“Relief and buoyancy are the characteristic notes . . . It follows that nearly every association which now clings to the word puritan has to be eliminated when we are thinking of the early Protestants. Whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy, or severe; nor did their enemies bring any such charge against them …
First, Tune the Instrument
“The preacher’s first, and the most important task is to prepare himself, not his sermon” (Lloyd-Jones, Preachers and Preaching, p. 166).
An Attempt at Transcendence From Below
“Repentance requires transcendence, something Darwinian ideology denied. The monster in horror fiction is a function of this bind” (E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id, p. 127).
And the Foundation of Their Art
“We want, above all, to know what it felt like to be an early Protestant. One thing is certain. It felt very unlike being a ‘puritan’ such as we meet in nineteenth-century fiction. . . In the mind of a Tyndale or Luther, as in the mind of St. Paul himself, this theology was by …
And the Name of the Disease is Sin
“The symptoms may vary tremendously from case to case, but the business of the preacher is not to medicate symptoms, it is to to treat the disease” (Lloyd-Jones, Preachers and Preaching, p. 134).
A Sexual Haunting
“As syphilis spread all over Europe, the horror at its unprecedented virulence spread with it. It was the sexual version of the black plague. As the descriptions of the doctors who first diagnosed the disease make clear, the advent of syphilis had much to do with the iconography of horror. The horrible faces in horror …
The Puritan Humanist
“By a puritan the Elizabethans meant one who wished to abolish episcopacy and remodel the Church of England on the lines which Calvin had laid down for Geneva. They puritan party were not separatists or (in the modern sense) dissenters . . . There were therefore degrees of puritanism and it is difficult to draw …
Tell Us What You Really Think, Martyn
“Lastly, and only lastly, Homiletics. This to me is almost an abomination. There are books bearing such titles as The Craft of Sermon Construction, and The Craft of Sermon Illustration. That is, to me, prostitution. Homiletics just comes in, but no more. What about preaching as such, the act of preaching of which I have …
Sexually Transmitted Dracula
“For instance, Coppola has Van Helsing mention the word syphilis, which is the book’s ultimate taboo, but the whole point of Dracula as monster is that neither Stoker nor Harker can mention syphilis. The monster is, in effect, the sign that neither Stoker nor Harker can bring themselves to face the true cause of their …
A Grand Mystery
“In short, we should be fully convinced in our own minds concerning those conditions in our own families which would cause us voluntarily to step down, and those conditions in the life and household of another that would justify a fight at presbytery. Whatever we understand Paul to be saying, our standards of application should …