Theology That Bites Back
“But, Cochlaeus asks, how can we be convinced that Scripture ‘flows from God’ unless we have recourse to the Church’s decree saying that this is so? Calvin brushes this aside as the typical academic question of a man without experience of faith. You might as well ask how one learns to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from sour.”
Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 3
“The apostle Paul lived one of the most thrilling lives ever lived, and yet the good professor seemed to have the ability to present the second missionary journey as something at the same level as watching paint dry.”
My book choice this month is a title with (I assume) limited interest. But since that limited interest group is made up of writers and would-be writers, and because everybody in that group is a sucker for books about books, and books about how to write them, I thought it would be worthwhile to tell …
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Introduction: Back when the coronavirus first came to our shores in a big way, I noticed an immediate defiance in some Christian quarters regarding the magistrate's authority to issue quarantines, ...
“In recommending a program of general reading for preachers, I will not be asking for a recrudescence of what Reinhold Niebuhr called ‘pretty sermons.’ Niebuhr appears to have had in mind not just poetry-laden sermons, or florid sermons, but any sermons of highly refined rhetoric. Niebuhr said he wanted to keep his sermons ‘rough,’ instead, ‘just to escape the temptation of degenerating into an elocutionist.’”
Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. 5
“He had once heard his grandfather say, in reference to his grandmother, that she was the butterfly’s boots, and this was a sentiment that Trevor now thought he understood the deeper meaning of. He had fallen for her voice—that voice!—the day of the rally out in front of the college, and then, when he had actually met her, he had decided within minutes that it would be criminal negligence on his part not to be in hot pursuit. Of course, he must not look as though he was in hot pursuit. Some girls don’t go for that. He ought to look like he was sauntering. Sauntering purposively.”
Some friends have drawn my attention to a piece that N.T. Wright wrote for Time on the coronavirus here. Another friend of mine has already replied to him here, and just like my friend I agree that the article was better than the headline, which was gobsmackingly bad. But the article itself was still a …
Letter to the Editor: What is missing is proportion. The all-or-nothing approach to this problem only creates more problems and worse problems. I work in a hotbed of the Corona virus--Oakland ...
“He might end up pondering with his congregation that kindness and laughter in a home are generationally as contagious as abuse, and that they provide acoustics in which the gospel of grace will sound plausible and resonant, even to the children of preachers.”
Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. 2
