This particular version of this particular thread, which generally draws a lot of interest, began with my observation that Jesus taught with authority, and not like the scribes. I want to return to this for a moment. If we acknowledge, as all Christians must, that any given action that could be righteously done could also …
Hubrizo Like Crazy
“One of the experts in the law answered him, “Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us also.” Jesus replied, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them. “Woe to you …
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. …
The Centrality of Peripherals
Incarnation trumps abstraction. The things we do every day, the things we do all the time, matter to us far more than those things we might think (or say) are crucial elements in our worldview. This explains, among other things, why the worship wars go the way they do in church. Someone could attend our …
Getting Miered Down
For many observers, the conservative revolt over the Miers nomination to the Supreme Court was out of the blue. But for those paying attention, it is not hard to explain at all. For a number of years, movement conservatives have been holding their noses (and largely keeping quiet) over lots of issues — the appalling …
When And What To Plunder From the Egyptians
Whenever believers confront unbelieving cultures, the perennial question arises — what can and cannot be taken from them and used by us in the advancement of the kingdom? One of the most enduring illustrations of what to do here is the image given by one of the early church fathers, which is that of plundering …