“First, we must never issue an appeal without first making the proclamation. Much harm has been done to the souls of men, and much dishonour brought to the name of Christ, through neglect of this simple rule. Evangelistic preaching has too often consisted of a prolonged appeal for decision when the congregation has been given …
Let the Reparation Talks Begin!
“Professor Davis estimates that up to 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved by Muslim slave raiders between 1500 and 1800” (Peter Hammond, Slavery, Terrorism & Islam, p. 10).
The Clichéd Rebel
“The authentic man, in the romantic conception, is he who has cut himself free of all convention, who acknowledges no restriction on the free exercise of his will. This applies as much to morals as to aesthetics: and artistic genius becomes synonymous with waywardness. But a being as dependent on his cultural inheritance as man …
Fun Fun Fun
“A young man, who never really wanted to graduate from high school himself, gets hired as a youth minister. His task is to put together a wild and crazy time down at the church, with perhaps a little inspirational message attached. The driving assumption is that young people today will not tolerate serious instruction and …
That Faithy Feel
Someone of Darryl Hart’s intelligence and learning is incapable of writing a book without offering many penetrating insights, and this book promises to be no exception. He starts out by observing the “tsunami of faith-based politics” (p. 3). He objects to this, as he should, because government sponsorship of a generic faith, or groups that …
A Sower Went Out to Sow His Seed
The teaching of Jesus is characterized by the parable. He teaches with concrete images, not abstractions, common situations, not convoluted hypotheticals. The first extended parable in this gospel is that of the sower, and, as we shall see, it is the key to the subsequent parables. Again, the setting of His teaching is by the …
What We Declare
“Thus the apostle Paul sets forth what we have called the proclamation, the announcement of what God has done for our reconciliation to Himself. He has refused to impute our sins to us. He has made Christ to be sin for us. This is the ‘gospel’ of which we are heralds. It is the proclamation …
Down to the Present
“Nearly 100 years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in America, and 130 years after all slaves within the British Empire were set free by parliamentary decree, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, in 1962, and Mauritania in 1980, begrudgingly removed legalized slavery from their statute books. And this only after international pressure was brought …
Parasitic Creativity
“The problem of upholding virtue and denouncing vice without appearing priggish, killjoy, bigoted, and narrow-minded has become so acute that intellectuals are now inclined either to deny that there is a distinction between the two or to invert their value. There is no higher word of praise in an art critic’s vocabulary, for example, than …
#NAME?
“Yes, but the Church at large long ago gave up talking about the Lord Jesus Christ, His efficacious death, His conquering cross, and His glorious triumph over death, grave, and sin, as well as over our miserable and filthy little rag-tag band of self-justifying isms — alcoholism, sexaholism, rageaholism, and can’t-be-nice-to-my-wife-a-holism” (Mother Kirk, p. 219).