Ross Douthat’s Erasmus lecture, “A Crisis of Conservative Catholicism,” and Carl Trueman’s column, “Is There A Crisis in Conservative Protestantism?” put me in mind to think about the American Church. That said, I’m more of a “not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper” kind of guy, not that . . . . Continue Reading »
Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation: The Mediation of the Gospel through Church and Scripture by matthew levering baker academic, 384 pages, $44.99 M atthew Levering’s prodigious scholarly output, his editing of significant theological handbooks, and his co-editorship of the English edition of . . . . Continue Reading »
A few words before you watch this video.1. The point is obvious, and it’s been said before, but to see it in this high production value should make you at least be happy that the point is also going mainstream.2. The stunning irony of this video is that it comes from North Point Media — . . . . Continue Reading »
We love our stuff, and that makes God less-real to us. We want our relationship with God to be completely under our control the way all our stuff — everything from cars to boxes of paper — is under our control. And because Jesus is not in your face the way this blog is in your face, . . . . Continue Reading »
That’s not the end of what Peter said that day, and we’ll get back to that in a minute. But I think that we have to admit something to ourselves since we know we are like Oprah Winfrey. We have to admit that often, we don’t care about what God wants.
It’s obvious, I hope, that I’m writing here for people who say to themselves, “There is something irresistible about Jesus.” For some of you, that’s a point which you make into an ideological cathedral — a point of doctrine which lines up in an acronym that summarizes the faith, your faith. For others, it’s a nagging thought — as you work out your faith on your own, you keep coming back to this Jesus, and you can’t make sense of him all the way, but you also can’t accept everything he says because it seems somehow too hard to live that way, or too complex, or too simple, or merely out of your grid of experience. Continue Reading »
Some people have been hurt in the local church. For some people it’s just a rote activity, as Oprah admits, which she learned as a child. Some of us are much smarter than our local church can bear, and some cannot stand how smart the church thinks it is. Worse still for others: it will simply be completely useless. Continue Reading »