CKB,in commenting on Romans 9, and God’s freedom to choose Jacob over Esau and Isaac over Ishmael for his own purposes adds: “Whenever the Church bases its own life and validity of its ministry on a line of succession connecting it with Augustine of Canterbury or Peter of Rome it is committing the same blasphemy against the sovereign freedom of God to choose his people in creative love, from generation to generation. Of course, the claim to an unbroken succession... Read more

There are two famous poetic sayings about fences— ‘good fences make good neighbors’ and even more famously Robert Frost’s ‘something there is that doesn’t love a wall’. The recent film starring two world-class actors Denzel Washington as the husband Troy and Viola Davis as the wife Rose is based on the play of August Wilson. Sometimes the adapting of a play for film doesn’t work so well, but in this case, especially because of the strength of the two lead... Read more

Somehow God’s love broke into the wheeling fabric of stellar space, settled upon our planet, and out of our kind of evil, made possible the great release. Christ died on Calvary and explain it how you will (or don’t explain it at all) human life thereafter was never the same. The balance was changed. Not that the world was wiped clean as a slate with a wet rag. It was not so simple as that. Read more

In working through C.K. Barrett’s 300 sermons, and comparing them to what I regularly hear traveling around the country, namely sermons that make me wince, I have come to the following conclusion: Frankly, I have grown weary of sermons that have illustrations which do not illustrate the point of the appointed Biblical text, story sermons only loosely connected to the Bible, and in general sermons based on the perceived wants and needs of the congregation rather than on the substance... Read more

I think that this failure to think seriously about God and sin is at the back of the moral disorder in our own day. That a weak, sentimentalized, humanized view of God is going about, there is no doubt. You can find the details in the newspapers. I shall not go into them. I am merely putting two and two together; and I am sure that the answer is four. A learned Jew in Cambridge, Mr. Loewe whose death a... Read more

True stories are most often the best stories, and such is the case with the film Hidden Figures, the tale of three black women who worked for NASA in 1961-62 during the segregation era. They as persons were called ‘colored computers’ by which was meant black women who crunched numbers (hence the double entendre of the film title). The problem with history writing is it often leaves important stories out, and when the filter involves editing out the contributions of... Read more

PURPOSES ACCORDING TO THE FLESH That is how most of our purposes are conceived. This is the natural way we all take when we are off our guard. In the whole of the study of theology, there is nothing more humiliating than the discovery that the Church, in the person of many of its leading members, has practiced just this kind of plan-making. Our fathers and mothers risked their lives to assert that it was possible that even general councils... Read more

Our Master IMMORTAL Love, forever full, Forever flowing free, Forever shared, forever whole, A never-ebbing sea! Our outward lips confess the name 5 All other names above; Love only knoweth whence it came And comprehendeth love. Blow, winds of God, awake and blow The mists of earth away! 10 Shine out, O Light Divine, and show How wide and far we stray! Hush every lip, close every book, The strife of tongues forbear; Why forward reach, or backward look, 15... Read more

The great scholar is not a person who has a multiplicity of interests in life, who dips into this, looks at that, tastes one enjoyable thing after another. I have known these sort of people and I know the single minded intensity of thought and labor which makes them. We are apt to think of the very learned as unemotional, dull; far from it. No one would ever do such work without a dominating passion, an all absorbing thirst driving... Read more

Again and again the great themes of biblical theology, of the Gospel, are illustrated not by specific discussions but by stories. That is why the concordance is not an infallible guide to what the Bible has to say on any given subject. For example, if you wanted to learn about faith you could find out a good deal by looking the word up in a concordance. But the concordance would not send you to this passage [2 Kngs. 6.16-17], because... Read more