“Whatever disagreements existed among believing Christians in the era after the Second World War, evangelicals at that time were clearly doctrinal vertebrates of some description. But in recent decades, we have added more than a little money to the movement, some academic respectability, a lust for influence, and the result is the widespread existence of …
Original Puritanism
[Elizabeth I] “released their creative power. She was a Queen, not a King, and all that was left of medieval chivalry idealized her into an incarnation of England, a militant heroine inseparable in imagination from the brave, young new nation who was saving herself from those proud old foes, the Papacy, Spain, and France, that …
Now You’re Talking
“I wish we did not have to fritter away on frivolous things, like lectures and literature, the time we might have given to serious, solid and constructive work like cutting out cardboard figures and pasting coloured tinsel upon them” (G.K. Chesterton as quoted in Thomas Peters, The Christian Imagination, p. 10).
Dishonesty Always Wants More Scope
“This high view of preaching has consequences. Christians are people of the Word, and as a result they are people of words. They are people of the enscripturated Word, and the preached word. We love the Truth, and this is why we must necessarily love truths. The flip side of this is that when a …
Recovering Its Acids and Spices
“The Reformers not only revered their biblical heritage, but recovered its energies, its acids, its spices, its ‘red wine and cheese’, the sting and zing of the Magnificat. We should therefore be chary of assuming that a more verbal spirituality, which Protestantism undoubtedly was, was necessarily more bookish or intellectual. It commuted between the lofty …
But I Know It When I See It
“Life and art are too complex to lay down legalistic rules. But that does not mean that there are no norms. Although one cannot define the wrong kind of seductiveness or the right kind of prettiness and the attractiveness of a woman by the length of her skirt or the depth of the décolleté, nevertheless …
And We Are At Midmorning, At the Latest
“The gospel will be preached in true spiritual authority until the end of the world. The authority of true preaching did not diminish after the apostolic era. The ability to write Scripture diminished — indeed, it ceased when the last apostle died. But the death of the apostles and the closure of the canon of …
Reformational Rap
“The Psalms, which Luther loved so much as peerles barometers of the human heart, leapt out of his translations in sparkling, associative, direct, venacular language, as urgent in their rhythms as rap, his reverent irreverence rediscovering them as the wild poetry and lyrical yearning which they are” (Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation, pp. …
Not Silly Or Shallow
“As art is tied to reality in this way, there is a place to speak about truth in art. Does it do justice to what it represents? Does it do this in a positive way? Does it show the depth and complexity of what it is talking about? Art may be simple; it must be …
The Folly of Preaching
“The foolishness of preaching saved those who believed, and the preaching of the gospel continues to manifest itself as the power of God after conversion. But to those who perish, preaching is always held in contempt; it is foolishness. Those who believe the Scriptures should not be astounded that preaching today is held in such …