self-Interest
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 43 A businessman cannot function without a prudent sense of self-interest, and one of the reasons many Christians struggle in their oversight of business is that they do not understand this virtue properly. And the reason they do not understand …