Chesteron had a famous comment where he spoke of tradition as the democracy of the dead. He thought we ought not to exclude someone’s voice from a discussion on the technical grounds that they were not still alive. The point was well-taken, but there are some discussions and arguments where voices ought to be excluded. …
A Situated Idahoan
In his fifth chapter, Grenz introduces us to the forerunner of postmodernism, to the voice crying in the wilderness — Fredrich Nietzsche. The philosophers of modernity (who bookended that age when rationalistic charismata were still being given to men) were Descartes and Kant (p. 84), and this gives us the approximate dates of 1650 to …
Glory, Greed, and Girls
The fact that they don’t have a foundation for it has not prevented philosophers from trying to come up with improvements on the Golden Rule that Jesus gave us. And without granting that they are in fact improvements, we might still benefit from looking at the ancient problem of selfishness from new angles. Kant’s form …
Protections for the Accuser
We have been talking about the rights of the accused in matters of justice. But in the tangled web of human experience, in many cases the accuser can rapidly become the accused. Then what do we do? The first thing to do, especially for all internet observers, is to maintain a heart check, a heart …
Two and Three Witnesses
It has been rightly pointed out that Matthew 18 is not talking about what many people assume it is talking about. Jesus is talking about one application of the biblical principles of justice; He is not talking about all of them. Not even close. For example, the situation He describes is limited to someone who …
You Can Climb Out of a Hole, But You Can’t Dig Out
We live in a day when few people, including many Christians, understand what justice really is. In this series, we are not talking about a conversation between friends, or between a husband and wife. If a wife were to ask her husband if he would mind not interrupting when their youngest daughter is trying to …
State of the Church 2006
Introduction One of our customs in Christ Church is to have a “state of the church“ message sometime around the first of the year. There are two slight changes this year. First, this year it is right at the first of the year, and the second difference is that this year we are going to …
A Back Eddy in the Moscow Everglades
Let me begin by inviting the uninterested to just skip this one, a post on one particular backwater eddy in the swamp that has become the Moscow Everglades. At the same time, some may be interested in this feature of our ongoing “rage for diversity” campaign because it is part of the reason that some …
Love and Loyalty
When you are in a conflict with a group of people over the course of several years, at some point you come to realize what kind of thing sets them off. Of course, as we have been dealing with the intoleristas in Moscow, it would be an excusable mistake for someone to argue that anything …
Lies and Liars
No one needs to teach us Pharisaism. Like all sins, it comes naturally enough if we do not guard against it. But you are Christians, you are a new creation in Christ, and one of the glorious characteristics of this new creation is the desire to guard against all such sins. One of the most …