I am not a political analyst and I do not play on TV or radio (nor in the pulpit) but Christians do live in a twofold kingdom and I was happy to talk with Chris Buskirk, host of Downstream Politics, about media, . . . Continue reading →
With the stench of decades of sweat fixed permanently in the air, its tile floor, and its fan-shaped basketball hoops mounted to the brick wall—the only protection against which being a thin, worn wrestling mat—the Community Center was the epitome of an . . . Continue reading →
The pagans have no frame of reference by which to understand what we are saying. The Christian faith is a mystery. We claim that a Jewish rabbi was crucified and raised on the third day, that he was and remain, in fact, God the Son incarnate. There is nothing about paganism that prepares them to understand that. Further. the pagans think about religion as a matter of works, as a matter of a quid pro quo. They think that the gods are powers to be controlled and manipulated. We make offerings and we perform duties and thereby, they think, we have obligated the gods to be good to us. That is not the Christian faith. We say that God has been gracious to us in that while we were sinners (disobedient and judgment deserving), God sent his Son to obey for us, in our place, and to die for us, as our substitute. We say that we are right with God not by anything we have done or can do but merely because God has credited to us who believe all that Jesus did for us. That is a supernatural religion. The pagan has a natural religion. He elevates nature (works) into a religion and seeks to use it to control the gods. Continue reading →
I spent some time yesterday talking to Chris Buskirk (filling in for Seth Leibsohn) on 960AM the Patriot (Phoenix) about the election, the place of Christians in politics, civil life, and religious liberty. Here’s the audio:
For Christians this is question of how to relate Christ and culture, or how to relate nature and grace. This is an ancient problem. The apostolic and early post-apostolic Christians faced this problem acutely. Our Lord commanded us to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (Matt 22:21). The assumption behind the our Lord’s teaching is, of course, that some things are legitimately Casesar’s and some things are not. Our Lord drew a line in the sand when he informed Pilate that his “kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). The apostles faced this problem acutely when they were commanded to stop preaching the gospel. The Apostle Peter spoke for all of us when he replied, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Continue reading →
It should be carefully noted that our criticism of this procedure does not imply that we hold it to be wrong for the Christian church to make formal use of the categories of thought discovered by Aristotle or any other thinker. On . . . Continue reading →
In 1973, Charles Merritt Nielsen imagined what might have happened had Polycarp (69–155 AD), the senior pastor of the Christian congregation in Smyrna (today Izmir, Turkey), adopted the rhetoric of the theological progressives, who look for approval from the broader, unbelieving world: . . . Continue reading →
HB reader David wrote to ask about a social program in which his congregation is involved and his question is one that I get regularly. My reading and experience with Millennials, i.e., those born between 1982 and 2004, tells me that there . . . Continue reading →
The Foundry, Resonate, Relevant, The Bridge, and Passion City are just a few of the contemporary church names noted by Dennis Baker and mocked by Url Scaramenga in 2010. A search for “contemporary church names” brings up a wealth of resources offering . . . Continue reading →
One of the great temptations faced by the Israelites as the entered the land of Canaan would be to absorb the Canaanite religion and thereby either to apostatize by becoming pagans or to attempt to synthesize Canaanite paganism with the biblical religion. . . . Continue reading →
One of the several reasons that it is difficult to have a reasoned discussion about the events that transpired in Charlottesville is that the groups like neo-Nazis and the Klan provide such an almost irresistible opportunity for self-righteousness. The history of these . . . Continue reading →
The deeper problem here is hermeneutical. O’Donovan—and following him, Smith—fail to give sufficient attention to the Bible’s covenantal storyline, and how that storyline affects the authority of church and state. Specifically, the lessons of the kingdom of Israel transmit directly to Christ . . . Continue reading →
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 →
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 →
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 →
In a recent essay, Rebecca McLaughlin calls for Christians to stop retreating and to “go on the offensive.” She makes some valuable observations. She is right to note that, though Christianity seems to be in trouble in the West, globally it is . . . Continue reading →
(HT: Presbycast)
The German expression, Der Kulturkampf (The Culture War), originally referred to the attempt by Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), the German politician who created the modern, unified Germany, to suppress the Roman Catholic Church in Germany because he feared that Romanism in Germany . . . Continue reading →
Mark Galli, editor of Christianity Today has published an editorial calling for the removal from office of Donald Trump either by the Senate or at the ballot box. Of course this has provoked considerable reaction, not the least of which has been . . . Continue reading →
H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) is the slightly less famous younger brother of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). The latter was a favorite of two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. The former is most famous for his 1951 book, Christ and Culture, though his early work, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929) and The Kingdom of God in America (1937) remain influential. In the latter he perfectly characterized liberal Christianity as that in which “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” In Christ and Culture he offered a taxonomy of Christian approaches Continue reading →