We too often have a simplistic understanding of sin and judgment. This understanding is true as far as it goes, and is consistent with the teaching of Scripture that a man reaps what he sows. This is obviously true, but Scripture also encourages us to think past this point. It is also true that a …
Sanctified Apathy
The word apathy has all kinds of negative connotations, and rightly so. But I would like to commend the word for at least one positive application if for no other reason than to make us think about how we interact with the culture around us. The word means to “not care,” but it also carries …
Peter’s Boast
Once a correspondent asked C.S. Lewis why he was not a Roman Catholic. Because he did not want to sin against charity, he declined to answer in any detail, but there was an aspect of his response that would be surprising to many of us. “By the time I had really explained my objection to …
Perfectly Legal
Scripture teaches us that unbelievers suppress the truth in unrighteousness. But this language suggests that the operation is not effortless. In order to sin, and in order to persist in it, we have to fight against something that is true about ourselves. We are created in the image of God, and despite the fall into …
Go Figure
“Far from being seen as the mortal enemy of the causes that progressive opinion holds so dear, such as sexual freedom or equal rights for women and homosexuals, the Islamic jihad has turned into the armed wing of the British left” (Melanie Phillips, Londonistan, pp. 117).
An Artistic Clerisy
“Composers, artists, or architects in a compound began to have the instincts of the medieval clergy, much of whose activity was devoted exclusively to separating itself from the mob. For mob, substitute bourgeoisie—and here you have the spirit of avant-gardism in the twentieth century. Once inside a compound, an artist became part of a clerisy, …
Irresistible Life
We already tend to misunderstand the nature of the relationship between God and His creatures, and so it is unfortunate that we sometimes use language calculated to perpetuate that misunderstanding. One term that is misunderstood in this way, in the view of many, is the irresistible grace of the famous TULIP. But is the misunderstanding …
The Tropes of Anti-Semitism
“Throughout the Muslim world, the Nazi calumny and the tropes of medieval Jew-hatred have become assimilated into Islamic thinking . . . The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is treated as a basic text and sold throughout the Muslim world along with Mein Kampf” (Melanie Phillips, Londonistan, pp. 110-111).
Ugly Is As Ugly Does
“O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today? I doubt it seriously. Every child goes to school in a …
Intelligent Despair, the Foundation of Hope
When Jesus said that He came for the sick, not the healthy, one of the great implications of His gospel is that it is a gospel of hope. The healthy tend to take it all for granted. As it was yesterday, so it will be tomorrow, and so, as far as their condition is concerned, …