(HT: Presbycast)
Too Close For Comfort
Christ and Culture
With Presbycast: What Is The Gospel?
It is always fun and edifying to talk with the Presbycast Guys, whom some have called the voice of confessionalist dissent in America. Last night we were discussing the question: What is the gospel? The answer to this question might seem obvious . . . Continue reading →
The Reformation Of Vocation
In the period between the early post-apostolic church (e.g., the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD) and the Reformation (beginning in the early 16th century AD) the church came to develop some unbiblical and therefore unhelpful and unhealthy ways of relating creation and . . . Continue reading →
They Are Coming For Your Children
There have been, arguably, three sexual revolutions in the modern period. If we think of the early stages of feminism, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that was part of a sexual revolution that included a loosening of heterosexual mores. . . . Continue reading →
Does The Bible Teach Socialism?
With the rise of a young, avowedly socialist movement in the USA there is renewed interest in the history, nature, and prospect of Socialism. What is it? There are several definitions or several variants of Socialism. The Oxford Dictionary of English gives . . . Continue reading →
What Christians Can Learn From Drew Carey About Subverting Culture
Drew Carey is an American comedian who burst on to the national scene in 1991, when he appeared on the Johnny Carson Show. I saw that appearance and I am still chuckling. Beginning 1995 he starred in The Drew Carey Show for . . . Continue reading →
Understanding Our Liquid, Therapeutic Age
Perhaps one of the most confusing aspects of this present age is the sheer speed with which unquestioned orthodoxies—for example, the nature of marriage, or the tight connection between biology and gender, or the vital importance of free speech to a free . . . Continue reading →
It Is A Super Lord’s Day Not A Super Bowl Day
In 2018 an estimated 111 million people watched the Super Bowl. That is about 1/3 of all Americans. In our media-fragmented age, in our cord-cutting age, in our on-demand age, rarely do that many people watch the same thing at the same . . . Continue reading →
Living In An Ephesians 4:17 Moment
The flood of bad news easily overwhelms us these days. Some of us are old enough to remember when we did not know who was doing what to whom in Iceland right at the moment but we live in a world when . . . Continue reading →
The Tyranny Of The New State-Religion: Incoherence
James Anderson is among many calling attention to the case of a teacher who has been fired by the West Point, Virginia school board for refusing to submit to their demand that he refer to students who belong biologically to one sex . . . Continue reading →
Does Christianity Need Christendom To Thrive?
John Millbank is a theologian and the leader of an influential school of thought known as Radical Orthodoxy. Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology was published 20 years ago by Millbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward. According to R. R. Reno, the Radical . . . Continue reading →
The Blessedness Of The Margins
The margins of a screen or a piece of notebook paper are the spaces between the very edge and the area where we are allowed to write. There are also social and cultural margins. Some institutions in society are right in the . . . Continue reading →
So You Say You Want A Revolution?
Judging by what one sees in the media, Americans seem to be at war with one another. Political violence seems to be a rising problem. We are not yet witnessing the sorts of bombings and mass protests that marked the late 1960s . . . Continue reading →
Paul: Let Him Not Eat
Paul was a theologian of the twofold kingdom. In what Calvin called the “spiritual” aspect of the kingdom we find a covenant of grace in which sinners are accepted (justified) and saved by God out of his free favor (sola gratia), through . . . Continue reading →
Calvin On Jesus’ Stance Toward Civil Government
Now it is certain that our Lord did not want to change anything about the government (police) or the civil order, bus without reviling it in any way, he made his office, for which he came into the world, that of forgiving . . . Continue reading →
Racism And The Second Use Of The Law (Updated)
Broadly, in evangelicalism, there are two stances toward the Ten Commandments or the moral law. For many, if not most evangelicals, it is believed that the Ten Commandments are so uniquely Mosaic, so identified with the Mosaic epoch in redemptive history, that . . . Continue reading →
The “Opium Of The People” And The Opioid Crisis (2)
The late-modern period is a a time of disillusionment in the West and perhaps nowhere else is that disillusionment more acute than in America where, since at the least the early 20th century, the false promises of Modernity (human perfectibility, the universal . . . Continue reading →
The “Opium Of The People” And The Opioid Crisis
I have been thinking some lately about Karl Marx (1818–83). Now, it has been a few decades since I have read Marx but I did read him a fair bit in University as an undergraduate. I think my various Political Science professors . . . Continue reading →
The Burning Of The Wooden Shoes (Update)
The most disturbing part is that many seem completely oblivious to the shifts. Among a new generation of Reformed pastors and churchgoers, there seems to be little awareness that the project they are pursuing, and the shifts they are pushing, have already . . . Continue reading →
Why It Is Reasonable Not To Send Your Children To Public School
The world has changed quite a bit since I entered Dundee Elementary in 1965–66. No-fault divorce did not yet exist. Two-parent families were the norm. Abortion had not yet been legalized. The late-modern drug culture had not yet exploded. WWII had been . . . Continue reading →