Mark Noll and Caroyln Nystrom’s book, Is the Reformation Over?, with this post is now over for the immediate future. Without getting into every chp, and there were some good chps left, I do want to offer what I see as a fundamental problem with the book: |inline Read more
For NT Wright, everything pertaining to redemption occurs in Christ — Christ does it all and those who are “in” Christ get it all. What those in Christ get is the Spirit. Those in the Spirit are released from the Law and its condemnation. |inline Read more
O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon all your faithful people your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. + Read more
Kris’ paternal grandmother, known to us as Grandma Willie (her real name was Willamina), taught me to watch birds. I’m grateful to her for it. Sitting on my back porch recently with Lukas and Annika, I watched the sudden flash of a Baltimore Oriole dart through the yard. I was glad I could identify it, because naming it gave me a history of the Orioles I’ve seen. I have to agree with Buechner, who observed this about birds: |inline Read more
Post of the week: Dan Kimball’s piece on the value of Gandalfs (the wisdom of the older generation) is worth printing out and pinning to the wall near your desk. |inline Read more
Today I’ll post some pictures of our time in California. On Thursday morning we got up and headed up to Lake Arrowhead. Didn’t read the map quite right, got off on some traffic-laden street, went beyond the mountain road to the city but found our way back, and by the time we had been out of the hotel two hours we found our way into that nice resort. |inline Read more
Joseph Epstein’s Friendship: An Expose asks in chp 5 an important question that we often do not ask ourselves, but in our more cynical moments we recognize ourselves in an affirmative answer to the question: “Is friendship, when stripped down to its essentials, just another playing field for that insatiably greedy and sleepless monster, the human ego?” Of course, I’m keen to hear what everyone thinks about this and the rest of these quotations. |inline Read more
Just in case you haven’t heard of it, in the early 1990s Richard John Neuhaus (editor of First Things) and Charles Colson (who needs no intro to most of you) began a fruitful dialogue that has led to four “Evangelical and Catholics Together” official dialogues. They addressed four topics: Christian mission, salvation, “your word is truth,” and the communion of the saints. Noll and Nystrom’s book Is the Reformation Over? surveys this development. |inline Read more
Paul is fond of jumping ahead in his argument, and sometimes it makes us feel like we haven’t figured out the previous section. Though not as prominent as it might have been, lurking (like some of you readers) around chp 7 is that the Law activates sin and sin leads to death. |inline Read more
We Midwesterners don’t take earthquakes lightly. Our family has been in one, and I thought it was spooky. Give me a tornado anytime: get to the basement and by and large you’ll be safe. So, when we checked in to our hotel in San Dimas, near Azusa Pacific, we noted this sign — I guess it is a Californian sense of humor. |inline Read more
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