“Every true preacher must be a poet . . . A belief in the Incarnation, in the divine Son of Man, makes such poets of us all.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 187
Lord of the Tools
“Jesus is the Lord of history, which means His authority extends from Adam’s first honeycomb stick, at the beginning, down to the last tool invented, which will probably be something like a transport barge for hauling radioactive waste to be dumped into the sun. It’ll be totally safe. We did tests and everything.”
Ploductivity, p. 104
Just One Future
“So we need to remember that the eschatological future promised by the prophet Isaiah, and the future that was shaped by the industrial revolution and will continue to be shaped by the digital revolution, are the same future. I don’t believe in an invisible spiritual future, shaped by the Holy Spirit, full of sweetness and light, and an actual historical future shaped by the Devil, Halliburton, the Illuminati, and Murphy’s law. The world, this world, is presently going where Jesus is taking it. So we should be wise, and stop worrying.”
Ploductivity, pp. 98-99
Atheism and Meaningless Black Lives
Introduction: A lot of cyber ink has been spilled when it comes to responses and critiques of the Black Lives Matter movement. But it has to be said that many of these critiques, however good, ...
Audio Reading of Post
Letters Over the Transom
Letter to the Editor: Re: Your comments on Rom 13. This is really beneath you, Doug. It's like you tries to jam as many fallacies into two paragraphs as you could manage. 1. Genetic fallacy. ...
That Tenacious Bell Curve
“Everywhere the human race goes, it drags a bell curve around with it . . . one half of all medical doctors graduated in the lower half of their class, right?”
Ploductivity, p. 98
Testimony or Nothing
“The philosophers Hume and Kant, in a frenzy of high conceit, helped to banish ‘testimony’ from the modern world as a reliable source of knowledge. We want an idolatrous way of knowing that what we think is indubitable. But we are finite, and so it has to be testimony or nothing. Jesus is Lord, so it is testify and live or languish and die . . . Jesus is under your breastbone and throughout the congregation. That is what we are talking about . . . If He has no testimony concerning us, then we can have no testimony concerning Him.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 124
Escaping the Cult of Nice
Introduction: I want to begin by saying that evangelicals really are nice, and that this is their problem. The second thing to say is that the top strata of the evangelical leadership elite ...
Audio Reading of Post
Should Have Said “When”
“This is the sinful pattern. God gives wealth, and man takes credit for it himself. If someone else comes along later and blames man for creating all this wealth, and demands that we have ourselves a little ‘social justice’ around here, he is just creating an extra layer of sedimentary silliness. And by this point, we don’t need any extra layers of silliness.”
Ploductivity, p. 96
Preaching to the Telos
“The service is not a zero-sum game, where the sacrament must give way to the Word or vice versa. Word and sacrament go together the way cooking and eating do. Services with great preaching and no sacrament are like celebrity chef television shows, where a lot of good food is prepared but not eaten. And sacramentalists are the ecclesiastical equivalent of a raw foods movement, where you come to church to get your puny carrot.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 122