Lane thinks that our discussion of God’s covenant with mankind before the Fall has gotten interesting, and I agree. But it will take me a few installments to answer the various issues he raises here. The one I want to begin with is Lane’s (no doubt inadvertant) denial of Calvinism. I had said, “If Adam …
Comes With the Territory
“Public men must expect public criticism, and as the public cannot be regarded as infallible, public men may expect to be criticized in a way that is neither fair nor pleasant. To all honest and just remarkds we are bound to give due measure of heed, but to the bitter verdict of prejudice, the frivolous …
Obedience and Works
Lane has come back from presbytery, apparently unscathed, and wants to resume our discussion. So here we go. He says: “I was saying that you were rejecting any overlap between obedience and works, such that you could say that the CoW was based on grace, and that obedience was required, but works were not. I …
And This Was True Even Before the Internet
“Would it not be a great degradation of your office if you were to keep an army of spies in your pay to collect information as to all that your people said of you? And yet it amounts to this if you allow certain busybodies to bring you all the gossip of the place. Drive …
Colonies of Heavean
INTRODUCTION: On Ascension Sunday, we mark the glorious coronation of the Lord Jesus. After His resurrection, He established to His disciples that He was in fact alive forever, and then He ascended into the heavens. When He did this, He was received by the Ancient of Days, and was given universal authority over all the …
Plunderers and Plunderees
Another important aspect of Third World debt forgiveness is one I have alluded to several times, but we have not yet developed it. And that concerns this subject — who is it, exactly, that is doing the forgiving, and on whose behalf is it being done? And on what authority? The money that was loaned …
There It Is
In my interactions with Bishop Wright on the matter of Third World debt, I have a couple times had the sensation of having been here before. Somehow. Tonight it happened again, and so I picked up a mental thread and pulled on it. This is what came of that. This is how Dorothy Sayers began …
Suspicion and Bitterness in the Ministry
“Nor is suspicion merely a source of disquietude, it is a moral evil, and injures the character of the man who harbours it. Suspicion . . . creates . . . in ministers bitterness; such bitterness as in spirit dissolves all the ties of the pastoral relation, eating like a corrosive acid into the very …
They Come in Crates of Twenty-Four
What might seem like the simplest problem in the world — just forgive the debts, man, how hard can it be? — turns out to have massive complications. These complications are not offered as an argument for doing nothing, but rather as an argument for taking the time to get it right. There are a …
Kudzu in Idaho
In his book The Millennium Myth, N.T. Wright acknowledges that debt forgiveness willy nilly is not the way to go. “Some will warn [like DW] that debt cancellation without political change will be a gift to the tyrants and bullies, not to the poor and weak. Steps will have to be taken to make sure …