In Essentials
For decades I have heard people use the expression: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” I think a common reply to this is that we can never agree as to what is essential and what is non-essential. In fact, , so we debate and debate the particular question at hand. However, [...]
Love and Justification
Theologians are always debating the righteousness of God in justification. Is it imputed? Is it infused? Is it forensic? I can’t tell you the torture I put myself through for decades over this kind of stuff. Like a navigator who knows if his calculation is off by the slightest degree he will miss the mark, [...]
10 Commandments and Hubris
I was in Ex 20 this morning. Besides the fact that I have broken every one of the 10 in so many ways except the obvious ones people think of. I often put myself as a god before God. I have used His name in vain. Even when I remember the sabbath (most weeks in [...]
God’s Faithfulness or My Faith
Our views of God are critically affected when, in an attempt to understand Him and know Him, we make Him into our image so we can relate better. We are people made in the image of God, so we look at ourselves like shadows on Plato’s cave wall, instead of looking at the one who [...]
On Love and Righteousness
I stumbled across this quote that for me just shows how Christians thinkers, as humans, try to sift the mysteries of God into false hierarchical categories: “Holiness is pre-eminent in God, for in the actual dealings of God his other attributes are conditioned and limited by his holiness. This is beheld excellently well on Calvary: [...]
Not a Christian Nation
I support the National Day of Prayer. It’s not unconstitutional; there is no imposition; one can pray to Whomever, whomever (only my God gets the capital–that’s how it works on my blog), or whatever they want, or to no one or nothing. The recent court decision declaring that it violates the Constitution is nonsense, and [...]
In The Originals
A lot of evangelicals–many of them very important to my faith formation–believe and assert that Scripture is “without error in the originals.” A lot of seminaries and Christian colleges and para-church ministries require one to sign a faith statement with just such language. First, there’s nothing I can discern in Scripture that says that. I [...]
Bonhoeffer and Obama
Eric Metaxas has just published the first biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in forty years: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. This review at Fox News has an illuminating quote from Metaxas that should sound alarm bells in the age of Obama: But the legacy that Bonhoeffer leaves future generations is of the untold dangers of idolizing politicians as messianic [...]
Steyn on Kennedy (or Why I Tend to Be Non-Progressive)
In general I would like to change the overall tenor of my blog away from the more polemical, reflections on the news-of-the-day, culture war sort, but something Mark Steyn recently wrote about Edward Kennedy summed up a lot of things for me. Steyn is acerbic, clever and hilarious, the closest living writer we have to [...]
Quantum Sovereignty
God is sovereign. Of this I have no doubt. I have no more doubt of it than I have that the Word of God is inerrant, but for me inerrancy is not a very useful word, and neither is sovereignty. Of course God is right, but do I understand His meaning? Of course God is [...]
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