Yesterday’s message from the book of Amos was on the tendency of unbelievers to bring their corruptions to an altar. Sinners like to sanctify their sin.
A Ragbag Response to Green Baggins
Lane gave me a helpful nudge the other day. What with end of school year frenzy, and a trip back east, I lost track of where we were. I will try to get us caught up here — but that will mean that my responses will be kind of a ragbag and briefer than they …
Scram, Padre
I am genuinely enjoying Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction. As I have mentioned before, Rodney Clapp is an astute social critic, and many of his insights are really valuable. But there are times, and this chapter is one of them, when the underlying incoherence of his political theology catches up with him, tackles …
An Unhassled Bride
Never forget that the point of worship is identical to the point that God has established for the history of our world. The meaning of worship is the same as the meaning of history. God is engaged in remaking the human race in Jesus Christ. There are three main points to the Christian worldview, which …
Sacramental Union
We learn from the Westminster Confession that in both sacraments—baptism and the Lord’s Supper—there is a spiritual and sacramental union between the thing and the thing signified, such that it is appropriate to speak of one under the terms of the other. We do this without confounding the thing and the thing signified, but, following …
Internationalist Power Monkeys
The next chapter of Clapp’s book, “Tradition and Progress,” correctly identifies one of the central tensions in American life. “The United States considers itself at once the most traditional and the most modern and progressive of Western — or any other — countries” (v. 63). We are far more religious than any other industrialized society, …
The Hand of Faith
God did not spare the angels who sinned (hamartano), and so He cast them into Tartarus, which was the lowest pit of Hades (2 Pet. 2:4). False teachers are like the false angels, not staying within appropriate boundaries. They have eyes full of adultery, and they cannot quit sinning (hamartia) — they are cursed children …
Taking Issue With the Careless
“Spare neither labour in the study, prayer in the closet, nor zeal in the pulpit. If men do not judge their souls to be worth a thought, compel them to see that their minister is of a very different opinion” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 345).
Why Dead Fish Always Swim Downstream
“The historicist mentality finds it difficult to consider the possibility that a dominant trend may be evil, and thus stands ready to embrace anything that will confer contemporaneity on itself” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 237).
Obedience a Two-Way Street
“It is easy to have strong views on the subject of authority, but these usually come up when we are considering how someone else ought to be obeying us. When we turn to consider those that we should be obeying, our ardor sometimes dims” (For Kirk and Covenant, p. 129).