Author: Tim

• Masai Creed: “The Hyenas Did Not Touch Him”

    From an article titled “Delighted by Doctrine” in  Christianity Today Magazine.  The link is long dead.   As a capstone to his lifelong interest in the central texts of the Christian faith, [Jaroslav] Pelikan edited (with Valerie Hotchkiss) what could only be called a second magnum opus—Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition,…

• Dallas Willard: Paralyzed by grace

  In most churches we’re not only saved by grace, we’re paralyzed by it. We’re afraid to do anything that might be a “work.” The funny thing is we will preach to people for an hour that they can’t do anything to be saved, and then sing to them for a half an hour trying to…

• Dallas Willard: Discipleship is no essential part of Christianity today

  A Divine Conspirator – Christianity Today Magazine Generally, what I find is that the ordinary people who come to church are basically running their lives on their own, utilizing ‘the arm of the flesh’—their natural abilities—to negotiate their way,” he says. “They believe there is a God and they need to check in with him.…

• Allegiance To Jesus Is Saving Faith

  Jesus is Lord” is the original confession of faith, test of orthodoxy, bond of fellowship, and death gasp. This confession is the test of the New Covenant in the same way that “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one…” was the confessional test of the Old.  It is a confession, not of belief,…

• Praise music: show, don’t tell

  It is a commonplace now to lament the superficiality of contemporary Christian praise music. Before I comment on that, let’s not get too indignant. The contemporary praise movement is largely a youth movement. The music is composed by young people for young people. Don’t look now, but young people are almost always superficial. If they…

• On Christians Arguing Online: “…the war-mongering matrix of apologetics.”

  I found this on the internet many years ago. I no longer know who wrote it. I hereby openly repudiate the entire mode of discourse… the fundamentally adversarial mode and its entrenched negative intellectual and social orientation. I deny that truly constructive, properly Christian discourse with other Christians, and chiefly between Catholics and Protestants, can…

• Gratitude to impersonal forces?

    In the presence of largesse, there are often accomplished mental convolutions,  just to avoid thanking anyone.   We seem to have an inherent need to give thanks, not only to other humans, but to something or someone larger.   But after modernity, no God is available.   So…thank impersonal objects? A common trope of…

• Peter Leithart: Modernity as Ingratitude

  The writer Peter Leithart: “…modern philosophy arises from a rejection of tradition. Modern philosophy is a tradition of the rejection of traditions, or as Gadamer put it, a prejudice against prejudices. Seen from the perspective of Heidegger’s Pietist slogan, modern philosophy arises from a refusal to receive. Descartes sitting in his German room in front…

• W. H. Auden: “Friday’s Child”

  (In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945) He told us we were free to choose But, children as we were, we thought— “Paternal Love will only use Force in the last resort On those too bumptious to repent.” Accustomed to religious dread, It never crossed our minds He meant Exactly what…

• Goethe on assimilating Tradition

  “What you have inherited from your forefathers, you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it.” Tradition is what you inherit; dead tradition is what you fail to win for yourself.