“We sort of take coolness for granted because it is so much around us. However, coolness is one of those pervasive and revolutionary constructs that America exports around the globe. Coolness is a magical state of grace, and as we take our drive through America, we will see that people congregate into communities not so …
God and Figures of Speech
[Speaking of Albert Barnes’ exegesis of the 2nd psalm] “The Bible tells us that God’s displeasure will be great. The literal expression refers to heat or burning, as when one is inflamed with anger. The Openness theologians would say that this is an expression of God’s anger and then haul it down to interpret it …
Suburban Supernova
“It’s as if Zeus came down and started plopping vast towns in the middle of the farmland and the desert overnight. Boom! A master planned community! Boom! A big-box mall! Boom! A rec center, pool, and four thousand soccer fields! The food courts come first, and the people follow. How many times in human history …
Trying to Keep the Bible Current
“When folks, even learned folks, actually, especially learned folks, start discovering that what the Bible has been saying all along is reawlly what we here in our own day have only just recently discovered, they are just half a step away from saying that it does not really matter what the Bible has been saying …
All the Western World’s An Ad
“The forces that affect it [our modern secular culture] are in the West the great commercialized amusement industries and in the East the forces of political propaganda. And I do not think that Christianity can ever compete with these forms of mass culture on their own ground. If it does so, it runs the danger …
The Table Set Before Time Began
“So the way of salvation can be found not in affirming the truths of orthodoxy with a long face, but rather by coming to see and know that the words of God are life itself. They are refined gold, they are honey to the lips, they are aged wine, they summon us to a banquet …
Orthodoxy As Habit of the Body
“Orthodoxy requires all our faculties, our reason, our imagination, our bodily habits, our affections. Straight thinking is inconsistent with crooked lives. Faith without works is dead; stories without dragons are boring; worship is a matter of sound doctrine and well-cooked meat on the grill; and a god chained to earth, however noble the portrayal, is …
Fruit In Its Season
“A Christian civilization is certainly not a perfect civilization, but it is a civilization that accepts the Christian way of life as normal and frames its institutions as the organs of a Christian order. Such a civilization actually existed for a thousand years more or less. It was a living and growing organism—a great tree …
The Loss of True Confession
“While we deplore the fracturing of life, its robberies and rapes, its abuses and cruelties, its assaults and catastrophes, we can no longer measure its darkness in the presence of God. All we can do is weep. We cannot make confession. There is no one to whom to confess. We cannot bring our sin before …
Prisoner or Professor?
“Conscience, then, is more like the moaning of a prisoner in his cell than the discourse of a professor at his lectern. It is an alarm signal whose noise can be turned down but not off. It is our interior reality, which is inexplicable in the absence of God and inconsolable apart from his grace.” …