[Speaking of Acts 4:27-28] “They gathered together to commit a heinous crime, but they only did what God’s hand and purpose had settled beforehand. We therefore see that God can control sinful actions without being defiled by those sinful actions. Of course, objections crowd into our minds, but they are not textual objections — at …
The “Malady” of Modesty
“The moral hedges that surrounded our collective life have been trampled down. That is the paramount truth. What once was sublimated is now, in all of its raw and often violent nature, spewed forth in the name of liberty or self-expression. What once had to be private is now paraded publicly for the gallery of …
Bungee Jumping With Frayed Cords
“Our lives are bounded by God. ‘Since his days are determined, the number of his months is with You; You have appointed his limits, so that he cannot pass’ (Job 14:5). Until the time comes that God has established, every man is immortal. As far as God’s determination is concerned, we cannot lengthen and we …
Culture As Cop
“Culture, then, is the outward discipline in which inherited meanings and morality, beliefs and ways of behaving are preserved . . . It is what tells us what owning a Cadillac means, what significance being gay has, how we can measure someone whom we learn is a doctor, an engineer, a street artist, or homeless. …
Reformed Theology and Classical Christian Schools
“Recall that the Reformation had begun early in the sixteenth century, and we can see that the historic position of Protestants was well-established for two and a half centuries before there were really any non-Augustinian Protestants. This pervasive orthodoxy included the American colonies, and it did not begin to erode in our nation until the …
How the Center Gave Way
“The collapse of the Western mind after Kant then scattered the human enterprise of understanding to the four winds. The falcon, moving in ever wider circles on the winds of modernity, has lost the voice of the falconer, the whole process greatly accelerated by the growing accumulations of knowledge in all fields that are stored …
Kids Demanding Uniforms
“The Bible tells us that it is legitimate to mark someone’s position in a particular culture or society by how they dress. Having students on the way home from school recognized as students is fully in keeping with a general human pattern, and is observed in Scripture and seen regularly in other situations. To illustrate, …
The Great Bluff
“I am using the term secularism, then, to refer to the values of the modern age, especially where these lead to the restructuring of thought and life to accommodate the absence or irrelevance of God. Secularization is the process that creates the public environment in which these values seem natural and inevitable” [David Wells, No …
The Centrality of Peripherals
“In all this, we must remember the centrality of peripherals. The point is not to favor the peripherals instead of the center. That would be the sin of majoring on minors, swallowing camels, and all the rest of it. Rather, the point is that on this question the Christian world has fallen into the fallacy …
Come Again?
“In literature, a whole generation of deconstructionists has emerged within the universities who, despite their calling to be the custodians of the nation’s language, now make their living by denying that words have any meaning at all.” [David Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 65.]