“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 44 Heavenly things drive earthly things. What we assume about ultimate reality is going to dictate how we behave in day-to-day matters. If we assume that the whole idea of “rewards” is somehow less than spiritual, then we have to …
The Central Thing
Speaking of the doctrine of Scripture, N.T. Wright says, “But such a doctrine usually has to be inferred. It may well be possible to infer it, but it is not (for instance) what Isaiah or Paul are talking about. Nor is it, for the most part, what Jesus is talking about in the gospels. He …
All Particulars
Our Father in Heaven, we glorify Your name, and we do so through Jesus’ name. Father, Your kindness to us extends into all particulars, and we are very grateful for the opportunity to rest before You in this way. We rejoice in the fact that it is through the rest of Your saints that the …
Petty Traditions
John Robbins continues to display one of his chief polemical attributes, which is kind of a bad attribute for a rationalist to have, to wit, his inability to follow an argument. He has recently said that one of our tactics is that of quoting John Calvin, who said “some foolish things about the sacraments.” He …
Private Judgment
Dear Joel, Thank you for bearing with my delay as I have been doing two things. First, I have been assembling my thoughts on this complicated issue, and secondly, I have been looking for an opportunity to lay them out in systematic fashion. In the letters that follow, I am not assuming that every issue …
Benedict XVIII
I have opened a new category for my blog here. Under Roman or Catholic? I hope to post my thoughts on the Roman Catholic Church (in the form of letters to a friend thinking about returning to Rome). While some of these letters are not fictional, some of them will simply be in that form …
Authoritative Story
In a lecture delivered in 1989, N.T. Wright offered a number of provocative thoughts on what it means to say that the Bible is authoritative. While I want to offer some criticisms of some of his points and/or applications, I should say at the outset that some of his points were superb, and were exactly …
Marriage as Manifest Glory XIX
Introduction: Learning is awkward. Even assuming good motives, and a desire to learn, and no rebellion against God’s pattern, there are still difficulties. G.K. Chesterton once said that the “chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.” Couple this with the fact that what we must unlearn is frequently what …
Government in the Church
The Lord Jesus has established a government in His church. A few in history have attempted to abandon all government in favor of the “leading of the Spirit” but such attempts always end in anarchy or in a submerged or disguised government. Such attempts spring from a lack of understanding the Word. The Lord has …
Provisional Thinking and Dogmatism
“Over against both of these positions, I propose a form of critical realism. This is a way of describing the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence ‘realism’), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the …