Reagan vs. Kuyper vs. Obama
As some of you know, I went through a long phase where I was a huge fan of Ronald Reagan. I still am, to a large degree, but I no longer actively collect biographies written about him or things like that. In fact, the more I think about Reagan’s political...Ransomed from every language, Part 2
Last May, I wrote a post that suggested that in heaven all the redeemed might speak our individual languages, rather than learning some universal, heavenly language. I was thinking more about this thought this morning, and, being in the process of reading gobs of...Augustine on Coercing People into the Kingdom
Does anyone doubt that it is preferable for people to be drawn to worship God by teaching rather than forced by fear of punishment or by pain? But because the one type of people are better, it does not mean that the others, who are not of that type, ought to be...Augustine on Sparing the Wicked
Augustine took the view that the Church should advocate in the secular realm on behalf of the wicked, that governments might not punish the wicked for what they deserve. This inspired a letter from someone claiming that to do so would, in effect, give approval to the...I believe in God the Creator…
For a class, I am reading Karl Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline, which comprises lectures he gave on the Apostle’s Creed. Today, we discussed Barth’s chapter on “God the Creator,” and my professor drew our attention to this paragraph: We are...Fear of the Lord and Being Scared
I’ve often struggled to describe the meaning of the phrase “fear of the Lord,” and I usually end up describing something that skirts around the word “fear.” To an extent, this is good–God does not want us to be terrified of him....A properly ordered love of mammon
I just read a fascinating sermon by Augustine on the love of money for one of my classes. The sermon was given on the occasion of a feast of a martyr, and Augustine’s main goal is to undercut the idea that the martyrs were somehow super-human in their capacity...The Necessity of Factions in the Church
Edit, 1/22/2011: I have been going back through some old blog posts, and I wanted to write that I do not find this blog post persuasive at all any more. I want to leave it here, but the more I read this, the more I hear Paul’s words dripping with sarcasm, not...On $4 gas
D. A. Carson writes in his For the Love of God, Vol. 2 for the meditation on Jeremiah 14: Because our own culture tries so hard to detach from God what happens in the “natural” world, reserving for him only private or distantly “spiritual”...Download My Free eBook
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