Introduction The task that the returning exiles had was that of rebuilding in the midst of ruin. The work was overwhelming and the challenges huge, and we are very much in a similar position. As we have noted, one of our basic tasks is that of learning from them. The Text: “And when the seventh …
Hip Off the Rack
“The sixties are more than merely the homeland of hip, they are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent. Co-option is something much more complex than the struggle back and forth between capital and youth revolution; it’s also something larger …
To Win Christ
[Speaking of Phil. 3:8] The King James is better than most, translating one particular word here as dung. The word is skubalon, and means in the first place some kind of animal excrement. And this verse helps show the problem we are in–Paul does teach elsewhere that we are to avoid filthiness in our speech, …
Rushdoony on Porn
Back in the eighties I read through a small hill of Rushdoony’s books, profiting greatly from many of them. One that I was never able to get my hands on was his The Politics of Pornography. But it has just been released again by Ross House Books under the new title Noble Savages. The folks …
Overflowing Like God
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 69 “There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty” (Prov. 11:24). God has placed us in the world in a such a way as to bless us. …
Urged to a Life of Love
“The truly astonishing thing for many modern readers (were we to notice) is how Paul continues. Right after he says that he wishes his theological opponents would overachieve and cut off more than they were currently advocating, he then goes on, in the next breath, to urge the Galatians to a life of love. The …
The Un-Ad
“Bernbach was the first adman to embrace the mass society critique, to appeal directly to the powerful but unmentionable public fears of conformity, of manipulation, of fraud, and of powerlessness, and to sell products by so doing. He invented what we might call anti-advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism-perhaps the most powerful …
What Actually Occurreth
I am not at all enthralled by the critique that postmodernists offer up of modernist hubris, any more than I am entranced by the critique that modernists offer of postmodern incoherence. The fact that postmodern dwarves are shooting at the Calormene modernists is not an occasion for me to throw my hat in the air. …
My Lutheranism, Hitherto Unsuspected
In a recent response to my question, Andrew Sandlin was kind enough to write the following. “By ‘factuality’ in redemptive-historical creedal affirmations I mean that Jesus really lived, died, rose again, and will come again in the air for His own.” In doing this, he has let me know that he not only affirms the …
Metaphorical Foundation Stones
“A man’s words reveal, first, the man. The words are not the man, and yet they reveal him faithfully. Out of the abundance of the heart the man speaks. The foundational nature of all language is therefore metaphorical because every word a man speaks reveals him–just as God reveals Himself though His Word. Every word …