How do we know when someone is competent? How do we know whether they know what they are doing? Why, we ask to see their papers. Whenever we are not content with the word of God on a given subject, we do not have the option of remaining neutral, of doing nothing. The only alternative …
The Politics of Dancing
The Lord Jesus Christ is seated at the right hand of God the Father. That should affect things down here. As He exercises His authority, we discover in the Word that this authority is all encompassing. To use Kuyper’s phrase, not one square inch exists concerning which the Lord Jesus does not say, “Mine.” So …
Grab Them By Their Baptism
It has been said that, in the Bible belt, everyone is a Christian until they get their drivers’ license. As soon as a child is old enough to leave his upbringing, he does so. And, after a time of wild living, he frequently comes back to the church so that his kids can go to …
Crisis of Faith
Christians still have to get used to the idea that non-believers are the establishment. And once they are accustomed to that notion, they have to come to realize that it is at bottom good news. In the last century, when the orthodox Christian establishment capitulated to the incoming waves of modernism, liberalism, Darwinism, and collectivism, …
Living Like a Trinitarian
I recently told a class of tenth-graders that what our culture needed was a return to trinitarian bubble-gum commercials. They were a little nonplussed, and so I hastened to explain. Individuals with one set of ultimate commitments have the capacity to live in alien soil, that is, a culture with a different set of commitments. …
Good News and Bad News
A lawless culture is at war with more than just the “rules.” Antinomianism likes to posture and say that it is simply against tiresome restrictions. But the cultural effects of lawlessness touch far more than just the idea of law. When lawlessness has run its course, it has demolished the very idea of forgiveness. Of …
Greeting Cards and the Atonement
Afflicted with pretty much everything, the modern church is certainly looking around for remedies. But where and how we look for these remedies remains a function of what ails us, and we are not yet desparate enough to ask for directions to the divine pharmacy. How are we to explain our general cultural irrelevance? On …
A Cornucopia of Bushwah
The evangelical world is still sitting under modernity’s table, eager for any crumbs that may fall our way. The big news down here is when some rock star or other intimates that it is possible that, under certain conditions, he might believe in a divine being other than himself. We snatch it up eagerly and …
Cultural Impact of Worship
For good or ill, the church leads the way in our culture. Long before feminism became the force it is in our general culture, the feminization of the church was already old news. Long before subjectivism became a way of life for most Americans, Christians had been groping around in the closets of the soul …
Enjoying Our Stuff
Cotton Mather once commented that the faithfulness of the people begat prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother. Put another way, we may state it as a general principle that whenever Jeshurun waxes fat, he kicks. In some ways the irony is a perpetual one. When a man comes to Christ, and begins to obey …