We have come to the third Lord’s Day of Advent, and so we continue to prepare our hearts. This is not just a religious festival that we Christians observe. In all that we do in the presence of non-believers, we are making cosmic claims, and we believe them to be true. Put another way, the …
Feeding or Devouring
When we come to this Table in the demeanor of faith, we are not just nourishing ourselves. Rather, the entire Body is being nourished and built up to the extent that various parts of the Body are receiving this gift in true evangelical faith. Coming to the Lord’s Table rightly is not a way for …
A Cinder Block in the Goldfish Bowl
Some time this coming week I may be in the position of defending the relevance of scriptural authority in our contemporary culture wars. If this happens, it will be on a nationally syndicated radio show with a liberal host. I will let you all know time and place if and when the whole thing is …
A Satiric Voice
One of the most frequent questions I have to answer about our ministry here concerns what has come to be called the “serrated edge.” It is such a common question that I wrote a (short) book addressing the question, and explained why a satiric voice in certain settings is not only biblically permissible, but is …
Uncle God
“Our contemporary theism is really a pathetic and sorry affair. We want an avuncular figure in the sky, someone to hand out celestial candies when we are feeling a little blue” (Angels in the Architecture, p. 42).
Christian Books and Porn
A friend recently gave me the very thoughtful present of some gift credit at Hastings, so I toddled off to Hastings to see what I could see. (I wound up getting some blues CDs mostly.) But that is not the point. While there I noticed (again) the very large section of Christian books in the …
Flew the Coop
Just read on a news site that the famous atheist Anthony Flew has become a deist of sorts. He has not come to the Christian faith, or anything like that, but has abandoned a lifetime of naturalism because in his mind the evidence for intelligent design is compelling. While some will try to dismiss this …
Mystic Puddles
“But we moderns have little interest in such redemptions or their results because the Church in our era is slack and effeminate. We do not look at an unbounded northern sky and by analogy see the eternity of God; rather, we look mystically inward to the swamps and standing puddles of our own hearts and …
A Father Forever
In the Bible, personal identity is not primarily a question of some substance inside a man. But each man still has a nature, inherited from his father. So ontology is not a philosophical problem in the Bible, but rather a problem of generation. And when this generation is sinful, the only solution to the problem …
Finite Limitations
“No created intellect can conceive of a single word suitable for God’s most infinite and simple essence. Any word we use to describe God will quickly fall to the ground exhausted–like us, our words fall short of the glory of God. But this does not mean that the use of such words is pointless. We …