“We must indeed learn how to fight for nature, not by means of nature. Natural affections by themselves do not empower us to engage on behalf of nature. But anyone who cannot identify the crackle of envy in antisemitism, or the smell of sulfur that wafts off of it, is not qualified for pastoral ministry” (American Milk and Honey, p. xv).
Americanitas
Introduction: So this post is the last post of NQN 2024, and as the calendar would have it, it is also the day just before Thanksgiving. In the spirit of both Thanksgiving and NQN, I intend to write ...
Yes, I Said Hot Pot
“Some might say, in defense of their idolatrous commitment to an absolutist view of tribal identity, that Scripture tells us to stick to the bounds of our appointed habitation (Acts 17:26)—as though this exercise of God’s sovereignty applied only to remote northern villages in Finland, or to White Town, Oklahoma. But God’s sovereignty in this applies equally to Brooklyn, that hot pot of jumbled ethnicities.”
American Milk and Honey, p. xv
Letters In the Shadow of Antioch
Letter to the Editor: Your dad was friends with Louis Zamperini?? Please tell the story or post to anywhere it's been written about. Fight On! CU CU, more details can ...
Think It Through
“By faith, Rahab betrayed her homeland (Jos. 2:25). By faith, Ruth abandoned her people (Ruth 1:16). By faith Jeremiah demoralized the patriots, undermining the war effort (Jer. 38:4). By faith Jehoida committed treason (2 Kings 11:14-15). By faith Jonathan disobeyed his faith the king (1 Sam. 19:2). By faith David ran away from the anointed authority (1 Sam. 19:12). They did all this because of their ultimate loyalties, not their proximate loyalties. Be adults in your thinking, and not children.”
American Milk and Honey, p. xiv
A Wide-Ranging and Long-Awaited Interview
We have no intention of revealing how this interview came to be in our possession. To do so would give too much away about our sources and methods. At the same time, we can fully vouch for the soundness ...
The Shape of Dual Loyalties
“Paul was willing to go to Hell for his kinsmen (Rom. 9:3), but was well aware that they were the ones who were so ardent about killing him (Acts 23:20).”
American Milk and Honey, p. xiv
Life in the Fast Lane
Two Kinds of Idolatry
“There are two kinds of idols. One must be demolished entirely, ground into powder at the brook Kidron, and used to desecrate the graves of the people (2 Kings 23:5-7). There is to be no quarter given to this kind of idol—for example, a statue of Tash in your backyard, to which neighborhood puppies and kittens are sacrificed. That is not the sort of thing that can be gradually opposed. But there is another kind of idol, where natural and good gifts from our Heavenly Father have assumed a wrongful place in the heart loyalties of an individual. He might be greedy for money, which is idolatry (Col. 3:5), and yet after repentance he must still purchase things. He might love his father and mother in such a way as to keep him from becoming a disciple of Christ (Matt. 10:37; cf. Luke 14:26), and yet true repentance does not mean that he needs to shoot his father and mother, and bury them in a desecrated graveyard at the brook Kidron. Rather, it means demoting them from the god shelf of his heart, and honoring them in the proper way more than he ever did in his life before.”
American Milk and Honey, pp. xii-xiii
Real Adultery
“A man who is married to a woman can betray her, but a man who never met her cannot do so . . . In other words, we say that all adulterers were never really married. But of course this means that they are not really adulterers . . . In other words, we have two positions: the first is that husbands cannot commit adultery, and the second is that adulterers are not husbands, and hence not adulterers. What never seems to occur to anyone is the duty of fighting our fellow Christians to the last ditch—as Athanasius did with Arius.”