Category: Theology
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Christmas: Lights In Trees!
Christmas is the height of the “already / not yet” tension in the liturgical calendar. We feel both at home and yet restless in the world. Intense “already”, and yet intense “not yet”, and they intensify each other, like light in a chamber of mirrors. As the Kingdom appears here, we sense more of it…
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God is not in control and everything serves His purpose.
God is NOT in control of earthly events, and everything serves His purpose. Let me say that again: God is NOT in control of earthly events, and everything serves His purpose, because of the strength of His love. The Christian God, unlike all other conceptions of God in history, including the Aristotelian one most…
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Tim’s Adaptation of Clarke’s Third Law
Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” My adaptation: Any sufficiently traced causation is indistinguishable from special creation.
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Trinity, and Mathematicians Are Safe.
…the necessity of a stage of thought where two things are asserted simultaneously with no understanding of their relation. Such a stage of thought is necessary in any advancing discipline.
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The Necessary Oomphalos
Apparent Age is a fringe thought. From the view of the typical secularist it is one of the craziest uncles in a crazy family of religious ideas. When the evidence of an old universe first put pressure on the literal reading of Genesis, some sincere creationist argued that Adam must have had a belly button,…
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“Singularity” And The Personal Pronoun
The content of the word “God” and the content of a word like “singularity” are nearly the same. They are functional synonyms. The differences are due to different intensities of exegesis. The “God” adherents have just spent more time reasoning about their concept, so there is more articulated content on the books. The “singularity” adherents…
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On Biblical Gender Roles, Experience Filters Theology
This is just my observation from life… the more responsible and caring a woman’s husband is, the more likely she will read the NT submission passages literally. The more passive or mean or noncommunicative her husband is, the less she will be able to comfortably imagine that God really made gender as a functional heirarchy.…
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The Exegesis Industry
Imagine a page of text transcribed from a plain-spoken speech, outdoors, to a simple audience, which a reader with no other beliefs to defend would interpret without reaching for a dictionary. Imagine, then, this page of plain text produces entire professions, entire industries, books literally 1000 pages long, all to tell new generations why it…
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The “True” Christmas
It is a universal human pattern: first, use some analytical solvent on the accidents to get to the essence, then, be shocked that the essence itself melted away. Christmas is not a core story or truth buried under the barnacles of culture. It is a dialogue between God and man, in which God says “Emmanuel!” and…
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What Was That Crack of Stone?
If we are not explaining some event that has no plausible natural explanation, we’re just adding to the cacophany. The Christian church’s power is not in winning a “battle of worldviews”, or in “contending for biblical truth”. If this is all we have to say then the proclamation of the church cannot pierce through…