“Simply presenting the truth of God in a computer printout fashion, without the passion, life, satire, love and emotion found in Scripture, is a way of being unfaithful to that content. Style is far more than the simple decoration of propositions. Style (with satire as an important part of this) should be woven throughout every …
Just Go Home
A little boy with his loyalties intact is one who might think his sister is ugly, but he will not countenance any other boy outside the family saying so. McLaren has this backwards. Whenever outsiders are around, he has a desperate need to put distance between himself and his people, and this is the chapter …
Merry Christmas 2005
Just a few personal notes about a wonderful Christmas. This year, because Christmas fell on the Lord’s Day, we had to spread our normal activities out over a couple days, in order to make room for two worship services within eighteen hours. We normally have a Christmas Eve service, which we did this year, but …
Christmas Sunrise
And the evening and the morning were the eighth day. We should not be surprised at the pattern of darkness and then light, a pattern which we see not only in the creation of the world, but also in the re-creation of all things. And the beginning of the re-creation of all things is what …
Christmas Eve Prayer
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, amen. Our Father and God, our gracious Lord, we gather before You now as a grateful people. We have been forgiven all our sins against You, and we have been given the gift of forgiving others their sins against us. We thank …
Brown Theonomy
I almost titled this post “Green Theonomy,” but when Ahab brought in the worship of the green god Baal to help out the fertility of Israel, one of the first things that happened was that it did not rain for three years, and Israel turned crispy brown. What is printed up in the prospectus is …
Cafeteria Catholicism
When C.S. Lewis undertook to describe “mere” Christianity, he stated that he had no intention of discussing, for example, the subject of Mary. Few subjects had, in his view, the capacity for derailing the train of Charity than this one did. But he did not just sidestep the question. He noted that for devout Roman …
Macbeth’s Nihilism
“‘It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.’ This is one of the most eloquent nihilistic speeches of all time. Macbeth no longer has anything to live for; time itself is empty, void of hope or regret, merely an objective succession of moments. Macbeth experiences the narrative of …
Scissors and Paste Hermeneutics
“But this begs the question: What standard are we using to say that we should imitate this part of Christ’s demeanor and refuse to imitate that part of it? What standard do we use to assemble this hierarchy of verbal values” Why do we say, ‘Imitate Christ in His kindness to the tax gatherers, but …
No Place But The Mall
I promise I won’t blog anything about Brian McLaren on Christmas Day. Apart from that, the only thing to say is that his next chapter is on Methodism, and coincidentally, so is mine! McLaren has a good eye (as all adversaries tend to have) for how belief in objective truth goes to seed. As Chesterton …