Absolutism is a two-edged sword, and yet we would prefer to have it be a more comfortable one-edged sword. Epistemic certainty is an Enlightenment idol — men who want to know absolutely have fallen to the ancient temptation offered in Eden, which is, ye shall be as God. Only God knows absolutely. But the fact …
Old Friends On The Road
Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! Lord, You have favored this land, You have brought back the captivity of Jacob, Restoring the exiles. You forgave the iniquity of Your people, And You have covered up all their sin. Think for a moment. You took away all Your wrath, …
Why Didn’t Jesus Stay?
We cannot be reminded too often that the very center of our faith is a grotesque murder. Not only was Jesus murdered, but He was murdered in a miscarriage of justice—the murder was perpetrated by the very authorities assigned by God to prevent that kind of thing. We must not be permitted to gloss over …
Trying to Twist Away
When children are spanked, even in love and affection, they often twist and turn to get away from the point of pain. In the long run, they only make their situation far more difficult. We are trying to worship the Lord in such a way as to deal with our various sins and follies. The …
Digory and the Postmodern Witch
When Digory refused to listen to the witch, it was because he had promised. He had learned certain things that little boys always ought to learn, and this includes little emergent boys. Not only had he learned that you should keep your promises, he had also learned not to steal, which had come in handy …
One Other Thing
I should have said one other thing about the two-fold authority of Scripture. It is not the case that the raw propositional truth has the two-fold authority (both rerum and verborum), but rather that only Scripture in the original languages had that two-fold authority. To translate a Scriptural passage into “pure” propositional notation would result …
Declarative Sentences and the Spirit
The problem is an obvious one for Protestant Christians, who place such a high value on translating the Scriptures from the original Hebrew and Greek into the vernacular. What does it mean to translate something? What does it mean to translate something that has divine authority? And doesn’t this require a propositional meaning distinct and …
Honest Prices
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 64 “A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight” (Prov. 11:1). Doing business biblically presents many challenges. One of them is to resist the prevailing dishonesty in many portions of the business world …
Propositions Rock
All right — we need to talk for a moment about propositions, and tie it in with the point of my previous post. Emergent advocates consistently oppose the importance of “story” to the land of arid “propositions,” whence they are departing. I have argued that this is simply a profound category confusion — stories are …
Painting the Couch
One of the most exasperating features of emergent church thinking is the constant tendency to set propositional statements over against narrative. Abandoning propositions, they are trying to recover the idea of pastor as story-teller. As I have pointed out before, this is like abandoning verbs and nouns in favor of sentences, or lumber for houses. …