First, before we can do business, we have to set aside a number of popular assumptions garnered from various hymns, sermons, and Far Side cartoons. The New Jerusalem is not a figure of Heaven, the final eternal state, but is rather a glorious image of the Christian Church. This is explicit in a number of …
When God Settles Our Hash
There are many reasons for my behavior on this theme of mere Christedom, but one of them is that the concept provides the only real antidote to American exceptionalism on the one hand and radical Islam on the other. When it comes to American exceptionalism, a couple recent examples are here and here. We are …
Some Turtles Have to Fly With the Shell
One of the foundation stones of a mere Christendom has to be a root and branch rejection of Darwinism. The reason for this is not hard to ascertain — Darwinism is one of the chief cornerstones of the secular state. We are acquainted with the standard liberal metaphor of the Constitution as a “living document,” …
Lusts and Labels
One of the characteristics of lust is that it hates to be constrained. This applies as much to political lusts as to sexual desire, and it explains a great deal about the dishonesty of the progressive mentality. How many times, when you have asked someone a specific question about some important issue, have you been …
The Machete of Curiosity
So, then, the issues are perennial, but the terms are not. Anyone working through the tangled weave of religion and politics may need some help with terms. Anyone whacking away at the thicket of culture and faith with the machete of curiosity could probably use a simple lexicon. It seems only fair to provide some …
Why Yarn Can’t Hold the Needles
One of the central tests of a Trinitarian understanding of practical theology is the ability to maintain distinctions in unity, and to maintain unity while steadfastly holding distinctions. Form and balance together is Trinitarian. To pick one aspect of God’s creation, and to root for it until it absorbs all the others is unitarian. To …
Shut Up in His Lazar House
So I have made a great deal out of the Great Commission, where Jesus tells His apostles to disciple the nations. I have noted that the direct object of that verb is the ethne, the people, the tribe, the whole unit. This means the question has arisen whether I am overlooking the explanatory participles following …
Words and Water, Bread and Wine
Two great Christian heresies — Marxism and Islam — borrowed something from the Christian faith which Christians should actually ask to have returned. They borrowed it, used it to great effect, and Christians for some reason let them, neglecting this idea ourselves. That “thing” they borrowed was a sense of inevitable victory for their cause. …
Enough of Them Already
The advocate of mere Christendom, in which category I place myself, must at some point address the question of whether or not we should have an established church. And, if so, which one? We already asked the Holy Ghost Lightning Tabernacle, but they declined. There are layers to this, making it a fun activity, like …
A Holy Ghost Mashup
At the beginning of his Republocrat, Carl Trueman says quite rightly “that religious conservatism does not demand unconditional political conservatism.” The word conserve is a transitive verb, and there is no virtue or vice in any transitive verb. So you love, but what do you love? God? Ice cream? Child porn? The church you were …