Category: Theology
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The Mind Puzzles, The Feelings Feel, The Heart Wants
Consider the perpetual arguments, the ones that have been going on long enough that everyone should have figured out the debate is not actually progressing in either of the two antagonistic directions. Here is the short list, you could add your versions of these: By now you are ready to say “nominalism vs. realism, in…
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Memorial Day 2008
see also Memorial Day 2007. So God enters human flesh under a military dictatorship. During His short mortal life the freedom fighters try to enlist Him but He declines; He has other interests. This lack of interest in political freedom is one of the things that gets Him tortured to death. He does not resist…
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Ashcan Christianity
Ashcan authenticity: “The most ugly version of anything is the most authentic one.” The term “Ashcan” comes from the school of painters, I think. These painters felt they should show the seamy and ugly side of the subject. But it is not just painting; many disciplines or communities have an ashcan stage. As a corrective,…
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The Human Face is a Set of Liturgical Conventions
At times you might have been told you don’t smile enough. Everyone is right, of course, to say that an insincere smile is bad, and right that just smiling alot is not a useful goal in itself. But there is a common assumption in all this that is not false but just not true enough…
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Credo ut Intelligum: I Affirm Before I Solve The Puzzle
In spite of what the Reformers did or didn’t intend, the Protestant world in fact does now have a canon-within-the-canon — let’s call it a canonlet. It is comprised of about 3 sentences from Paul which you can recite in under thirty seconds, and these perennial struggles for “the heart of the gospel” are simply…
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Memorial Day 2007
In the flowered hills God is easy to believe in, but what we know as religion is unnecessary. The flowers are what they are: wondrous, but not morally complex. When the flower dies, it effortlessly becomes life for other flowers. It does not raise the question of the rightness of its death. But with people,…
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You’ll slide off, either up or down.
Supernaturalism: Nothing is just itself, it is part of something else. Naturalism: Nothing is itself, it is made up of something else.
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On Alienation, prompted by Jacques Ellul
Quotes are from “The Ethics of Freedom”… The Bible often talks about the bondage of man…We read of the institution of slavery. We also find bondage to corruption, to the stoicheia of this world….The ending of formal slavery has softened the term. But the situation described remains the same. In our own age the equivalent…
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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,…
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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…